As a research blog, I can think of no better way to begin than to examine and explain my research interests as they now stand. Mainly, I’m concerned with Otherness and Others, specifically in literature, along with the idea of an ethical authorship attached to them.
How much artistic liberty may Authors, fictitious or actual, apply to Others in their fiction? How does one “ethically” imagine and author an Other? And as Authors in our own lives and, thus, our own fictions, can we even attempt to answer that?
These questions first occurred to me while reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement. His book remains one of my favorite pieces of 20th Century literature, and also, remains the best way I know how to explain my Author/Other fascination.
McEwan’s Atonement follows the tragedy of a young couple, Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis, parted because of faults within Briony’s (Cecilia’s younger sister) imagination and Authorship of certain events. At the time of her crime-of-imagination, young Briony had already been identified by McEwan as a prolific writer. We also understand that she had complicit access to adult codes of her time and social class through her father’s library, which she perused at her leisure and which we are to assume, caused her imagination to grow. As a writer, and a child, the fact that she had imagination certainly doesn’t present itself as a problem or a crime; however, at her young age, she didn’t understand the way in which her world functioned well enough to form true interpretations of adult codes or to invent accurate fictions according to those actions. Due to her readings, she was most familiar with stereotypes of social orders within fictitious literatures. This caused her to recreate people, to recreate Others, according to her imagined motives for each.
McEwan illustrates this confusion early in the novel by having Briony witness her sister and Robbie interacting by the fountain on their estate. She read the scene incorrectly, thinking:
There was something rather formal about the way he stood, feet apart, head held back. A proposal of marriage. Briony would not have been surprised. [….] Robbie Turner, only a son of a humble cleaning lady and of no known father, […] had the boldness of ambition of ask for Cecilia’s hand. It made perfect sense. Such leaps across boundaries were the stuff of daily romance. (McEwan 48)
What appeared to Briony as a possible proposal was actually a quarrel —definitely not the stuff of daily romance, I’d say.
Briony’s misunderstanding of the fountain scene and her authorship of it projected later that day onto a note from Robbie to Cecilia, which she read as an unintended audience. In the note, Robbie explicitly described what he would like to do to Cecilia–causing Briony to encounter an adult sexual code, which in her youth she did not comprehend.
[In an effort for concision, and to prevent this from reading anymore like an essay than it already does (which I am actively trying to avoid!), I’m going to summarize the next points of action quite quickly.]
Briony’s mind created a fiction around the note, because she didn’t understand it, and she concluded that Robbie must mean to hurt her sister. A scene which she later saw in the library compounded this assumption, causing her to accuse Robbie later in the evening of committing a crime of sexual violence against one of her cousins.
Unfortunately, her Authorship was accepted and became her most successful fiction.
McEwan makes sure that as an audience we understand that Briony was functioning under a fiction when she accused Robbie as her cousin’s attacker. The events of that day on a whole caused Briony to cast him as “evil incarnate” in her own melodrama (McEwan 147). Her understanding of upper-middle-class English society (another adult code) prevented her from considering her brother or his equally privileged friend, Paul, as the rapist.
Later, as she matured, Briony realized and fully understood the consequences of that fiction, but by that time, it was too late. Robbie and Cecilia died alone, far apart from each other, during World War II and Briony dedicated her life to “atoning” for her crime.
Essentially, life stinks and we all die. Woo. (Should I have said **spoilers** before now?)
So…
My stance on this is that Briony practiced unethical authorship toward an Other. I classify Robbie as an Other based on his social status in regards to Briony’s own. In the quote I provided from McEwan’s novel, she cites him as the son of the gardener at her family’s estate–social standing is a factor that can identify Others. Her immature categorization of Robbie caused Briony to create a biased fiction.
Trying to agree on or define what an ethical authorship is, at this point, too lengthy and unclear an endeavor to take up. However, my assertion for Authors is that fiction rests on possibilities, not certainties, and that fiction comes from what Others may be. To that end, I suppose this is what I hope to write on for my thesis.
For those who haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it! It was one of the most enjoyable texts I had the pleasure of reading during my undergrad work, and even though I may have ruined a couple of plot points (so sorry), it’s well worth the read!
Thanks for reading! Feel free to comment about the post or contact me with any questions you have.
Works Cited:
McEwan, Ian. Atonement. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Print.
Others N' Me: Literary Research 
