« A black cloud [...] stood above the horizon, marking out Dunkirk » Vision, histoire et réécriture dans Atonement de Ian McEwan

Abstract

As its title explicitly states, McEwan’s best-known novel depicts a process of atonement, in which the narrator, Briony Tallis, a girl with a disquietingly vivid imagination, stages her fantasy of control over the past and the future of her characters. Her guilt for having falsely accused her sister’s lover, Robbie Turner, of rape, draws her to try and find an accurate vision of the events that happened during the night she ‘committed her crime’.The novel offers a series of architectural elements materializing Briony’s vision : Tallis House’s doors and windows indeed symbolize the thresholds of a constant rewriting of the past striving for ethical relevance. Nevertheless, those framing elements frequently come up against the desirable, yet puzzling Otherness of past characters. Furthermore, Atonement evokes the centrality of History in Briony’s account of the past and questions the role of historical events in the writing of fiction.

Keywords

• I. McEwan
• alterity
• architecture
• ethics
• frame
• gaze