Atonement (2001), by Ian McEwan: A Consideration of Narrative Integrity

   Ian McEwan has become a great literary icon in Great Britain; somewhat less so, but still widely respected, here in the States. There is some disagreement about his overall merit, but most agree, more and less, that his works are not all of equal greatness—some perhaps failing greatness altogether. As I am new to his writings I won’t be taking a stand on the general view, but will content myself with some very tentative first  impressions.
    The opening chapters of McEwan’s Atonement present me with a bewildering perplexity: I had to ask myself, repeatedly, Just who is telling this story, and at what remove? The perplexity concerns the narrative voice. The narration of the novel seems to start out as a straightforward omniscient viewpoint, telling the tale of a 13 year old literary ingénue named Briony, who is eager – frantic really – to stage a play she wrote herself in celebration of her older brother’s return to the family estate from Cambridge for summer holidays. She is determined to enlist the aid, as cast members, of her three cousins (two younger, one older) who have also just arrived to spend time with her family and to escape the domestic squabbles of their parent’s divorce. So far, so good --one would think.

Yates’s The Easter Parade and the Vision of the Artist

    In this, Part II of my essay in aesthetics, I am going to try to apply the principles I espoused in Part I to an analysis of Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade in an attempt to more fully articulate the approach I favor in the appreciation of literary artworks. It will involve some sniping at various other approaches, which I take to be current – even pervasive – in the field of modern literary criticism. This is a habit I will not indulge in normally – unless provoked – but one which, I hope, will make clear to myself and to my readers, just where I stand in these debates. More importantly, I hope my position will clear a theoretical space in which writers like Richard Yates, and their efforts, might be taken more fully at face value, i.e. as they actually intend their works to be taken, as Art, and less as examples of the way we “consumers” can amuse ourselves.

A Brief Foray into the Minefield of Modern Aesthetics

    This essay - in which I make no claims to any  profound originality, but only to the more or less orderly collation of various active ideas which guide my thinking about Literature and Art, and which I whole heartedly hold to be correct -  is intended as both a general statement of aesthetic principles, and as a prelude to the immediately following discussion of Richard Yates's The Easter Parade.
   It will be seen that I am still 'solid' with the New Criticism' school of thought, generally, and for that reason have made no great effort to reference the obvious sources. (I will be more intent on reference and rebuttal when it comes time to refute the foolishness of the newer schools of thought, such as 'de-constuctionism', and 'reception theory'--all Post-Modernist philosophies which I abhor.)