Neohelicon (2010) 37:53–62 DOI 10.1007/s11059-010-0051-z
The (meta)narrative paratext: coda as a cunning fictional device Monica Spiridon
Published online: 7 April 2010 Akade´miai Kiado´, Budapest, Hungary 2010
Abstract Our study draws on the array of functions assigned to the textual Coda in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, also turned into a successful movie. It follows two diverging narrative discourses—the Text and its Paratext—that overtly compete over the understanding of the story and over its reading transaction. In McEwan’s novel, the closing Paratext provides genre patterns and alternative reading strategies to the Text. Turning back upon the story itself and upon its process of writing, its understanding and its genre expectations in a particular cultural context, Coda is being assigned by the British novelist an overt meta-narrative task. Keywords Transtextuality Coda (visual verbal meta-narrative) paratext Genre patterns Reading expectations Verisimilitude Story and discourse Narrative theory
The sense of an ending In his dazzling book dedicated to this issue, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Frank Kermode substantiates that it is only the ‘‘Ending’’ that brings sense to the chaotic circumstances of the real world, granting purpose and momentum to the cultural discourses which account for it. (Kermode 1967, p.50) Paul Ricoeur emphasizes that Frank Kermode’s highlighting axioms as to the potent strain between Beginning and End interlink a main Western cultural tradition with the fundamental allegations on the narrative, dating back to Aristotle’s Poetics: Kermode turns toward the myth of the Apocalypse, which in the traditions of the West has most contributed to structuring the specific expectations that govern our need to give a meaningful end to a poetic work, by giving the term ‘‘fiction’’ a range that overflows the domain of literary fiction. (…) In this way, the eschatological
M. Spiridon (&) University of Bucharest, 14, Edgar Quinet St., 010018 Bucharest, Romania e-mail:
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myth and the Aristotelian mythos are joined together in their way of tying a beginning to an ending. (Ricoeur 1985, pp. 22–23.) Theorists are perfectly aware that ‘‘narrative may help us make life meaningful by cleansing our everyday sense of pure sequence by establishing meaningful, understandable relations between a point of departure and some ending. They cut out a certain stretch in an ever on-going process, and then identify or construct casual relations between various points or elements in that sequence.’’ (Gipsrud 2002, pp. 221) It is indeed the ending that helps consecrate and legitimate a narrative as such. We can even admit that narratives are backwards-oriented discourses, since ‘‘they are always told from the back end of a sequence of events.’’ (Gipsrud 2002, pp. 221) Our study draws on the array of functions assigned to the textual Coda in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, also turned into a successful film. (McEwan 2007) It follows two diverging narrative discourses—the Text and its Paratext—which overtly compete over the understanding of the story and over its reading transactions. According to the well known systematic of transtextuality introduced by Genette, Coda is a closing paratext: ‘‘The second type is the generally less explicit and more distant relationship that binds the text properly speaking, taken within the totality of the literary work, to what can be called its paratext: a title, a subtitle, intertitles: prefaces, postfaces, notices, forwards, etc.: marginal, infrapaginal, terminal notes; epigraphs: illustrations; blurbs, book covers, dust jackets, and many other kinds of secondary signals, whether allographic or autographic. These provides the text with a (variable) setting and sometimes a commentary, official or not, which even the purists among readers, those least inclined to external erudition, cannot always disregard as easily as they would like and as they claim to do.’’ (Genette 1997, p. 3) Along its way from the musical to the verbalf discourse, Coda has been turned into a rhetorical device able to comment, to highlight, to defend and—why not?—to challenge a Text. Paul Ricoeur sees the ‘‘End’’ as a generic category, which refers to both the end of the events reported by a discourse and to the narrative closure of a literary text: One difficulty stems from the always-possible confusion of the end of the imitated action and the end of fiction as such. In the tradition of the realistic novel, the end of the work tended to be confused with the end of the represented action. This was the sort of ending that most novelist of the nineteenth century sought. (Ricoeur 1985, pp. 21–22) In Atonement, a twentieth century’s novel and film, the paratextual closure retrospectively amends the main story and provides alternatives to it. In this way, the Coda becomes a cunning fictional tool.
The narrative and its almighty author Ian McEwan’s narrative, an odd story of love, war and inner turmoil, is a patchwork of different perspectives belonging to either visible or undisclosed observers. Set against a fateful historical background, the story evolves around the outbreak of The Second World War and focuses on the appalling British retreat in Dunkirk. In a hot summer of the mid thirties, in the Surrey countryside, Cecilia Tallis, the offspring of a snobbish and well-established upper class family, and Robbie Turner, the brilliant Oxford graduate son of the family’s charlady, distressfully and tortuously discover
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their unforeseen and intense love for each other. The abrupt, euphoric and furtive fulfillment of their passion occurs under ill-fated circumstances. Robbie is convicted and jailed for a rape that he did not commit and, surprisingly, the alleged and vehement eyewitness is Bryony Tallis, Cecilia’s teenage sister. In a convulsive cascade of crucial events, Robbie serves his sentence, is dispatched to the French battlefield and becomes involved in the agonizing fight for survival of the British army on the beaches of Dunkirk. In her turn, Cecilia breaks up with her family, an accomplice in Robbie’s unfair conviction, and signs up as a nurse in a London hospital. Over and above the lovers’ ordeal, McEwan’s narrative also tells the story of Bryony Tallis, the guilty younger sister. Hers is the story of an unfolding awareness of guilt, followed by an imperative atonement that the repentant girl progressively develops into a strong commitment to a written confession. In the main narrative, the end of the love story occurs in Part Three, dedicated to the experiences of the apprentice nurse and tentative writer Bryony Tallis. Overall it is a happy ending, in as much Robbie, although injured and traumatized, seems to have survived Dunkirk and had eventually spent idyllic moments with Cecilia in a cottage in Wiltshire, before again reporting for duty. There is also hope that Bryony is ready to publicly assume her guilt and that after the war the lovers would reintegrate into the normal social life without shame. Signed ‘‘B.[ryony] T.[allis], London 1999’’, the main narrative implies that the felonwitness, committed to atonement through writing, eventually achieved a career as a professional writer and the author of the novel we have just finished reading. To this story, its narrator has assigned a Coda, titled ‘‘London, 1999.’’ This Paratext has a visible fictional author, the well known writer Bryony Tallis, irreversibly ill, who is turning 77 and who seeks to come to terms with herself and with her virtual reader. The novel’s Paratext unravels that the happy ending version, the last variant of a story constantly drafted and redrafted over the last 50 years of Bryony’s life, is a convenient reshaping of the real events that the author would label as ‘‘pitiless.’’ Briefly, the Coda reveals that Robbie never returned from France and died of septicaemia on the outskirts of Dunkirk, the night before the British naval evacuation. In her turn, Cecilia was killed only a couple of months after Dunkirk, in the catastrophic bombing of Balham tube station. However by that time, they had acknowledged that Bryony was repentant and ready to confess her crime. The main point in McEwan’s Paratext is the plea of the fictitious author in favor of her misleading account, which purposefully distorted ‘‘real’’ facts. Why is this? According to Bryony’s persuasive sermon, a happy end had seemed more suitable for the common reader who, in all circumstances, would have rebuffed the bleak truth she would have reported: ‘‘How could that constitute an ending? What sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account?’’ (McEwan 2007, p. 371) As a top professional writer, Bryony fully acknowledges that, as a narratorial instance, her demiurgic position leaves no room for an upper Almighty God, able to take note of her atonement and eventually to absolve her: ‘‘How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms.’’ (McEwan 2007, p. 371) In theoretically elaborated terms, she is aware of what we might call the free will of all narrative instances that devise a discourse in order to report a story. (O’Neill 1994, p. 41) As Mieke Bal contends, the story is in fact an instable retrospective projection, inferred from a discourse cunningly crafted by the narrator, in order to fit his/hers interests and
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purposes. (Bal 1985, p. 149) All narrators are Creators of their fictional universes and the writer Bryony Tallis resolutely draws on this fact. In Atonement, both the verbal and the visual Codas allow an apologetic, persuasive discourse to prevail over the story, intended to masterly guide the reader on the way paved by the author’s designs. The strategies that allow the novelist Ian McEwan and the scriptwriter of the film to make their most out of the existence of a Paratext touch upon at least two basic levels in the narrative structure: focalization and voice. In this respect, a parallel between the Text and its Paratext unravels significant changes undertook by the latter. A first level of reference is the so-called focalization, point of view or perspective, more precisely ‘‘the point from which the narrative is being presented at any moment.’’ (O’Neill 1994, p. 86) Jonathan Culler defines the point of view as ‘‘the identification of narrators, overt and covert, and the description of what in the text belongs to the perspective of the narrator.’’ (Culler 2001, p. 170) In Atonement, the text operates with an intricate mix of distinct focalizations (Genette 1980, p. 189) which swap between a comprehensive perspective endowed with omniscience and a more limited point of view, assigned to an actor or to a stealthy and intrusive spectator of the action. In Part One, the crucial scene of the lovers’ feud by the fountain is first focalized by an all embracing viewer, with free access to both Cecilia’s and Robbie’s minds. Secondly, the same episode is accidentally seen by a confused 13-year-old: ‘‘The sequence was illogical. Such was Bryony’s last thought before she accepted that she did not understand, and that she must simply watch.’’ (McEwan 2007, p. 39) Moreover, Ian McEwan clearly exposes his kaleidoscopic technique: ‘‘Now there was nothing left on the dumb show by the fountain beyond what survived in memory, in three separate and overlapping memories. The truth had become as ghostly as invention.’’ (McEwan 2007, p. 41) In Part Two (the Dunkirk episode), an omniscient persona, mostly providing information on the overall course of warfare, is constantly intertwined with private Turner’s more restricted, inner point of view. Robbie recollects earlier events omitted by the narrator in Part One (his trial, the jail years, Cecilia’s break out from home, their furtive, frustrating get-together in a cafe´ between the detention and his training for war). He also goes over Cecilia’s letters again and again, drawing plans for their life after war. In Part Three, the perspective is progressively (not entirely though) seized by the nurse Bryony, who does not bother to delineate the demarcation between her real and her conveniently imagined experiences. Comparatively, the Paratext prefers to assign the focalization to a unique narrative instance, endowed with both clarity of mind and explicative expertise. It is in this way that we become aware that the apologetic encounter between the criminal and her two victims at the end of Part Three is pure wishful thinking: (That) I never saw then in that year. (That) my walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and (that) a cowardly Bryony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister. (My brackets) (McEwan 2007, pp. 370–371) Another relevant level where Text and Paratext diverge is voice, or the source of narrative discourse, either formally disclosed (usually in the first person), or undisclosed at all (in the third person). Theorists insist on the key difference between point of view and voice: ‘‘Point of view is still related to a problem of composition and so remain in the field of investigation of narrative configuration. Voice, however, is already involved in the
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problems of communication, in as much as it addresses itself to a reader.’’ (Martin 1986, p. 97) In Atonement, despite its intricate focalization, the voice of the Text remains grounded in the third person discourse: the paradigm of showing the events—in the Aristotelian sense of mythos as imitation of an action (Ricoeur 1985, p. 12)—rather than telling them. On the contrary, the Paratext embraces the first person discourse, emphatically disclosing the source of the narrative. This configurative choice, to ‘‘tell’’ the facts and not to let them ‘‘be’’ and prevail over explanatory words, is endowed with multiple capabilities and mostly overt purposes: defensive, argumentative, persuasive, etc. On both the above-mentioned narrative levels, the Text diversifies, engenders ambivalence and uncertainty, whilst the Paratext resolutely seeks unity, clarity, even monopoly of thought and enunciation. It is in this way that the Coda endeavors to decisively question the Text, denouncing it as the product of a repentant criminal. In other words, the Paratext sets up Bryony as the undisclosed author of the Text, only to immediately expose her as a typical ‘‘unreliable author’’, in the notorious terms coined by W. C. Booth in his Rhetoric of Fiction. (Booth 1961)
Lector in fabula It is true, as Walter Benjamin beautifully asserts, that ‘‘traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the fingerprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.’’ (Benjamin 1968, p. 92) Nonetheless, it is also true that the fingerprints of the reader cling to the vessel of the text and leave a significant mark on it. To put it in a different way, apart from the story and the discourse that accounts for it, the reader is a key landmark of any narrative. According to Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘it is important not to confuse the two main structural processes that underlie the narration: configuration (by the author) and refiguration (by the reader). A work may be closed with respect to its configuration and open with respect to the breakthrough it is capable of effecting on the reader’s world’’ (Ricoeur 1985, p. 20.) In Atonement, the Coda undertakes the negotiation between the author and the virtual reader. At a superficial level, the differences between the verbal and the visual Coda as to the reading transaction touch upon the relationship of the author with the real audience. In the novel, the Coda accounts for the late confession of an exhausted and insomniac writer, who deceives herself by inferring that if fiction allows happy endings, real life also does and that consequently she was within her own rights to interfere with it: I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave then happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration. (McEwan 2007, pp. 371–372) We must remember that the object of this delayed confession is an unpublished novel and that this testimonial is significant for Bryony alone. Since, for legal reasons, her manuscript cannot be published before her death, in the verbal Coda the writer does not have to face and stand the trial of a real reader. On the contrary, in the film’s Paratext, the novel Atonement has already been published and has been a success: the real public has responded favorably to it. As she turns 77, Bryony Tallis is introduced as the famous guest of a TV interview. The writer does not seem afraid to disclose the cruel truth and the burden of her guilt. This time however, the
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context of her plea is quite different: a face to face broadcasted statement, where the reporter stands in for the real reader. This is why her discourse is less hesitant, her voice no longer falters and her points are made very neatly. However, on a deeper level, the reading transaction takes on the role of a contract of verisimilitude. Bryony occasionally uses this key concept in her Coda: ‘‘I like these little things, this pointillist approach to verisimilitude, the correction of detail that cumulatively gives such satisfaction’’ (McEwan 2007, p. 359) Significantly, she also acknowledges that this transactional notion does not necessarily depend on facts: ‘‘During the ride back north, I thought about the colonel’s letter or rather, about my own pleasure in these trivial alterations. If I really cared so much about facts, I should have written a different kind of book.’’ (McEwan 2007, p. 360) In the most straightforward terms, verisimilitude can be defined as the ability of a discourse to be recognized as acceptable, by a particular instance, according to a series of signposts and under specific cultural circumstances. Subsequently, in order to be accepted by the reader, truth itself needs to become plausible. Bryony is completely aware of the fault line between truth and verisimilitude. She also suspects that only a few atypical readers would be prepared to accept her truthful report of the harsh facts: ‘‘Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? (…) No one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel. I know that there is always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask: But what really happened?’’ (McEwan 2007, p. 371) Theorists have detected at least three main types of landmarks that help the reader give verisimilitude to a particular discourse. There are referential, cultural (also called ideological) and genre signposts (Fage`s 1968). Among them, the most efficient are genres. Usually perceived as production moulds, genre patterns also take on the role of reception paradigms: the public recognizes them as warrants of acceptability, in other words as tokens of verisimilitude. Within genre structures, the end plays a key role: thanks to it we are able to distinguish between different genres, such as, tragedy and comedy. Paul Ricoeur also stresses the part played by the ending in the reader’s paradigmatic expectations (Ricoeur 1985, p. 25). In this respect, the French scholar pinpoints the alternative faced by an author who tries to meat the reader’s expectations: either ‘‘truthfulness’’ or ‘‘consolation’’ (Ricoeur 1985, p. 27). In Atonement, the Paratext manipulates the ending in order to help the Text fit into a particular pattern of conventional expectations. Bryony is torn precisely between the two polar temptations mentioned by Ricoeur: to unveil the merciless truth or to console her readers, fulfilling their most cherished desires. The meanings retrospectively unraveled by the Coda attempt to over impose a particular genre to the novel and to the film. What genre choices are the readers of the book and the public of the film being presented with, in our case? After a long series of alleged rewritings, (‘‘The earliest version, January 1940, the latest, March 1999, and in between, half a dozen different drafts. The second draft, June 1947, the third…who cares to know?’’, McEwan 2007, p. 369) the possible genre tag of Bryony’s narrative seems to move between two polar opposites: a cruel bleak realist story, on the one hand, and a happy-ending romance, on the other. The Paratext extensively elaborates on the inconveniences of the first but it does not mention, among the risks of the second, melodrama, as a current generic side effect. The Hollywood film also crafted an utterly successful subtype of melodrama: the so-called
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handkerchief movie (Love Story, Titanic, among many others). However, both Ian McEwan’s novel and Joe Wright’s film astutely bypass these risks. One explanation for this might be the atypical, if not simply the weird romance that is being reported. The reader can hardly identify in this plot the canonical pattern of a love story. We could even conclude that there is not a real love story at all. What one might call the basic romance consists of cherished memories and day dreams, nourished by the lovers’ numerous letters, strictly supervised by the prison and then by the military censorship and desperately reread or recollected by Robbie. A second reason touches upon the discretion and the ambiguity that conceal the death of the two. The discourse of the novel ‘‘shows’’ us the night of Robbie’s last day, near Dunkirk. However this is done in such a way that we do not fully grasp the information we are presented with and its dramatic effect is purposefully spoiled: ‘‘‘I won’t say a word’ he said, though Nettle’s head had long disappeared from his view. ‘Wake me before seven. I promise, you won’t hear another word from me.’’’ (McEwan 2007, p. 265) Only in the retrospect, the final phrasing ‘‘you won’t hear another word from me’’ turns out to be prophetic. Cecilia’s death does not qualify for a single word in the main story. A brief and dry statement is however allotted to the successive deaths of the lovers in the verbal Coda: ‘‘Robbie Turner died of septicaemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1949, (…) Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station.’’ (McEwan 2007, p. 370) It is true that in the movie’s Coda we witness her death. However, the images are iconographically and symbolically over processed, and this rather hieratic information does not make tears or handkerchief compelling. If her astute genre maneuvering does not push the story either towards bleak realism or towards melodrama, what is the genre pattern that Bryony sets her fiction against? A short play, devised by Bryony in the Text and firstly staged by her young relatives for her 77th anniversary party in the Coda, might offer a possible answer to this question. This bizarre, atypical piece of writing needs careful attention. The Trials of Arabella plays a crucial part in the coherent design of McEwan’s novel, as well as in its full understanding. Advertised around and rehearsed by an overexcited Bryony, this play and its forthcoming performance occur at the gateway to Atonement. This is the very first phrase of the novel: The Play - for which Bryony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper – was written by her in a two day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch. (McEwan 2007, p. 3) Due to the careless actors (Bryony’s young ‘‘cousins from the North’’) the frantically planned premiere does not happen in the Text and we loose trace of the manuscript until its belated performance in the Paratext. On the one hand, The Trials of Arabella opens the front door of Bryony’s destiny and, on the other, it completes her active life as a professional writer. Moreover, it symbolically compensates for the failure of the first performance, in as much it fulfills Bryony’s striving toward a very peculiar type of world. This is a universe that prevails over what she calls ‘‘the adult world’’: ‘‘the real the adult world, in which frogs did not address princesses and the only messages were the ones that people sent.’’ (McEwan 2007, p. 40) In this realm, the gap between imagination and reality can be set aside and, above all, romance is the routine: ‘‘Such leaps across boundaries were the stuff of daily romance’’. (McEwan 2007, p. 38)
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In the above sentence, every word is full of significance and needs to be pondered. The phrasing ‘‘leaps across boundaries’’ discloses the structural norm of this ideally free world, whilst ‘‘the daily romance’’ represents its outcome. Careless with respect to current borders, Bryony’s existential paragon is also enfranchised from moral responsibility, reward, guilt, and punishment: Her excitement [of the 13 years old forthcoming writer] was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need nod judge. There need not to be a moral. (McEwan 2007, p. 40) In a nutshell, this might be the eks-centric genre pattern which can give acceptability to Bryony’s literary production and, last but not least, to Bryony’s life. The ending of an ending, the performance put on by the Coda marks the symbolic return of the author Bryony Tallis to her enchanted childhood scenarios. The fictional closure wins a long and tormenting battle not only with real world but also with the glorious pillars of the reputedly realistic truth: history, individual destiny, psychological truth, moral law and the unavoidable atonement and punishment for whoever challenges it.
Coda: a briefing on the craft of fiction In the wake of the considerations above, we are entitled to infer that in McEwan’s book the Paratext becomes a coherent reflection on the genesis of the story, on its discursive build up and last but not least on its readers and their potential patterns of reception. To put it differently, in the design of the book as a whole, Coda is assigned an overt meta-narrative task by its author. The Paratext enhances the meta-narrative potential of the Text itself, retrospectively pointing to a series of clues that the unobservant reader has probably ignored. To take just one example, in Part Three, the novella Two Figures by a Fountain, an early literary attempt by nurse Bryony submitted to the literary magazine Horizon, holds an obvious selfreflexive function in McEwan’s novel. It recalls a tense and confusing scene between Cecilia and Robbie, full of consequence for the development of the plot, and misinterpreted by the young girl, who witnesses it through the nursery window. We cannot read Bryony’s novella. However, we have been granted the privilege of reading the comments of the literary magazine, which approves of the text, but will not publish it: If this girl has so fully misunderstood or been so fully baffled by the strange little scene that has unfolded before her, how might it affect the lives of the two adults? Might she come between them in a disastrous fashion? Or bring them closer, either by design or accident. (McEwan 2007) For nurse Bryony, the lecture of the editors’ comments and especially of the paragraph above is both an incriminating finger, pointing towards her unfortunate involvement in the drama, and a merciless evaluation of her guilt. For the reader, it is above all an insightful, retrospective hint on the plot. In the terms coined by Lucien Dallenbach Ian McEwan’s Coda can be seen as a manifold mise en abyme (Dallenbach 1977) which turns back upon the story itself, upon its process of writing and the norms that govern it, upon the implied patterns of its reading and its genre expectations in a particular cultural context.
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In the movie, both the temporal economy and the specific devices of the visual discourse are less prepared to discharge such a complicated duty. To compensate for this lack, the visual Paratext is more biting. Its fictitious author boldly steps up on the front stage— which means in front of the TV cameras—and makes audacious statements. She admits that the novel Atonement, which she recently published, disguises a sour autobiographical burden. She also confesses straight out that, in spite of this, she has discarded what the public usually calls ‘‘the truth’’ and that she had sound reasons to do so. Although they adamantly contradict the bare truth revealed by the elderly Bryony Tallis, the closing images of the film put on the never fulfilled, idyllic encounter between Cecilia and Robbie on a beach in Wiltshire. Briefly alluded to by the author in the deceitful ending of her novel, they unravel and stress the generic code lying beneath her fictional ‘‘lie.’’ As regards the verbal Coda, it has unabridged capabilities to emerge as a canny metanarrative device. In this respect too, the belated performance of The Trials of Arabella, plays a key part. ‘‘It occurs to me that I have not traveled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play. Or rather, I have made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place.’’ (McEwan 2007, p. 370) In this elaborated circularity, we might detect a plea in favor of rereading, as one of the essential patterns, if not the main pattern, of writing, reading, and understanding a book. (Calinescu 1993) In the Text of the novel too, The Trials of Arabella mirrors insightful dimensions of the story and of the discourse reporting it. For instance, the fact that young Bryony is obsessed with Eros and with the good or bad ending of a love story: ‘‘the play told a tale of the heart whose message conveyed in a rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed.’’ (McEwan 2007, p. 3) Or the detail that, as early as at the age of 13, she displays a writer’s approach of life: sheer facts seem far less interesting to her that convenient fancies, even when she emerges as eye witness of a crime. The late performance of her play presents the author Bryony Tallis with a renewed source of retroactive legitimacy for her novelistic choice. By the end of a sleepless night, she expresses her hope in a miraculous rectification of Life itself: ‘‘Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It is not impossible. But now I must sleep.’’ (McEwan 2007, p. 372) The Paratext points out that, although not conspicuously, Atonement is a genuine metafictional novel. It also ascertains that the Coda can always be manipulated as a manifold tool devised by an author deeply interested in his own craft of fiction. A thoughtful and perceptive reader of the novel, the director Joe Wright, underlines the self-reflexive nature of the novel by all possible means throughout the visual narrative it inspires. To take just an example, the pace maker of the filmic universe is the rhythmic sound of a typewriter. Sometimes we can see it—it is Bryony’s or Robbie’s; most of the time, we do not, but the story unfolds according to its imperious rhythm. In Ian McEwan’s book, the Coda brings forth the tortuous road to turning a fabula into a narrative discourse: the story of a storytelling.
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