One Little Word Can Say So Much And Mean So Little
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday March 29, 2008
WHEN Ian McEwan, in Atonement, has Briony's mother respond to the play her girl has written with the single word "stupendous", one knows, by the word's very exaggeration, that something is amiss. It's a neon light, a clarion call. If Hamlet were here, he'd be saying "All is not well".
At the centre of the book and film lie Briony's machinations - or childish fantasies, character defects, mental weaknesses, if you prefer. Both in terms of triggering the narrative action, and providing a straight line to the putative atonement of the title, the big imponderable remains: what makes Briony tick? But for this, everything follows its inexorable, predetermined catastrophic course, war included. Briony is the only point of conjecture.In one so young, what causes such aberration? For any contemporary mental health professional, even post-Freudian, the first port of call is the family of origin. The father, notable entirely by his physical absence, is simply not there. The mother is physically present, but aloofly unavailable. Hmmm, mothers. Fertile soil. Let's probe there. When Briony gets told "stupendous" it had to be, paradoxically and simultaneously, both more and less than she'd have wanted. More, because of its hyperbole; less, because of its vacuousness. "Stupendous", literally, means stunned into a seemingly stupid state of surprise. Easily mistakable for "stupid", it's a risky word to use with a child, especially this child. It's probably outside her lexicon, unless, as may be the case, it's identifiably her mother's idiolect, in which case its sheer frequency may make it merely phatic.Central to the complexity of "stupendous" is the fact that whether the mother did read in depth or merely skim the pages, she may have come up with the same word. It betrays its user's disengagement. It's a one-size-fits-all word, useful for a mother who is minimally involved in the daily traffic of her child's life. And as the word ominously foreshadows, "stupendous" is not the feedback this little girl needs at this stage of her impressionable youth. Its sheer exaggeration alerts us that boundaries that should be in place, aren't. Once the context is understood and "stupendous" is given its prophetic role, Briony slips from her pinnacle of imaginative self-indulgence into her little moment of madness. To judge from the cataclysm that follows, and drawing on McEwan's other works, discrete moments can have thunderous outcomes, from which all that may be salvageable in the end is some kind of tawdry atonement. ruth@laraconsultancy.com
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald
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