Dan Shen's Theory of Dual Narrative Dynamics Linked to Ian McEwan's Atonement

There are several reasons why Dan Shen has made, and continues to make, significant contributions to narrative studies. One reason is the original way in which she incorporates stylistics into her version of rhetorical narrative theory and analysis; a different yet linked reason is her insistence on the need for careful reading and rereading; a third one is her exploration of the ethical dimension of narrative fiction—and thus also of the act of reading and interpreting a narrative text. All these critical qualities are observable in the short analyses incorporated into her target essay.Since the essay by Shen under consideration here is very rich, I choose to respond by commenting on the dual narrative dynamics of one particular narrative, Ian McEwan's novel Atonement.1 By making this choice, I indicate that I am broadly persuaded by Shen's main thesis: “In many fictional narratives, the plot development exists in tension with a ‘covert progression’ in the shape of a powerful hidden dynamic, which … complicates readers' response in a distinct way” (“‘Covert Progression’” 1, abstract). The qualification signalled by “many” is necessary because not all narratives, including complex narratives, are possessed of such dual narrative dynamics. Yet Shen is right to note that the critical narrative tradition has concentrated on the narrative text's overt plot progression, thus tending to overlook a paralleling covert progression.The examples of short fiction analysed by Shen in the target essay, and in her excellent Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions Behind Overt Plots, are possessed of such dual dynamics. One reason why short fiction responds well to her theory of a dual plot dynamics is that, partly because the characters' motives, decisions and actions often cannot be explained the way they can in a longer narrative,2 works of short fiction typically intensify the reader's interpretative activity in a different way, thus perhaps making it easier to detect a covert plot progression paralleling the overt one. This point applies not least to the works of modernist short story writers such as Katherine Mansfield, on whose story “The Fly” (1922) Shen makes perceptive comments.This response will extend Shen's project not only by looking at a longer narrative but also one in which the covert progression is about the telling and the told—and overtly revealed in the text. I am also extending Shen's theory by commenting on the ethical consequences of the covert: the textual dynamics of Atonement accentuates the novel's ethical dimension by prompting ethical questions to which there are no easy answers. In order to briefly comment on the novel's dual dynamics, I will first summarize the main plot, focusing on the main character, Briony, who serves as the mediator between the two parallel narrative movements.Briony is one of the children in the Tallis family—the others being her older sister, Cecilia, and her older brother, Leon. A friend of Leon's, the wealthy chocolate manufacturer Paul Marshall, is also visiting the country estate in England where the family lives; the time of Part I is a July day in 1935. When Briony's cousin Lola is sexually assaulted by a person she cannot identify, Briony, who only catches a glimpse of this person but has earlier misunderstood several meetings between Robbie and Cecilia, claims it was Robbie. Everybody believes her, except Cecilia and Robbie's mother. In Part II Robbie is jailed, but released four years later so that he can fight as a soldier in the British army during the German invasion of France in May 1940. He is seriously injured, but is evacuated from Dunkirk and marries Cecilia, who he has kept in touch with all this time. Cecilia works as a nurse in London during the war. So does Briony, having realized the consequences of the fatal error she made in claiming it was Robbie who raped Lola. The actual rapist was Paul Marshall, who Lola later marries and therefore cannot testify against in a trial. Cecilia has broken off all contact with her family, but in Part III, Briony comes to see her and Robbie in London to ask forgiveness.A plot summary simplifies as it necessarily leaves out important plot elements, and as it does not indicate how the plot is presented as a literary narrative. What makes this plot summary particularly misleading is that it does not include a textual addition that is crucial for McEwan's exploration of ethical questions in Atonement and that reveals the existence of a covert progression that parallels the main plot summarized above. For, having made the third-person narrator relate a difficult, but apparently conciliatory meeting between Briony, Robbie, and Cecilia at the end of Part III, McEwan presents an epilogue, “London, 1999” (351).This epilogue is an extended diary entry with Briony as first-person narrator. Briony here reveals that she is the author of the three parts of the novel that constitute the basis for the plot summary above. Thus, what appeared to be an anonymous third-person narrator with the capacity to reveal the interior consciousness of Briony, Cecilia, and Robbie, turns out to be the character whose “misidentification of Robbie as Lola's assailant … [is] the major event of the progression” (Phelan 110). The narrative and ethical complications of this delayed disclosure increase when Briony, who is 77 years old in 1999, notes in her diary that she has vascular dementia and does not have a long time left to live. The reader suspects that there is a connection between her illness and what she reveals in her diary: the story she tells as third-person narrator is autobiographical and as accurate and “pitiless” as possible (McEwan 370), apart from the end, which Briony decides to change when she writes the last of several versions of her story: “But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station” (370).This information means that the epilogue does not just radically alter the narrative situation but also turns the end of the plot on its head by introducing a covert progression that has accompanied the main one all along. This overt part of McEwan's novel reveals two interacting dimensions of the covert progression in Parts I to III: one for the telling and one for the told. While the dimension for the telling makes every sentence simultaneously part of McEwan's novel and part of Briony's novel, that for the told reveals that in Briony's novel Parts I and II seek to represent what actually happened while the latter half of Part III radically alters what actually happened.3The reader may counter that since McEwan makes Briony state explicitly in the epilogue that she is the author of the novel's first three parts, what we are confronting here is a sophisticated instance of self-conscious metafictional writing rather than the disclosure of a covert progression. After all, a key component in Shen's understanding of covert progression is that it is not made explicit; rather, it is “hidden” (“‘Covert Progression’” 2) in the text's narrative and linguistic web, thus necessitating careful rereading in order to be identified and adequately understood.Although this objection holds some force, I still find it critically productive to consider Atonement as an original novel in which McEwan combines the overt plot development with a covert progression until the epilogue when the covert is brought to light. Atonement is an illustrative yet also challenging example of a narrative text in which “the covert progression and the plot development contrast and interact with each other in diversified ways” (Shen, “‘Covert Progression’” 6). Shen notes that this kind of interaction tends to fall into “two broad categories: the complementary and the subversive” (6). In Atonement, both categories are operative, one blending into the other and vice versa. For example, our realization that the third-person narrator in the first three parts is in fact Briony subverts the narrative by revealing that the presentation of the main events as well as the other characters is more subjective, and thus also potentially less reliable, than we thought on our first reading. Yet that same realization also complements the first reading since the third-person narrator, who gives a nuanced and in some ways critical presentation of a character (Briony) who attempts to come to terms with a fatal mistake she much regrets, is also engaged in an act of atonement. Thus, the novel's dual dynamics is strengthened.Once I become aware of the novel's covert progression, I realize that it parallels the plot development throughout. Discussing Mansfield's short story “Revelations,” Shen notes that a narrative beginning rarely accommodates a covert progression. However, rereading the narrative beginning of Atonement and knowing (since I am turning back to the beginning from the epilogue) that the unidentified narrator is actually Briony (or more technically, Briony the novelist's construction of a third-person narrator), I realize that the covert progression starts right from the beginning, excluding the title page and the dedication but including the epigraph from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. Concentrating on the overt plot when I read Parts I to III for the first time, I find that the action and the characters are presented by a third-person narrator; on my second reading, my knowledge of the covert progression prompts me to consider these three parts as an autobiographical novel whose author is atoning for a fatal mistake in her extra-fictional life. The novel's title condenses this process into one word.My awareness of the novel's dual narrative dynamics accentuates its ethical dimension. Because she confesses only in her diary, Briony does not tell the reader of her novel about the alternative ending. Enhancing the gravity of her mistake, the information to me as a reader of McEwan's novel, but not to the reader of Briony's novel, that Cecilia and Robbie both died in 1940 colors my understanding of the novel's ethics. Although Briony has developed ethically through the atonement experienced over the many years of writing the “pitiless” versions, her diary reveals that she regresses by inventing the version in which she confesses to Robbie and Cecilia and reconciles with them.As Briony's reflections in the diary include elements of self-irony and resignation, McEwan's ironic exposure of his protagonist is not only intensified but also modified in the epilogue. Although the novel's covert progression is ethically dubious since McEwan tricks his readers for a long time, “London, 1999” not only reveals the trick but prompts us as readers to ask ethical questions about Briony's mistake (which she admits to her readers) and her invention of the different version (which she does not admit to her readers but which McEwan discloses to his). These questions blend into further ethical questions tied to the historical context in which Briony makes her mistake—questions inseparable from issues involving social class, gender, and war. Briony's direct involvement as a writer, an involvement that results from and is integral to the novel's dual dynamics, gives an edge to McEwan's ethical exploration—an exploration that for McEwan as implied author includes Briony as main character, narrator, and writer. The implied author's stance is multidimensional and ultimately reconciliatory, not least ethically. Rather than adopting “two contrastive or even opposed stances” (“‘Covert Progression’” 22), the implied author adopts a complex stance and combines a set of purposes that are linked but not necessarily opposed.Appropriating Shen's theory of dual narrative dynamics in our reading of Atonement enables us to gain a fuller and richer understanding of the novel. The theory prompts us not only to identify but also to appreciate the interpretative potential of the narrative's undercurrent and its relation with the overt plot in Parts I to III. Although the first three parts of the novel's overt plot are deceptive, McEwan's direct revelation of that deception in “London, 1999” provides the basis for his ethical reconciliation with his readers. Dan Shen's notion of dual narrative dynamics helps us understand the nature of both the initial deception and the ultimate reconciliation.