In Atonement (2001), McEwan incorporates temporal and geographical displacement within the structure of the novel: the first section takes place in 1935 England, the second one follows Robbie during the British retreat from Dunkirk in 1940, while the third section takes us back to England and depicts Briony’s experience as a nurse in a war hospital.
After his return to England, to a state boarding school in Suffolk, his early writing reached towards a different kind of territory-the mind of the Other-in his first collections of short stories First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978)ĢStill, McEwan’s novels often use the strangeness of a setting-a thinly disguised Venice in the Comfort of Strangers (1981), post-war Berlin in The Innocent (1990), and, of course, the eponymous Amsterdam (1998)-to enhance the Englishness of the displaced subject and study the crisis of an identity confronted with the loss of geographical bearings. Of his teenage years in Lybia in the 50’s, he recalls living “not very far from the machine gun nest” (Head 3), and understanding “for the first time that political events were real and affected people’s lives” (Head 3). Because his father was a soldier in the British army, his childhood was an uprooted one, and very much in contact with the political and social upheavals of the second half of the 20th century. Dans Atonement, McEwan essaie ainsi de définir une nouvelle approche éthique de la relation avec l’autre-dont nous évoquerons la proximité avec l’éthique Levinassienne-et ainsi d’expier les péchés collectifs et “historiographiques” du passé.)pġSince his childhood, Ian McEwan’s life and work has been placed under the aegis of a fascinating yet disturbing elsewhere.
En effet, dans Atonement-un roman écrit en 2001 et se situant à la fin des années 30-les mythes constitutifs de l’anglicité, tels que la “country house”, ou le code de conduite des gentlemen anglais, sont critiqués afin de souligner leur insuffisance en période de guerre-un ailleurs éthique où les valeurs traditionnelles se trouvent radicalement déstabilisées.Ī travers l’exemple de Briony et de Robbie pendant la seconde guerre mondiale, le roman tisse un maillage de tensions entre identité individuelle et identité collective interrogeant la notion de “rencontre avec l’autre”. La fiction anglaise de la fin du xx e siècle montre que, pour de nombreux auteurs contemporains (Ishiguro, Barker, Swift,…), “ailleurs” signifie en premier lieu l’Angleterre mythique du passé, que l’on souhaite la recréer ou craigne son influence toxique sur le présent.
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