‘So Proud of our Dead Soldiers’: of Ghosts and men in Jacob’s Room (1922) and Atonement (2001)
Virginia Woolf’s composition of Jacob Flanders from a diversity of angles and her ironic perspective at the “absent” presence of a banal, inconsequential, narcissistic young man proclaim a lifelong refusal to contribute to the fallacies of myth making. Mourning their sacrifice, she declined to eulog...
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| Veröffentlicht in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| 1. Verfasser: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprache: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2019
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| Online Zugang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Zusammenfassung: | Virginia Woolf’s composition of Jacob Flanders from a diversity of angles and her ironic perspective at the “absent” presence of a banal, inconsequential, narcissistic young man proclaim a lifelong refusal to contribute to the fallacies of myth making. Mourning their sacrifice, she declined to eulogize those killed in the First World War and to mould heroes out of the blown bits of men.The writer in Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel creates the character of an innocent, immature young man, Robbie Turner, who is assembled from a succession of drafts and carefully edited revisions. A soldier in the Second World War, the character is cast as a caring man, a compassionate and involuntary hero, only to be eventually reread as an instrument of the novelist’s effort at atonement. His valour is a literary construct, his fictional presence an absence.If the war as history seems beyond the control of the common writer and reader, the war as emotional experience is something that fiction can deal with. The dialogue here established between Woolf and McEwan exposes male, military, heroic myths as fatally anachronistic and explodes the narrative conventions that escort such fallacies while acknowledging their seemingly inescapable attraction. Lest we forget. |
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