‘As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion’ (A 370). The Sense of Destiny in Atonement

Abstract

Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1967) seeks to establish a bond between fiction, history, the apocalyptic and eschatology. This paper argues that in Ian McEwan’s Atonement the ‘sense of an ending’ is superseded by the ‘sense of destiny’. Indeed, the whole novel disclaims the coda of Briony Tallis’s childhood play, The Trials of Arabella: ‘Here’s the beginning of love at the end of our travail./[…] As into the sunset we sail’ (A 368). Indeed, ultimately, the trials of Briony do not so much gesture towards an onward journey as they double back to their starting place, i.e. the dramatic juvenilia which they substantially rewrite throughout the novel, thus sealing what amounts to textual destiny. Firstly, patterns of fate are envisioned within the largely metatextual format of the novel, then Slavoj Žižek’s concept of recoil is applied to the narrative and, in a last part, destiny is analysed through its link with impersonality, by drawing from D.H. Lawrence’s oeuvre, a modernist intertext that is not often studied by critics in relation to McEwan.

Keywords

• destiny
• recoil
• eschatology
• post-apocalypse
• loop
• fatum