Responsibility and Meaning

At one point in Atonement, Briony sends a slightly fictionalized version of part of her story to a magazine. She writes in the style of Virginia Woolf, focusing on light plays on the surfaces of stone and water. The story is rejected, and in explaining the rejection the editor says that the story went nowhere, and it was little more than a sketch. Suggesting some directions for developing the plot, the editor stumbles on Briony’s actual story, and Briony realizes that her story was finally an attempt to evade responsibility for the consequences of her actions by eliminating her actions. McEwan writes, “The interminable pages about light and stone and water, a narrative split between three different points of view, the hovering stillness of nothing much seeming to happen – none of this could conceal her cowardice. Did she really think she could hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream – three streams – of consciousness? The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella – and was necessary to it. What was she to do now? It was not the backbone of a story that she lacked. It was backbone.” Which raises the question of stream of consciousness itself: Is the penchant for diverse and often mutually-cancelling perspectives, and the penchant for static plot, in modern fiction a way of escaping rersponsibility, an effort to shield oneself from evil, a form of sentimentality? And this also raises questions about various forms of postmodernism. When Paul de Man’s Nazi affiliations were explosed some years ago, a number of commentators noted how convenient his theory of meaning was for someone with such a past. If we cannot be sure what we mean, if we cannot know that we mean, then of course we cannot be held responsible for what we mean.