"I love you" and the c-word

I am through the first part of Atonement, which details the events of one day in 1935 (I’m pretty sure it’s 1935). Part two picks up again in the thick of the second world war. On the day in question, the younger daughter of a wealthy family intercepts and reads over a note written to the older daughter that contains a particularly nasty word.

The word – which the younger daughter, Briony, will not say and will only spell backwards when she explains it to her slightly older cousin – is the c-word, which I will not say either. The effect that the letter has on Briony is complicated – “the very complexity of her feelings confirmed [her] in her view that she was entering an arena of adult emotion and dissembling from which her writing was bound to benefit” (McEwan, 106) – but it is remarkable the degree to which that word affects her as a word, prior to anything else. Since Briony is a writerly – which is to say, a hyperliterary – character, she is of particular interest to us as readers. More so than many other characters – Leon, for example, or Emily – Briony has a particularly sensitive relationship to words, and since she lives in a novel that makes her a character particularly open to us. McEwan’s description of the c-word’s effect on her is a virtuoso performance, and it is representative of Briony’s writerly nature.

At first, the representations of the word are totally divorced from any but the most oblique insinuations: she thinks of words that rhyme with the c-word, but won’t even say those rhymes (“the smallest pig in the letter” rather than “runt”). The word, “a typographical demon” (McEwan, 107; all the rest of the quotes are actually from the same paragraph, so I’ll stop attributing) has a specially typographical life for Briony because she has “never heard the word spoken, or seen it in print, or come across it in asterisks”. But she knows to what it must refer – apart from context,

“the word was at once one with its meaning, and almost onomatopoetic. The smooth-hollowed, partly enclosed forms of its first three letters were as clear as a set of anatomical drawings. Three figures huddled at the foot of the cross.”

That, I think, is virtuosic; and, beyond its pure entertainment value (and its sophomoric charm – this is, after all, a little girl outraged by a dirty word), its negative presentation of a word is a forceful depiction of the power of words. Later in this chapter, Briony’s cousin Lola calls Robbie, the letter’s author, a maniac, and that word similarly becomes more and more resonant until Briony’s conception of Robbie as a maniac overcomes her. This passage enacts such an engulfment in miniature, culminating in the strange and wonderful description of what is probably the dirtiest word in English as “three figures huddled at the foot of the cross”. This reimagining of the word as a form of feminine humility before religion, I haven’t quite figured out yet. But this is a frenzied castle that Briony has built out of words, and triggered by one word. That triggering, I think, is what enchants me the most about the passage. It seems as if reading, as an activity, is daunting going outwards – the number of things that have been written is staggering, a point that has been beaten pretty much to death by anyone who’s ever written about the interwebs. But Briony’s, or McEwan’s, reading of a single word in Robbie’s letters reminds us that there is an equally daunting depth to books – even the dirtiest word can (as a piece of “demon typography”, no less) be transfigured into one of the most sacred scenes in human history – that is more inviting than anything else. It is a supreme act of readerly creation, and has an echo in Briony’s horrible crime (which crime becomes hers and horrible by an imposed misreading of a different, already nasty crime scene). Briony’s reading of the letter may not be a particularly palatable reading – and it may forebode the terrible act that gives the shape to the book – but it serves as a testament nevertheless to the raw power of reading.

A partially integrated footnote: I imagine that this determination to avoid the word – it has not, in its proper form or even in asterisks, cropped up since Robbie’s original letter – might clue us into another echo, when the text is far more elliptical than we’d expect when, in their appropriately bibliotechnic lovemaking, Robbie tells Cecelia that he loves her.

“Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can ever quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as if she had been the first to say them” (McEwan, 129).

Again, the words themselves don’t show up near this passage. This obfuscation is what puts me in mind of Briony’s reaction to the letter, and I think this counts as a vote for the power of words to do good: it is not just Robbie’s love for Cecelia, or hers for him, that has been able to survive centuries of abuse uncheapened; it is the words themselves. Later, Robbie will have his personalized mantra: “Come back. I’ll wait for you.” But the talismanic property of unassociated words – words qua words – is on display here as steadfastly as the demon that typographically infects fervent Briony.

Your thoughts on words, talismanic, dirty, or otherwise, are appreciated. More on non-Atonement stuff in the coming week.