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“All history is fiction”

Explore this statement in relation to Atonement.

Ian McEwan’s ‘Atonement’ explores the idea that history may be fiction, purely because it
involves accounts of prominent historical events and the text itself is a metafictional novel – this
meaning that the book is about a writer creating or recalling a story. It has been said before that
“history is fiction” because after years of studying psychology, it has been noted that the human
brain likes to ‘fill the gaps’, where memory is lost, with information that may not be the exact truth
and therefore when people re-call eye-witnessed stories from memory, they begin to adapt from
the real truth. Some people say that in a modern culture, you can prove history because of new
ways of recording it - for example a video camera. However, the video is only true if we can prove
that the events on it are not altered or manually edited from the original; we cannot do this, thus we
cannot prove that history is fact. In relation to ‘Atonement’, the book is dominated by themes of
fact versus fiction – with the very first chapter opening with the recurring words: “story”, “fact”
and “secret”, but how else does the novel relate to this statement?

Firstly, if we look at the form of the novel, we can see that it is, as aforementioned, a metafictional
novel. This means Ian McEwan has written the book, as if he were Briony, and for the very last
chapter, written from a first person narrative where Briony is no longer writing the book. This
creates a strong element of ambiguity surrounding the novel because eventually Briony admits that
she lied in the ending, purely to satisfy the reader, therefore we realise how much she has
manipulated us into feeling certain emotions within the novel (such as hatred towards young
Briony because older Briony is ashamed of her and thus she wants her audience to spite her too).
This idea that Briony may have made every part of the story up, from start to finish, is also
supported by the letter that she receives from the editor of ‘Horizon’ suggesting that her short story
‘Two figures by a fountain’ lacked some sort of trauma and perhaps the little girl “might come
between them in some disastrous fashion”. In the novel, Briony does come between the two
“figures” and therefore the novel that we have just read is the edited version that suits what
‘Horizon’ advises; thus insinuating that the text has been edited and altered and therefore making it
untrue. This supports the “all history is fiction” statement because Briony is writing the novel as if
it were an eye-witness event, yet the novel she has displayed has been changed to appease critics
and the audience thus making it fiction.

Furthermore, Ian McEwan’s father was a veteran in the Second World War and therefore there is a
sense of truth conveyed in Part Two where the third person narrative is describing Robbie’s
morbid experience. The realistic details, such as the “severed child’s leg” in the tree, bring a sense
of fact to the novel because there would be terribly gory aspects, such as severed limbs, occurring
in travels across West Europe in the Second World War. Also, the factual references to Dunkirk
prove that the chapter is more truthful than the others; this disagrees with the statement that “all
history is fiction” because eye-witness accounts, even when altered, are close to the real events and
therefore it is closer to fact than it is to fiction, because there are bold elements of truth that reveal
actual emotions and feelings that contextually relevant people would feel. However, there is an
underlying intention behind this slightly more factual chapter – McEwan (and thus the older
Briony who is meant to be writing this part of the novel) needed to draw empathy from the reader
(for Robbie) in order to feel wrath against young Briony for spoiling Robbie’s life. Therefore the
book is not being reliable; it is still manipulating the audience into feeling a certain way and thus it
is fictional because it is not cold, hard, solid fact.

Finally, history is usually altered by misinterpretation or imprecise re-telling of events, thus


creating fiction; this is usually brought about the ‘Chinese Whisper Effect’ - when passing
information from one party to another (verbally), the facts and theme often become distorted. This
effect is illustrated in ‘Atonement’ where Robbie’s sexual note to Cecilia is misinterpreted by
Briony as some sort of threatening sex bribe and therefore Briony forwards her deluded thoughts
about Robbie to Lola, exclaiming that “the man’s a maniac” and then Briony (with Lola’s support)
tells the police that Robbie is the rapist. This part of the novel explores how misinterpretation and
lack of viewpoint can completely alter a situation. If Robbie was given a chance to tell Briony, or
perhaps the officers, who arrested him, that the note was an accident and he had intended to send a
different note that was indeed an apology letter, then maybe the novel’s prime trauma (the arrest)
would have never happened. This reflects the ‘Chinese Whisper Effect’ because the only person
who witnesses actual evidence is Briony who misinterprets a lot of what she sees and therefore
when she passes the information, others feel they are given fact, when in fact it is the thirteen year-
old’s childish interpretation. This proves that history is easily altered and therefore most, if not all,
of history is fiction.

To conclude, history cannot be proven, even when there is proof, because there needs to be proof
that the history’s proof is correct and then for the secondary proof, there has to be tertiary proof to
prove that that source is also correct, and so on. This proves that history is fiction because it is
improvable and therefore it could all be made up. In a solipsistic theological perspective, history
must be fiction because nothing other than the human mind exists; thus, nothing ever happens and
it is all thought up. This idea is reflected in Atonement because Briony could have easily made
everything up in her fictitious world and it may all have been thoughts that never happened.
However, the book does convey a sense of fact with Part Two being very emotionally correct
about the pain and suffering caused in World War Two with the Dunkirk rescue and other events.
Postmodernism in Atonement

-Use of metafiction and meta-narrative


-Relationship with other novels (intertextuality) relationship with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and
Shakespeare's The Tempest
-Use of irony – Robbie being the most proffering young academic student is the one to be locked
away and sent to war.
- Use of Pastiche – pasted together tomake a unique narrative.
- "historiographic metafiction" (Linda Hutcheon coined the term) to refer to works that fictionalize
actual historical events or figures – Dunkirk.
- Temporal distortion – time repeats itself with the re-calling of the same events but from different
perspectives.
- Maximalism- the sprawling canvas and fragmented narrative. Alternative narratives.

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