INDEX OF CONTENTS
Introduction ……… 4
Chapter 1 – Structural framework in Atonement and Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit ……….. 7
1.1. Epigraphs ……….. 8
1.2. Incipits ……… 14
1.3. Bildungs- and Künstler-roman in the Postmodern World ……… 18
1.4. Confessional Writing ……… 25
1.4.1. “Bless me reader for I have sinned” ……….. 25
1.4.2. Unreliable Narrators ……….. 27
1.4.3. Confession or Construction? ……….. 28
1.5. Intertextuality ……… 30
1.5.1. Recontextualization (reconstruction) ………. 30
1.5.2. Intertextual relation between The Bible and Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit ……… 33
1.5.3. Intertextual relation between The Bible and Atonement ……… 36
1.5.4. Other literary references ………. 37
1.5.5. Pop culture reference – the construction of time settings ………. 39
1.6. “Narrative seduction” ……… 41
Chapter 2 – Shades of Meaning ………. 43
2.1. Constructions and De/Re-constructions in the Thematic Organization of Postmodern Fiction (The Postmodern Mind) ………. 44
2.2.1. The subjective perception of reality ……… 47
2.2.2. The danger of imagination ………. 55
2.2.3. Self-fulfilling prophecy ……… 56
2.3. Disturbed Family Relationships ………... 58
2.4. The Loss of Innocence ………. 64
2.4.1. “From self-centredness to reality-centredness” ………. 64
2.4.2. Briony’s manipulation ……… 65
2.4.3. Jeanette’s manipulation ……….. 67
2.5. The Exploration of the Limitless Possibilities of the Self ……….. 68
2.5.1. The mind’s power ……… 68
2.5.2. Limitless possibilities of resistance ………. 69
2.5.3. “The creative possibilities of imaginative freedom” ……… 71
Chapter 3 – Construction and de/re-construction of story/stories (writing and reading) ………... 73
3.1. The Power of Language ……….. 74
3.1.1. Narrative constructions ……… 74
3.1.2. “Storyworlds” ……….. 75
3.1.3. ‘Chameleonic’ narrator ……… 76
3.1.4. Linguistic creation of the “magical realism” ..……… 78
3.1.5. Making a storytellers ……….. 79
3.1.7. Language allows transformations ………... 81
3.2. The Process of Writing ………... 83
3.3. The Construction of Time ……… 86
3.4. How fiction represents history ………. ……….. ... 88
3.4.1. McEwan’s historiographic metafiction ……… 88
3.4.2. The concept of history in Oranges ………... 93
3.5. Controversial Content in Oranges ……….. 94
3.6. Structuralist and Poststructuralist Thinking ……… 95
3.7. The Relationship between the reader and the text (fiction) ……… 97
Conclusion ……….. 103
INTRODUCTION
The aim of this study is to explore the process of construction and de/re-construction in the comparative analysis of two contemporary postmodern novels,
Atonement (2001) and Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985).
Atonement is Ian McEwan’s most popular and most awarded novel which he
published as an already affirmed writer, while Oranges is Winterson’s first novel, which relatively soon after its publication was appreciated both by readers and by critics. Their intriguing and interesting narratives did not take much time to receive a request for TV adaptations. Five years after Oranges was published, Winterson wrote the screenplay by the same name, which Beeban Kidron directed and for which BBC produced three episodes, while Joe Wright directed a film based on McEwan’s novel in 2007. This explains how fast these two books gained great interest and popularity.
The two book covers show that both Winterson’s and McEwan’s protagonists are little girls. These two girls, Jeanette and Briony, ‘meet’ each other for the first
time in this study. They both go through the complex process of transformation (from childhood to adulthood) in which they are both ‘constructed’ and ‘constructors’. McEwan and Winterson ‘construct’ their protagonists through their narratives, but also allow them to be ‘constructors’ of their own stories. How do these two authors ‘construct’ their protagonists? In which way are they ‘constructed’ and how do they ‘construct’? How does a fictional character become a creator of stories? Is it the process of construction and de/re-construction that leads McEwan and Winterson through their creation of their postmodern fiction?
Atonement and Oranges may seem completely different because their authors do not have a similar style of writing and the subject of their storytelling is not the same, but in the comparative analysis of their narratives it is possible to prove that they have many common points and even the same ‘backbone’. The assumption of this dissertation is that the ‘backbone’ lies in the process of construction and de/re-construction, and this will be discussed in the following three chapters. Through a literary, linguistic, psychoanalytic and philosophical perspective, an analysis of the narrative construction, and of the thematic and linguistic organisation of these two postmodern novels will be developed.
In the first chapter, the structural framework of Atonement and Oranges will be discussed through various arguments: the comparative analysis of their epigraphs and incipits, the contextualization of the Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman in the postmodern world, the implantation of ‘confessional writing’, the intertextual relationships and a kind of ‘narrative seduction’ that rules in both fictions.
In the second chapter, the thematic organization will be questioned. At the beginning it will be explained how the postmodern mind allows the process of construction and de/re-construction in fiction. After that, there will be a discussion on some common themes in Atonement and Oranges, such as the perception of reality, disturbed family relationships, the loss of innocence and the exploration of the limitless possibilities of the Self. The aim is to explain the instability/ constructability of meaning. This chapter is entitled Shades of Meaning because it attempts to explain that everything can be easily constructed and de/re-constructed because nothing is stable and unchangeable, so neither is meaning.
In the very last chapter, a discussion will be developed on how the story/stories can be constructed and de/re-constructed through language. An explanation will be given on how McEwan and Winterson use the power of language to show the process of writing, the construction of time in their narratives and the implementation of history inside fiction. McEwan also demystifies the process of writing, while Winterson creates a controversial content because she writes about a girl who realizes she is a lesbian. They break all canons and imposed limits (literary and social) in their postmodern narratives through structuralist and poststructuralist thinking in their process of creation of Atonement and Oranges and this will be explained in detail. Is the instability and fluidity of their narrative also reflected in the variability and infinity of the interpretations they inspire? This will be explained in the discussion on the relationship between the reader and the text.
Capitolo 1
Structural framework in Atonement and Oranges Are Not The
1.1. Epigraphs
An epigraph is like an entrance hall where the echo of certain words is difficult to understand but useful in that they engage the reader’s interest. In that space, the author warns or suggests, while the reader speculates.
The use of the epigraph stems from a concern to enrich the cultural tradition of the novel and establishes both collective and individual semantic interaction in writing.
Structuralist and poststructuralist theories provide a good basis to analyse these interactions. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, the unity of language and discourse is dialogue, a point on which Emile Benveniste agrees. Dialogue is collective enunciation, rather than an exchange between two subjectivities, for it is not only carried out through the medium of parole, the use which individuals make of the resources of language, but also through langue, the system of language shared by the collective consciousness. These remarks prove to be particularly relevant in the case of the epigraph. Indeed, in spite of its isolated location at the threshold of the narration, a quotation which serves as an epigraph can be seen, even materially, as a link between the quoted writer, the quoting writer, their respective readers, and all readers in between: hence a system of both subjective and codified relationships which, in their interweavings, alter one another. (Laing et al. 2008: 68-69)
The playful nature of an epigraph creates a subtly manipulative space between the author and the audience. Both Ian McEwan in Atonement and Jeanette Winterson in Oranges use this method to intrigue their readers before letting them walk into their postmodern stories.
While the structure of Atonement is suggested by the citation from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Jeanette Winterson’s novel uses «two mischievous epigraphs about oranges – a real quote from Mrs Beeton and a bogus one from Nell Gwynn.»1 Thus, they both decide to infuse the story with intertextual insinuations.
McEwan encourages his readers to apply the words of Jane Austen’s character, Henry Tilney, to the story of Atonement. (Wells 2008: 101) The words that Henry addresses to Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey invite the reader to rethink the false suspicions in McEwan’s novel.
“Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English: that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?”
They had reached the end of the gallery; and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room. (McEwan, 2001)
In Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney invites the protagonist, Catherine Morland, to rethink ‘the dreadful nature of the suspicions’ which could lead her to give false evidence. This is the idea that McEwan wants to convey before letting the reader step into his story. Jane Austen’s character, Henry Tilney, instructs Catherine on how to think, and the author of Atonement does the same with his reader.
Through the epigraph, then, McEwan starts a dialogue with his reader, leading him/her to reflect on a particular topic and to search for specific answers. The same attitude is also adopted towards the end of the novel, where the narrator introduces a series of questions: «What sense or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? […] what really happened ? […]» (McEwan, 2001:371) Some of the answers might be found in Briony’s ‘shocking’ confession at the end of the novel, when the reader finds out she is the author of the whole story he has been reading. In that moment, the third person narrator switches to an autodiegetic one, and the protagonist reveals that the story narrated up to that moment is her invention. She has condemned an innocent man and the guilt she has been feeling is at the very basis of the construction of her story in search for atonement. Yet, at the end of the novel she also adds:
[…] 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. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all. (McEwan, 2001:371)
The protagonist, Briony Tallis, shows up in the last part of the novel as a first person narrator in a kind of epistemological coup de scène entitled London,1999. She is the creator of a fiction inside a fiction, and she wants to talk to the reader and to
deconstruct her own creation, the story she invented. She creates an illusion of reality, but she also deconstructs it by telling the truth.
There is no solution or reparation for her false suspicions and the injustice she has committed. Her false testimony determines the life circumstances of several people, not just the unfair condemnation of Robbie. Briony’s act completely changes the life of several people such as Cecilia, who loves Robbie, Lola, who is abused, and Paul Marshall, who is guilty of the crime. Robbie and Cecilia could have been happy together like in the invented story if Briony had not told the police something she was not sure of. Paul Marshall is guilty but nobody reveals the truth on the day of the crime, so he does not end up in prison but, on the contrary, he manages to build a successful career.
What the reader does feel as an external observer of the whole metafictional world of Atonement is a sense of entrapment in Briony’s game where her imagination has constructed an illusion of reality. It is the game of construction and re/de-construction of different stories that drives the reader through a labyrinth-like narration; and it is difficult to distinguish what is really happening from what is made up by someone’s fancy.
In the first part of the novel, McEwan is playing with a multiple narration, then in the second and third part, he chooses a fixed focalisation, whereas in the fourth part he introduces Briony’s autodiegetic voice. Through this kind of structuring, Atonement deconstructs the idea of an Author-God whose omniscient and superior presence is capable of organizing narrative material. (Ferrari, 2012:176)
There is no stable meaning in McEwan’s novel since he problematizes authority in the narrative and its consequences on the reader, who faces an unreliable narrator and uncertain meaning.
McEwan presents his protagonist, Briony, in a self-justifying manner and this puts the reader in a position to feel empathy and perhaps to forgive her or at least try to understand her actions. This is perhaps the same effect Jane Austen wanted to achieve for her heroine, Catherine Morland, who had problems in distinguishing
fiction from reality and ended up if not committing a crime, at least running the risk of committing one.2
McEwan’s «choice of epigraph invites readers to consider more broadly what
Atonement, which includes allusions to and pastiches of authors from throughout the
English literary tradition, owes to Austen in particular. » (Wells 2008:102)
Wells points out that «he has gone “a step further” than Austen, crucially, by making Briony a novelist who, like Austen herself» (Wells, 2008:102), has taken her writing seriously at a young age.
What McEwan shows us of Briony’s youthful writing—a rhyming, melodramatic playlet—is not especially suggestive of Austen’s own juvenilia. Yet McEwan’s characterization of Briony as being precociously concerned with language and the trappings of professionalism is certainly reminiscent of Austen. (Wells, 2008:102-103)
Atonement opens with Briony, who is described as a very imaginative child
that wants to be a writer and likes inventing stories. The first thing the reader discovers about her is that she has written a play, The Trials of Arabella, and that she is preparing to perform it. At the beginning of the novel, McEwan presents his protagonist as a girl who finds the greatest joy and fun in writing and who dreams of becoming a successful writer.
Winterson’s Oranges also starts with the protagonist as a child. This novel operates with the same type of character (it starts with a girl and follows her from adolescence to adulthood) even though their stories are completely different. Winterson’s semi-autobiography opens with the child, Jeanette, who talks about her upbringing and the conditions she was raised in. Mrs Winterson, her adoptive mother, has constructed Jeanette’s reality by forcing her to respect the fanatical religious rules of Pentecostal Christians.
«This child is mine from the Lord.» (Winterson, 1985:16) That is how Mrs Winterson expresses her fanatical beliefs. She interprets the Bible in her own way and her fanatical behaviour traps the protagonist, Jeanette, in a morbid atmosphere.
2
Another statement by the author, where he confesses that during his writing of Atonement, he had a «notion of a country house and of some discrepancies beneath the civilized surface» (Giles, 2002: 62-63) but that he did not have Northanger Abbey particularly in mind, seems somehow to deconstruct this parallel between the two novels.
Mrs Winterson adopts the child with the idea of bringing her up to be a missionary. She does not consider any other option for her adopted daughter, only to obey and realize her own dream.
Before Winterson allows her protagonist to introduce herself and begin her storytelling, she uses the two quotes mentioned above. While Ian McEwan’s epigraph dialogues with the external observer of the upcoming fiction in Atonement, Jeanette Winterson’s quotes hide the metaphor which is to be understood during the narration.
The first quote is part of a recipe for orange marmalade from Mrs Beeton’s cooking book, The Making of Marmalade. It advises the reader to be careful while making marmalade so as not to destroy its perfect taste. Only after discovering why the protagonist is entrapped and what the symbol of the orange represents, can the reader understand the epigraph and its connection with semi-fiction.
In Winterson’s novel, the reader learns that oranges are the only fruit that Mrs Winterson gives her daughter. The woman believes that they are the only good fruit for her daughter and, similarly, she believes that the fundamental Christian Pentecostal Church belief is the only creed to follow.
Only after reaching adulthood can Jeanette distinguish reality from her mother’s fanaticism and consequently break her mother’s chains by which she is entrapped, understanding the world around her as it is, and not as it is offered by her mother’s instructions.
«[…] my mother liked to tell me her own conversion story; it was very romantic […] My mother is very like William Blake; she has visions and dreams and she cannot always distinguish a flea’s head from a king.» (Winterson, 1985: 8) Through these words the reader learns that the protagonist is starting to understand where reality ends and where imagination begins. This is her first step towards maturity. Moreover, when Jeanette realizes she has homosexual desires, which do not fit the concepts and limitations declared by the Church, she starts to resist and to refuse ‘oranges’, that is to oppose her mother’s orders and instructions.
The orange symbolizes resisting binarism as, on the one hand, the difference between the thick skin and soft inside suggests clear-cut division between inner and outer life, yet, on the other hand, one can conjoin the inside and outside of the orange by making marmalade. (Front, 2009: 110)
Jeanette does not have the chance to make the perfect marmalade because she lives in the context her mother has created for her. She cannot be free to live as she wants in the house of her adoptive parents, so the only way is to escape and refuse to look upon the orange as the only fruit. Away from her adoptive mother’s control, she discovers that ‘oranges are not the only fruit’, as stated in the second epigraph. This quote by Nell Gwynn also becomes the title of the novel.
Nell Gwynn (1650-1687) was a Restoration-era celebrity who began her career as a scantily dressed “orange girl”, selling oranges and sweets to theatre crowds and ferrying messages between men in the audience and the actresses backstage. King Charles II had recently made it legal for woman to act in plays (prior to this female parts had been played by boys), and by age fifteen “pretty, witty Nell” was receiving glowing reviews for her performances. She was as famous for her lovers as for the parts she played , but her singular devotion to Charles II and her salty, down-to-earth manner earned her the public’s undying affection.(Ahern, 2001:23)
Jana L. French points out the importance of «[…] Jeanette’s mother’s acquiescent “Oranges are not the only fruit”, an unwitting testimony to her daughter at the end of the book” […] .» She explains that the “[…] borrowed aphorism from Nell Gwyn […] called attention to the performative aspect of gender and sexuality.» (French 1999:234) Jeanette Winterson, like Ian McEwan, guides the reader to the end of the novel and reminds him/her of the ideas in the epigraph. Mrs Winterson deconstructs her own educational system which she has imposed on her adopted daughter by reconstructing a completely opposed one, the one described in the second epigraph. While Ian McEwan invites readers to reflect, Jeanette Winterson shows them the path to follow in order ‘to make the perfect marmalade’ and she indicates her secret method in the epigraph.
Ian McEwan and Jeanette Winterson both create a playful ‘entrance hall’ where they ‘ring the bell’, calling the attention of their audience and directing their thoughts without killing the mystery that keeps them interested. The reader of Winterson’s semi-autobiography knows from the beginning that oranges are not the only fruit because it is doubly highlighted in the title and in the epigraph (but through the novel he/she explores the symbol of that particular fruit). It is the style of the
author that makes this meta-fictional journey so dynamic and interesting right up to the end.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Atonement are novels that tell many
stories. After the ‘warning” introduced by the epigraphs, both stories create a game of construction and re/de-construction where «the reader plays an active role in textual interpretation.» (Eco 1981: 44) Ian McEwan and Jeanette Winterson invite their readers to rethink certain ideas, from social and moral codes to human progress and transformation in contemporary times.
1.2. Incipit
Both Atonement and Oranges have an interesting opening hook which plays with the reader’s expectations. McEwan and Winterson easily and seductively transport their readers into their fictional worlds.
The very first words that occur in Atonement, “The play”, create a mimetic space which the audience is invited to enter and observe. The third-person narrator reveals that it is Briony, a very young girl and the author of “The play”, who invites some people to observe and understand her moral message. The word “play” is followed by a detailed explanation of how it has been written by the protagonist and how she is preparing to perform it.
THE PLAY—for which Briony 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 crêpe paper—was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch. When the preparations were complete, she had nothing to do but contemplate her finished draft and wait for the appearance of her cousins from the distant north. There would be time for only one day of rehearsal before her brother arrived. At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad, 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. The reckless passion of the heroine, Arabella, for a wicked foreign count is punished by illfortune when she contracts cholera during an impetuous dash toward a seaside town with her intended. Deserted by him and nearly everybody else, bed-bound in a garret, she discovers in herself a sense of humor. Fortune presents her a second chance in the form of an impoverished doctor—in fact, a prince in disguise who has elected to work among the needy. Healed by him, Arabella chooses judiciously this time, and is rewarded by
reconciliation with her family and a wedding with the medical prince on “a windy sunlit day in spring. (McEwan, 2001:3)
Does the presentation of Briony’s play at the beginning of Atonement indicate a story within a story? The very beginning of the novel suggests complex storytelling and it points out that there are many stories to be discovered. The first paragraph of the novel is powerful enough to immediately provoke the desire of the reader to investigate. Why is Briony’s play so important? Who is she? Is she the protagonist? Is the novel about the play? McEwan reveals the moral story of the play right away. This probably invites the readers to think about ethics and morality during the narration.
There is a lot of information right at the beginning of the novel. Besides the play and Briony as its author, the narrator introduces her «cousins from the distant north» (McEwan, 2001:3), a sentence which may arouse the curiosity of the reader, and she also mentions her brother, who is the person the protagonist wants to perform for.3
The important fact about Briony and the process of her literary creation is that she wrote the play «in a two-day tempest.» (McEwan, 2001:3) In that mode, the third-person narrator emphasizes the tension under which Briony has been writing her play and not only that. He also limits the time she has at her disposal.
Furthermore, for Briony […] time only becomes human when it is narrated. Briony understood life only within temporal change represented by stories. Her present was constantly archived within diaries, notebooks, and letters. This detail is revealing if we think about the old Briony's account of her memories. (Ciorogar, 2016:152)
Among other things, McEwan narrates how storytelling shapes memory and how it relates events over time guided by someone’s impression. In this novel, the imagination plays a crucial role as to how it influences the storytelling. The imagination stands between the real and the invented and it is not easily noticed. This is the idea that is developed in McEwan’s novel. The skilful style of the author
3
Her play was […] for her brother, to celebrate his return, provoke his admiration and guide him away from his careless succession of girlfriends, towards the right form of wife, the one who would persuade him to return to the countryside, the one who would sweetly request Briony’s services as a bridesmaid. (McEwan, 2001:4)
shows how thin the line between reality and fiction is, sometimes so thin that it is imperceptible.
What is also interesting at the beginning of McEwan’s novel is that it does not start talking about the protagonist, but about the protagonist’s relation with the process of making a story. From the very first sentence, the reader learns how Briony is constructing her story and fashioning it for the performance. THE PLAY is between her and ‘others’. It is the invented story that is emphasized at the beginning of the novel. This is exactly the same as in the closure in Atonement, but it is something that the reader will not understand until the end of the novel. McEwan’s narrative art is powerful enough to manipulate the readers’ attention, to take them into his labyrinthic narration and play with their perceptions during his storytelling.
Soon after the first paragraph it becomes clear that Briony is the protagonist and the reader discovers that the action has been developing in her home. The narration follows the events that surround this young girl.
Oranges also begins with its protagonist, the little girl Jeanette, in her family
home. Nevertheless, unlike McEwan in Atonement, who only in the last part of the novel lets Briony speak directly to the reader, Winterson’s Jeanette is always the first-person narrator and her narration is only occasionally interrupted by the insertion of fragmented fairy tale parts. «Winterson uses fantasy […] to give symbolic expression to forms of desire masked or rendered deviant by dominant discourse on sexuality and identity. » (French, 1999: 235)
By using the vocabulary of a child at the beginning of the novel, Winterson makes her protagonist genuine and believable, and this creates an effective relationship between the protagonist and the reader. In addition, Jeanette, like Briony, has the sympathy of the reader.
Winterson plays with the reader’s expectations by beginning her novel with the sentence: «Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father.» (Winterson,1985: 3)
While pointing to the majority of the people forming the community the narrator refers her readers to, the adjective “most” implicitly points to the differential units which
challenge the ideal of a perfect community: Jeanette is precisely one such exception to the norm, and writing the story of this “disorientated” subject will sketch a new trajectory for the self, not within her community but without it. The first page of the novel presents the context against which the protagonist stands out as an individual; at the same time, this context is exposed as the fantasy of a world denying the possibility of subtleties and shades. (Bijon 2008:322)
It is not an ordinary life story that Jeanette is telling the reader and this is suggested immediately in the first sentence when the auto-diegetic narrator focuses on describing the unusual model of the mother:
My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn’t matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that.
She hung out the largest sheets on the windest days. She wanted the Mormons to knock on the door. At election time in a Labour mill town she put a picture of the Conservative candidate in the window.
‘She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies. Enemies were:
The Devil (in his many forms) Next Door
Sex (in its many forms) Slugs
Friends were:
God Our dog Auntie Madge
The Novels of Charlotte Bronte Slug pellets
(Winterson,2001:3) Jeanette makes clear to the reader that there is a list of enemies and friends that her mother has created and there is no space for grey shades in this black and white division. In addition, the reader finds that Mrs Winterson has also imposed this kind of belief on her daughter, who finds attraction exactly in the ‘grey shades’ and not in the proposed black and white ones.
What is interesting is the way Jeanette presents her life, especially the irony she uses while talking about her mother:
She had a mysterious attitude towards begetting children; it wasn’t that she couldn’t do it, more that she didn’t want to do it. She was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting
there first. So she did the next best thing and arranged for a foundling. That was me. (Winterson, 2001:3)
Right after the first sentence in Winterson’s novel, the reader starts to realize that irony is the key instrument the narrator uses, and that it gives the novel its particular tone. It seems as if Winterson wants to laugh at the ordinary and fixed models by saying things are not always as they may seem at the beginning. The very important thing in her narration is to read between the lines: the reader has to find out that she is not like most people who have lived for a long time with their parents, as she indicates in the opening of her confession.
1.3. Bildungs- and Künstler-roman in the Postmodern World
Both novels follow the protagonists in their life journey from childhood to adulthood. While Ian McEwan uses the focalisation strategy and narrates from a female point of view, despite being a man, Jeanette Winterson uses the autodiegetic form to tell the story of a woman who realizes she is a lesbian. They are both innovative. Neither of them accepts any limits in the storytelling process.
By experimenting with narrative strategies, readers’ expectations and other characteristics typical of postmodern fiction, the authors of Atonement and Oranges create a Buildungsroman, interestingly choosing a female character as their protagonists. Moretti comments on the Bildungsroman as a symbolic form of modernity. He writes that it is «‘A specific image of modernity’: the image conveyed precisely by the ‘youthful’ attribution of mobility and inner restlessness. Modernity is a bewitching and risky process full of ‘great expectations’ and ‘lost illusions’. » (Moretti, 2000:5)
These contemporary British writers present Briony and Jeanette as ‘modern’ women that represent the modern age. The crisis they both pass through happens during their youth. The climax in both novels happens exactly then. Youth is the period of ‘great expectations’ and ‘lost illusions’ and this is the period when identity
forms. The modern age, in which both protagonists live, supports the emancipation of women and this is why they are both given the opportunity to run away from their parents, find a job and learn to be independent in society.
Youth is the key explanation as to why both protagonists have the courage to react as they do. On the one hand, «Youth is, to speak, modernity’s ‘essence’, the sign of a world that seeks its meaning in the future rather than in the past.» (Moretti, 2000:5) Jeanette dares to look at the future and explore things that make her happy, although she goes against the rules imposed by her mother. She is ready to say farewell to her past life, to rebel against an imposed system of values, deconstruct it and reconstruct a new one, with her own rules.
On the other hand, «youth is subordinated to the idea of ‘maturity’: like the story, it has meaning only in so far as it leads to a stable and ‘final’ identity.» (Moretti, 2000: 8) This is why Briony reacts without thinking and accuses the innocent young man. Young age is without patience and this is why Briony reacts impulsively and in the end admits her guilt, searching for atonement but at the same time knowing that there is no repair for something broken. The broken vase4 can never be repaired to look as good as the new one. The same is true of her atonement. She can create a love story with a happy ending, but Robbie and Cecilia cannot come back from the dead, even if she gives them roles in her fiction.
The ideas of a successful female writer and of a lesbian, taken from these two novels, reflect the position of women in the twentieth century. Not only does a woman have more opportunities than before to be successful in a professional sense, but she also has more freedom to express her sexual orientation and to declare herself a lesbian. This would have been very controversial in the past if not wholly impossible. The twentieth century brought many changes to the field, although the topic of male and female equality is still debatable. Nevertheless, if we look back through time and literary history, we can see how long it took women to achieve their new position.
4 The broken vase is used in Atonement as a symbol. It breaks at the moment when Robbie and Cecilia
realize they are in love. This happens near the fountain and it is the first scene that Briony misunderstands. She thinks that Robbie is trying to drown Cecilia, but actually this is not the case.
Some of the first female Bildungsromane were about a woman’s development in a patriarchal society, and they show her subordinate position. Lorna Ellis discusses female development and the British Bildungsroman from 1750 to 1850 and she concludes that women in that period did not have much choice but to adapt to male-dictated conditions:
[…] once Bildungsroman heroines learnt to work within “the system,” they were able to gain a qualified power. (Ellis, 1999:18)
Ellis also discusses the long tradition of the Bildungsroman. She claims that the female Buildungsroman begins well before Wilhelm Meister, the traditional ‘prototypical’ Bildungsroman, and her exemplary novel is The History of Miss Betsy
Thoughtless by Eliza Haywood, first published in 1751. This novel, in her opinion,
«allows us to see both the similarities and differences between the male and female Bildungsroman – which are not necessarily what they have been thought to be. The many similarities show that two forms are indeed two versions of the same genres, and that more parallels between male and female development in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century fiction exist than have usually been acknowledged. At the same time, the differences can help us to rethink the origins of the genre as well as to consider the special means by which female protagonists make their way through society.» (Ellis, 1999:23)
Literary history shows us the difference between the male and female
Buildungsroman. Ellis argues:
[…] the alienation that Betsy Thoughtless and other female Buildungsroman heroines experience differs from the alienation of the male Bildungsroman protagonist. It is based on the material disempowerment of women and the repressive social expectations placed on women, and it is manifested through the disjunction between the heroine’s appearance and her sense of her own motivations. Thus, these novels create a view of female subjectivity that has interesting affinities to post-modern concepts of self. The rift between the self as initially perceived by the heroine and the self that is reflected back to her by other people’s expectations recognizes the instability of the humanist view that there is a “true” self embodied in each heroine, even as that view is ultimately upheld. (Ellis, 1999: 23)
History shows us that women have obtained more self-confidence through time and, as a consequence, more courage to fight for a better position in society. This is also reflected in literature. Ellis argues that «the female Bildungsroman’s ability to
bridge this gap between the heroine’s self-perception and other people’s expectations, and to overcome the heroine’s social alienation, is linked to the
Bildungsroman’s emergence in the mid-eighteen century, with a female protagonist
and helps explain why the female Buildungsroman is important. It created a model for female development that provided women with a sophisticated understanding of their constricted place in society while encouraging them to manipulate social expectations in order to promote their own welfare.» (Ellis, 1999:23)
The twentieth century, where our two novels are set, is as aforementioned a period of elaboration and innovation of many ideas and beliefs. The ideas of the past are brought into question and new ones are suggested. Patriarchal ideology is challenged and women’s emancipation rapidly grows. Twentieth-century women find more courage to fight for their rights and independence, especially in the second half of the twentieth century.
McEwan covers three different time periods in Atonement (1935, World War II and 1999) and through them, the reader can also see women’s emancipation. In the first part, there is one scene where the narrator focalises on Emily Tallis:
The cosy jargon of Cecilia’s Cambridge – the Halls, the Maid’s Dancing, the Little-Go, and all the self-adoring slumming, the knickers drying before the electric fire and two to a hairbrush, made Emily Tallis a little cross, though not remotely jealous. She had been educated at home until the age of sixteen, and was sent to Switzerland for two years which were shortened to one for economy, and she knew for a fact that the whole performance, women at the ‘Varsity, was childish really, at best an innocent lark, like the girls’ rowing eight, a little posturing alongside their brothers dressed up in the solemnity of social progress. They weren’t even awarding girls proper degrees. When Cecilia came home in July with her final results’ – the nerve of the girl to be disappointed with it! – she had no job or skill and still had a husband to find and motherhood to confront, and what would her bluestocking teachers – the ones with silly nicknames and ‘fearsome’ reputation – have to tell about that? Those self-important women gained local immortality for the blandest, the most timid of eccentricities – walking a cat on a dog’s lead, riding about on a man’s bike, being seen with a sandwich in the streets. A generation later these silly, ignorant ladies would be long dead and still revered at High Table and spoken of in lowered voices. (McEwan, 2001:65)
This critique of the modern ‘vision’ of women comes naturally because the narrator tells it through the thoughts of a middle-aged housewife with traditional assumptions about women and their role in society. Emily is the woman who does not rebel against her husband, who is unsatisfied and inactive and she is opposed to the type of ‘modern’ woman that her daughters have become through time.
In the third part of the novel (World War II), Cecilia, as well as Briony, leave their family home and both show the ability to struggle for their independence. After becoming nurses they gain a certain freedom to go and live their life without being dependent on their families or on the need to find a husband.
The evaluation of woman’s emancipation is reflected best in the fourth part of the novel, London 1999, where the female protagonist is shown as a successfully realized female artist.
Oranges is set in the second half of the twentieth century (1960-1970). The
author skips the topic of woman’s emancipation and opens the space in her fiction for characters like Mrs Winterson, who is more dominant than her husband in the house but also in society; or the eccentric Elsie, or Ida, the owner of the paper shop, who is homosexually oriented and so on. Winterson not only fills her novel with emancipated women, but also stands for female, or better, for universal freedom of sexual expression.
Literature, in accordance with popular culture, follows trends in terms of change and transformation of identity (related to sexuality, ethnicity and gender) and questions traditional values and conventions. (Childs 2005:8) This is what Winterson does. She questions patriarchal ideology, the stereotypical presentation of women and family, and opens a dialogue about religious and social oppression and homosexuality.
It is clear that Winterson’s personal homosexual orientation is mirrored in her semi-autobiography. She dares to speak about it explicitly, which, when Oranges was first published (1985), still had a revolutionary connotation.
From a generic viewpoint, Oranges is modelled on the traditional Bildungsroman. The autobiographical events are arranged into a diegetic structure that has much in common with the novel of formation, in which the male hero’s growth into maturity entails a separation from home and from the female, nurturing figure that is usually his mother. The overcoming of this Oedipal phase is necessary for him to come of age and, eventually, to return home after his initiation is complete. But Winterson introduces a main element of subversion, since she characterises the protagonist as a female gendered heroine. For a female main character, the perspective is quite different: the few models that the literary tradition offers to girls, such as the protagonists of fairy-tales, are passive women whose fate is determined by patriarchal norms. Moreover, these static female characters posit the impossibility of establishing female bonds of friendship and cooperation, since they make women competitive against each other and
exorcize the creation of any assertive model of femininity, which would be threatening to the patriarchal system. (Antosa, 2008: 28)
Antosa concludes that «Oranges problematizes this pattern by redefining the ideological and formal features of the Bildungsroman. By telling the story of a young lesbian girl’s education and growth in a religious community in Northern England, Winterson questions the long-established representation of the feminine in Western culture.» (Antosa, 2008: 28-29)
Oranges is a novel coloured by female domination, but what is peculiar is
that its protagonist, Jeanette, opposes not only male authority, but absolute authority. She fights against the system that limits her freedom not only as a woman, but as a sexual being. Winterson extends the topic of female rights to gender equality. Her protagonist, Jeanette, is a woman who speaks in the name of the people who fight for freedom in the social context and in sexual behaviour. She passes through various difficult moments as a child and adolescent, and even goes through exorcism, but despite all this, she is intelligent and strong enough to break the wall5 of the rigid system imposed on her (the fundamental Pentecostal Evangelist prison that her mother constructed) and takes the courage to acknowledge her being a lesbian, even though very young.
Jeanette demonstrates the ability to deconstruct her inner prison created by the upbringing she received from her mother and then to reconstruct her life, starting from the moment she leaves her parent’s home. In this way, Winterson gives her female protagonist the chance to live the life she desires, free to love anyone she wants, even another girl. Thus, who can tell this kind of story better than the author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit ? Jeanette is Winterson’s protagonist but she also reflects her author. After all, it is based on her autobiography.6
5 What is interesting is that Winterson uses the “WALL” as a particular and symbolical detail in her
narration, that has been repeated a few times. In one scene she writes: «Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.» (Winterson, 1985:112)
6 It is her first novel. Many facts coincide, such as the fact that she is adopted and raised to be a
missionary and that she escapes from her home very early, and so on. «When it was published in 1985, Jeanette Winterson’s first novel was unanimously regarded as “a realistic and heavily autobiographical comedy of ‘coming out’”» (Bijon, 2008:320) However, she denies it as entirely autobiographical.
Does this mean that the protagonist, Jeanette, is a writer? Does Jeanette share the same profession with Briony, McEwan’s protagonist? Guided by this assumption, could both novels be considered Kunstlerromane? Indeed, if we think of Oranges as an autobiographical novel, it is the life formation of a lesbian artist.7 Here is the meeting point with the protagonist of Atonement. Briony is also an artist, a writer like Jeanette. The end of McEwan’s novel confirms her as a successful, now seventy-seven-year-old woman writer. McEwan gives her the opportunity to talk about her success as an artist at the very end of the novel:
Every second person wanted to tell me something kind about my books. A group of enchanting teenagers told me how they were studying my books at school. I promised to read the typescript novel of someone’s absent son. Notes and cards were pressed into my hands. (McEwan, 2001: 366)
On the one hand, Atonement is a Kunsterlerroman. This novel’s narration contains the story about the formation of Briony as a writer. She starts to write when she is eleven years old and the reader learns about the writers she has read, how she builds her narrative, how she tries to publish the story for the first time and how she fails and many other things that she goes through before becoming a truly recognized and popular writer.
On the other hand, it focuses on Briony’s Buildung, on her life story. It is the process of her personal formation from a child to an adult woman that allows us to consider Atonement a Bildungsroman. The reader of Atonement learns about Briony’s childhood, a crucial event that changes her life, her life after she leaves her family home, her process of becoming independent and then in the end, the realization of her dream of becoming a successful writer, a profession she has desired from a very early stage of her life.
McEwan and Winterson show how female Buildungs- and Kunstler- roman function in the postmodern world of Atonement and Oranges. Their protagonists, Briony and Jeanette, grow up during the narration. The plot builds up the process of
7 The definition of this innovative version of Bildungsroman has been an object of critical contention.
Since it is the story of a lesbian coming to terms with the outside world, Paulina Palmer opted for the expression “(Lesbian) Coming Out narrative”6 , while other critics saw the protagonist’s artistic (self) education as following the archetype of the Künstlerroman, or “portrait of the artist as a young (wo)man”. (Antosa, 2008:29)
their transformation from children to adults and the inner struggle they go through. The loss of childhood innocence is a step that breaks the illusions they had until that moment, but opens the door to a space where they have to construct their own life through their decisions.
Earlier female Bildungsromane rarely give a woman the opportunity to have a career, but this changes in the contemporary novel. Ian McEwan, as a male writer, creates a female protagonist who reaches independence and success, while in
Oranges, Jeanette Winterson (a woman writer) delivers into the field of gender
studies, proclaiming sexual freedom. Both authors give a voice to their protagonists8 to confess how they have gone through their life struggles.
1.4. Confessional Writing
1.4.1. “Bless me reader for I have sinned”
In literature, confession remains an important genre. Literary autobiographies abound, and so-called fictional confessions are a substantial subgenre of the contemporary novel. (D’Hoker, 2006: 31)
Both Ian McEwan and Jeanette Winterson use the technique of confession.9 They wrap it up in the form of postmodern fiction where the reader gets to know how these two British contemporary authors “facilitate trauma disclosure”10. The confessions of their protagonists, Briony and Jeanette, have a reflexive role and leave space for discussion about sin and the sinner.
8 Winterson’s Jeanette is the first person narrator through the whole narration, but McEwan’s Briony
only in the last, ‘epiloguesque’ part, London, 1999.
9
“Confessional” is […] a descriptive term for a specific literary genre a type of autobiographical discourse in which the writer gives an intellectualized account of intensely personal experiences. One of the earliest examples is St.Augustine’s Confessions (397–398 CE), considered the first autobiography proper of Western Europe. Augustine not only narrates his life story but also struggles with issues of identity and meaning. (Wear and Jones, 2010: 218)
10 Dr Arden Corter and Dr Keith J. Petrie, both from the field of psychological medicine, explain that
«The expressive writing (EW) paradigm was originally developed with a confessional process in mind to facilitate trauma disclosure.» (Corter and Petrie, 2008: 27)
Ian McEwan and Jeanette Winterson both reveal to their readers a certain traumatic event that has affected their heroines. The child Briony misunderstands a love scene between Robbie and Cecilia, she sees it as a violent act. Briony does not understand that sex is something they both desire and enjoy. On the contrary, she only sees the devilish nature of Robbie who wants to possess the innocent Cecilia. Her misunderstanding wakes up the anger which will disrupt her power of reasonable thinking. Young Briony sees the devil in Robbie and she desires to get rid of him. During this state of mind she becomes a false witness and a sinner. In order to atone for her sin she creates a fiction. McEwan reveals this only at the end of the novel, in the form of an epilogue, by presenting a ‘letter’ with Briony’s confession. Like the confessant in front of a priest, she talks to the reader and confesses the crime she committed one hot summer day in 1935. This is not only a revelation, she also confesses that she lied to the reader and that until the moment of her confession she manipulated him/her. The false sense of reality that the reader has until the last part,
London, 1999, is her game of construction and de/re-construction of the stories she is
telling him/her.
The reader can only presume this because nobody actually tells Briony to confess her crime. The statement of confession that Robbie and Cecilia ask Briony at the end of the third part of the novel is invented. This means that nobody directly accuses her of being a sinner.
On the other hand, young Jeanette is accused of being a sinner by the Evangelist Pentecostal Church. This happens because the church disapproves of her homosexual feelings and considers them sinful. According to the rules of religious fundamentalists, sin calls for punishment. Jeanette uses an ironic and, in some moments, even humoristic narration through which she confesses her sin. Jeanette wonders: «Can love really belong to the demon?» (Winterson, 1985: 108) Is it a sin to be a lesbian? This is the question asked by young Jeanette, who reflects on her own feelings. She discusses this with Melanie, the girl with whom she falls in love:
‘Do You think this is Unnatural Passion?’ I asked her once.
‘Doesn’t feel like it. According to Pastor Finch, that’s awful.’ She must be right, I thought.
Winterson uses the language of children to comment upon the accusation of the Pentecostal Church against homosexuality as a sin. After this scene with Melanie, Jeanette decides to confess her feelings to her mother. What awaits her after this is exorcism. Throughout the narration of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeanette confesses all the traumas she goes through and explains how she overcomes them.
1.4.2. Unreliable Narrators
Both Ian McEwan and Jeanette Winterson try to create a natural flow in their narration to convince the reader of the truth of their storytelling. On the other hand, both Atonement and Oranges talk about discourse manipulation.
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit demonstrates that people who use religious
fundamentalist discourse practise a cruel method of manipulation. This novel shows how discourse can be used for manipulation. The same thing happens in Atonement, where the truth is hidden and manipulated until Briony’s revelation at the end of the book.
In the case of Winterson’s novel, Jeanette is a narrator; she presents her personal story. How many people can be objective when they talk about themselves? What about fairy tale fragments which are intertwined in her narrative? Is the whole novel one fairy tale with a happy ending? Or is it an encouragement for all women who want to live free and happy, no matter their sexual orientation? Who is the author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit? Jeanette, the protagonist, or Jeanette Winterson, the one who signs her name to the novel Oranges Are Not The Only
Fruit?
In ‘unreliable narration’ the narrator’s account is at odds with the implied reader’s surmises about the story’s real intentions. The story undermines the discourse [. . .] Two sets of norms conflict, and the covert set, once recognized, must win. The implied author has established a secret communication with the implied reader. (Chatman 1978: 233)
How does the implied reader of Atonement communicate with the implied author? Who is the author of Atonement? There is a gap between the first three parts and the last one which is a kind of epilogue. These two parts have different kinds of narrators. Crosthwaite observes that «Although the implied reader has a sense of having participated with the main characters in their experiences, the epilogue demands a new understanding of the narrative that is also, on some level, a recognition: namely, that the events depicted in the first three parts of the novel predate Briony’s narration of them by a considerable distance – in fact by six decades – as do the deaths of Robbie and Cecilia. This temporal gap precisely corresponds, of course, to that between the composition of Atonement itself and the historical period that is the setting of its first three parts.» (Crosthwaite, 2009:172)
Fiction and reality intertwine when suddenly one of the characters becomes the author. Currie explains it as a characteristic of postmodern writing:
A postmodern novel takes the issue of the relationship of fiction and reality as a central concern. Postmodern novels are often thought of an anti-realist. They construct fictional worlds only to expose them as artificial constructions. They like to thematise their own artificiality, often by constructing an internal boundary between fiction and reality, which allows for reflection on the relation between fiction and reality, as well as the irony that both the fiction and the reality are, in the end, fictional. They favour illusion-breaking device, especially ones that highlight the presence of an author, such as the intrusive authorial narrator who steps in to declare the fictionality of a fiction, or the surrogate author: a figure within the fictional world who occupies the role of an author, or a role analogous to the author. For many, a postmodern novel, is above all, one that involves metalepsis, which is usually defined as frame-breaking, a crossing of some uncrossable boundary between different orders of reality or being, as when a character steps out of a fiction, or an author steps into it to interact with characters. (Currie, 2010:3)
1.4.3. Confession or Construction?
Confession […] is not a means of expressing the irrepressible truth of prior lived experience, but a ritualised technique for producing truth. Confessional writing is poetic, not mimetic, it constructs rather than reflects some pre-textual truth. It is not free expression of the self but an effect of an ordered regime by which the self begins to conceive of itself as individual, responsible, culpable and hereby confessional. Most importantly, confession takes place in a context of power and prohibition, and surveillance. It is generated and sustained not by the troubled subject, confessant, but by the discursive relationship between speaker and reader. (Gill, 2006: 4)
How do McEwan and Jeanette Winterson construct manipulative discourse in their fictions by using the confession technique? What effect do they produce? Are they deconstructing some ‘ordered regime’ and reconstructing a new one? What kind of power do their protagonists have by telling their personal life stories? Are they manipulating their readers? All these questions may find some answer in discourse analysis and by exploring literary strategies used in the construction of the novel.
McEwan and Winterson use different ‘tones’ in the narration of their novels. While Atonement has a quite ‘serious’ tone with some occasional cheerful touch of irony and some sporadic game of satire, Oranges is dominantly coloured by parody. Delese Wear and Theresa Jones in their study, Bless Me Reader for I Have Sinned indicate that «In confessional writing […] tone may very well reflect and reveal a writer’s desire to find release from the pressure of guilt arising from an action or attitude.» (Wear and Jones, 2010: 227-228) They further explain:
The fact that others will read these confessions may offer some re-demption and resolution through the writers’ exposure of their inevitably flawed, shared humanity and their expressions of regret for any harm done […] each writer models the importance of reflection as well as offers an opportunity to consider different ways of approaching mistakes that move beyond the “blame and train” rituals […] to address the really tough issues—shame, humiliation, defensiveness, and suffering. (Wear and Jones, 2010:228)
McEwan and Winterson bring the confessions of their protagonists to the surface and ask their readers to reflect upon them. Literary strategies allow the author to choose a particular approach in the narrative creation. Upon these choices depends the message that the writer wants to convey in his/her fiction. It may suggest that the discourse—in this case, a confession—becomes a kind of manipulation between the author and the reader, or, between the confessor and the confessant. In this regard, Gammel reminds us of Foucault’s reflection on the power of discourse in the context of confession:
Foucault’s theory is […] useful to conceptualize the power relationship involved in confessional politics. The confessional speech act is characterized by an imbalance between the confessor’s power (to interpret. Forgive, and console) and the confessant’s impotence (in preventing his or her words from being turned against him or her). The confession has little authority of its own, but need the voice of an authority – religious, medical psychological, or legal – to legitimize it and assign it a truth value. (Gammel, 1999:4-5)
What kind of value does Winterson assign to Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit? What kind of value does McEwan assign to Atonement? The previous comment about the ‘tone’ of narration points to the differences and, therefore, the different effects they want to produce.
McEwan problematizes the idea of Briony’s guilt because of the problem she has caused when she was very young. Nevertheless, she is guilty and this is something that she does not deny in her confession. The tone of her confession is repentant. On the other hand, Jeanette is accused of breaking the rules proclaimed by the fundamental Pentecostal Evangelist Church, but she feels innocent and this is the idea she wants to convey to the reader. The reader does not feel that she is repenting. It is the nature of parody that makes the accusation, which is directed towards Jeanette, ridiculous and absurd.
The Bible is the master text against which the life and experiences of Jeanette are set. The parodic rewriting of the Bible and the adoption of its narrative style, in which myth, poetry and historical narration are blended together, reveals Winterson’s narratorial project of overcoming a rigid model of femininity both in semantic as well as textual terms. (Gammel, 1999: 30-31)
1.5. Intertextuality
1.5.1. Recontextualization (reconstruction)
Each time someone else’s words, or words from one document or another part of the same document, are used in a new context, the earlier words are recontextualized, and thereby given new meaning in the new context. (Bazerman and Prior, 2004:90)
Postmodern novels abound with intertextual relations11. Atonement and
Oranges are not exceptions. These novels contain a thick ‘spider’s web’ that leaves
dusty traces of other stories and epochs inside their postmodern fictional worlds.
11 «Bakhtin was one of the first to replace the static hewing out of texts with a model where literary
structure does not simply exist but is generated in relation to another structure. What allows a dynamic dimension to structuralism is his conception of the ‘literary word’ as an intersection of textual surfaces
Various allusions and quotations in Atonement and Oranges Are Not The Only
Fruit take readers on a journey from the medieval period to the nineteenth century,
from Romanticism to Modernism, while showing a densely embroidered innovative narrative of the postmodern fictional world. Their novels abound in literary, historical and pop culture references.
There are many explicit and implicit relations with other texts in Atonement and Oranges. Different levels of intertextuality flow through their narration. The relation with other texts is used as a “source of meaning to be used at face value”, “background, support and contrast”, “beliefs, issues, ideas, statements generally circulated” etc (Bazerman, 2004)
Atonement is announced with a quote from a romantic period novel, as already
mentioned. After the epigraph which recalls Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the first part of the novel abounds with ‘romantic’ literary references. In this kind of ‘space’ McEwan creates the story of a girl, Briony, whose head is lost in books, like it is the case with many heroines (like the protagonist of Northanger Abbey) who ‘live’ in romantic fictions. There is even an episode in Atonement where the reader has an opportunity to assist the discussion about romantic novels. This happens in the scene where Cecilia and Robbie discuss about Richardson and Fielding.12
Atonement is partly a historical fiction. The second part of the novel is the
depiction of World War II. In particular, it talks about the battle of Dunkirk. McEwan gives his impressionistic depiction of World War II, using real historical information. By talking about history through poetic and gothic narrative, he gives a rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character), and the contemporary or earlier cultural context.» (Kristeva 1980:64-65) «Postmodern novels are intertextual novels. They are highly aware of their condition in a world pervaded by representations, and of their place in a tradition, or a history of representations including other novels. They are citational, in the sense they cite, allude to, refer to, borrow from or internalise other texts and representations, both real and fictional. They belong to a more general cultural condition in which cultural forms recycle, repeat, reshape and rewrite past forms. They use fictional intertext as ways of incorporating boundaries between fiction and reality within a fiction, and therefore of dramatizing their own relationship with the outside world. » (Currie, 2010: 3)
12 In this scene the «debate on eighteenth-century literature» (McEwan, 2001:26) starts when Robbie
asks Cecilia if she likes Clarissa (the book she is reading at that moment). What she answers is that she rather reads Fielding. Although Cecilia does not expects that Robbie will approve her statement he says: «I know what you mean […] There’s more life in Fielding, but he can be psychologically crude compared to Richardson.» (McEwan, 2001:26)
certain critique of war, its absurdity and unexplainable morbidity which destroys all human values and negates any logic.
What is common to McEwan and Winterson is that throughout their fictional worlds, they occasionally name some historical figures, letting the reader read between the lines and understand their playing with historical references through irony. Just to name a few, here are some examples from both novels:
Atonement Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
Everybody said it was so, from the portraits who were forming their hospital Local Defence Volunteers unit, to
Churchill himself who conjured an image of the country subjugated and starving with only the Royal Nave still in large. p.315-316
-
The boys stared at him as they absorbed this and could not speak, for they knew that the business of newspapers was momentous: earthquakes and train crushes, what the government and nation did from day to day, and whatever more money should be spent on guns in case Hitler attacked England. p.59
(…)
‘If you want to talk in terms of power I had enough to keep Mussolini happy.’ p.124
-
‘Now, Queen Victoria, that was a funeral.’ p. 57
