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Knowledge which goes so far as to accept horror in order to know it, reveals the inner horror of knowledge, its squalor, the discrete complicity which maintains it in a relation with the most: insupportable aspects of power. I think of that young prisoner of Auschwitz (he had suffered the worst, led his family to the crematorium, hanged himself; after being saved at the last moment-how can one say that: saved?).
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
OPENING IN 1935 AGAINST THE LOOMING BACKGROUND of World War II, Ian McEwan's novel Atonement (2001) centres on the guilt felt by the protagonist, Briony Tallis, for the consequences of her erroneous accusation that Robbie, her sister's new boyfriend, molested their young cousin Lola. The novel is a meditation on the act of testimony, beginning with Briony's initial accusation and extending ever outwards as, over the following years, she begins to rethink the reliability of her position as a witness. Each new chapter forces the reader to revise his or her understanding of what was revealed earlier, sowing seeds of doubt that make the text blossom into a set of irreconcilable uncertainties. James Harold writes that Atonement "reveals that narrative imagining is not static or unified, but dynamic and multi-polar," as it skilfully manipulates the imprecision of language by playing with the complicated link between knowledge and ethics (130). While the novel demonstrates the potentially tragic results of hasty judgment, its increasing ambiguity self-reflexively turns this logic of shame back onto the reader, so that the book's conclusion leaves us, as witnesses, to ponder our own ability to testify about the story that Briony has just described.
At the centre of the book's narrative is a secret, an obscured truth, which McEwan uses to lure the reader into the story. Like Briony, the reader is pushed toward a moral judgment by this act of concealment, even though the information necessary to make an ethically informed decision is withheld. Each secret contains two possible destinies, writes Maurice Blanchot, "The stratagem of the secret is either to show itself, to make itself so visible that it isn't seen (to disappear, that is, as a secret), or to hint that the secret is only secret where there is no secret,...