‘And above all to make you see’: Vision, Imagination and the Aesthetics of Montage in Atonement

Abstract

This paper will consider the notions of sight, vision and imagination in Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) in order to try and offer a new definition of the author’s visual poetics. We will first focus on the frameworks moulding Briony’s vision, as a child and a fledgling writer. Watching events from the nursery, Briony’s gaze is explicitly defined as both childish and literary (melodramatic), reluctant and fascinated, a paradox which is materialized in the problematic blind spots of her obsessive vision. We will finally explain how the exploration of ‘vision’, as a theme and a poetics, connects McEwan to the literary tradition, as an heir to Conrad, but also creates an original and hybrid aesthetics of montage, which may ultimately have bearing on the ethical reading of Atonement.

Keywords

• McEwan (Ian)
• vision
• imagination
• montage
• melodrama
• ethics