Revista de Investigaciones Universidad del Quindío,
34(S2), 436-442; 2022.
ISSN: 1794-631X e-ISSN: 2500-5782
Esta obra está bajo una licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0 Internacional.
CULTURAL MEMORY AND NEURO-CRITICAL READING OF IAN MCEWAN'S ATONEMENT
MEMORIA CULTURAL Y LECTURA NEUROCRÍTICA DE LA EXPIACIÓN DE IAN MCEWAN
Hamed Jamalpour1; Javad Yaghoobi-Derabi2*
1. Department of Literature and Foreign Languages, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran. jamalpour@gmail.com
2. Department of English Language and Literature, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran. jyderabi@kiau.ac.ir
* Corresponding author: Javad Yaghoobi Derabi, e-mail: jyderabi@kiau.ac.ir
ABSTRACT
The structural and value developments resulting from the cultural revolution in contemporary societies, parallel to the growth, have sought attention to the category of memory. Cultural memory has become an important tool in producing discourses and representations, as well as forming the cultural identity of social groups and communication with many institutions and social structures. The present article seeks to describe the contexts, functions, and effects of memory studies as an interdisciplinary academic tradition and introduce its main approaches and methods, especially in the tradition of cultural studies. For this purpose, the approach of neuro-aesthetics was utilized, and the Atonement Novel was reviewed, which in addition to adding important agendas in the study of everyday life and popular culture, also has a great contribution to the connection of humanities and social sciences and a better understanding of cultural and social complexities. Given the results, the major probable addition for the humanities from discussions with neuroscience is a pulling together of consideration on a few center inquiries of normal interest.
Keywords: Cultural memory; neuroscience; neuro-aesthetic; atonement novel.
RESUMEN
Los desarrollos estructurales y de valores resultantes de la revolución cultural en las sociedades contemporáneas, paralelos al crecimiento, han llamado la atención sobre la categoría de memoria. La memoria cultural se ha convertido en una herramienta influyente en la producción de discursos y representaciones, así como en la formación de la identidad cultural de los grupos sociales y la comunicación con muchas instituciones y estructuras sociales. El presente artículo busca describir los contextos, funciones y efectos de los estudios de la memoria como tradición académica interdisciplinaria e introducir sus principales enfoques y métodos, especialmente en la tradición de los estudios culturales. Para ello se utilizó el enfoque de la neuroestética y se revisó la Novela de la Expiación, que además de sumar importantes agendas en el estudio de la vida cotidiana y la cultura popular, también tiene un gran aporte para la conexión de las humanidades y las ciencias sociales. y una mejor comprensión de las complejidades culturales y sociales. Teniendo en cuenta los resultados, la principal adición probable para las humanidades a partir de las discusiones con la neurociencia es un análisis conjunto de algunas investigaciones centrales de interés normal.
Palabras clave: Memoria cultural; neurociencia; neuroestética; novela de expiación.
INTRODUCTION
In the last two decades, the study of the relationship between culture and memory as an important and rapidly growing field has gained a special status in a range of fields such as history, sociology, art, literature, media studies, cultural studies, psychology, and neuroscience. Memory studies fueled interdisciplinary research in humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, led to greater convergence of these fields, and stimulated new fields for study and research (Krishna et al., 2016; Sutiono, 2021).
The purposes behind these advancements are confounded and have, maybe, as much to do with a misjudgment in the sociologies of the value of quantitative strategies likewise with the humanities’ relinquishment of artistic and, featureful inquiries. Changes have started to happen in the humanities and there is proof on many fronts of the arrival of interest in reading, style, and, form (Ioakimidis & Trimikliniotis, 2020). Taking up discussions with the neuroscientific local area about matters of common interest might assist the humanities with rediscovering the center disciplinary concerns with reading, understanding, and feeling, about which we can talk with power. What the humanities have the most to acquire from this interdisciplinary work, then, is a recuperation of our disciplinary character. Neuroaesthetic order as a significant concept can be traced throughout the whole characters in society. Therefore, all the main characters possess art which signifies the richness of their work and art. Briony, as the younger daughter of the Tallises, is skillful in the field of creative writing. The account of her aesthetics is shown from the beginning of the novel to the end (Finney, 2004; Serpa & Ferreira, 2019). Briony’s brother, Leon, is supposed to come back home with a friend so Briony has written a play to perform in the honor of her brother’s arrival. Consequently, what she does during those days is work on her play. Her story fluctuates and depicts different feelings which are sometimes contradictory; in fact, the tone of the play is “at some moments chilling, at others desperately sad”(Atonement 1) which reflects the state of Briony’s psychology. However, it is worth mentioning that Briony is not mentally problematic; rather, she is just a kid who enjoys her imagination to make stories that are admired by others.
Accordingly, aesthetics is influenced by the social status of a subject in society. What McEwan presents at the beginning of the novel is a mixture of her cultural, and social background, and also her personality. Regarding Briony’s description of her play, Brian Finney addresses that “we meet an instance of Briony’s literary imagination as a personality” (Di Nuovo, 2020). What Finney intends to address could be interpreted as the effect of imagination on personality. Literary imagination is Briony’s mental picture is shaped by her social context. What Briony produces as an objectified form of cultural status is the harbinger of her mentality which brings about tragic consequences. In other words, “Briony’s overactive imagination ruins lives and relationships in Atonement” (Naughton, 2022). Consequently, Brioney’s aesthetics is destructive rather than constructive which signifies what she writes based on her imagination is rooted in the way she has been brought up as an aristocratic girl.
METHODS
How we remember past events has a deep impact on what we do and how we live. It seems impossible to understand memory without considering the influence of social forces such as religion, class, family affiliation, political conditions, and similar cases. Social contexts and structures are carriers of memory. People are carriers of memory, and memory itself is the carrier of past generations’ experiences (Minshall et al., 2013). Our current lives, both as independent individuals and as members of different groups, are strongly shaped by memories of the past and expectations from the future, and it is through a narrative that a culture organizes and gives coherence to its understanding of reality. Memories give meaning, direction, and form to our moral choices and without memory, living in the world lacks any order and coherence. A group’s narrative and memory acquaint us with its destiny and history, makes actions and aspirations appear legitimate, and leave important indicators and demarcations for non-members to help identify a group’s identity. Thus, cultural memory should be considered an important aspect of the tradition of every society. A tradition that should never be fought against. This tradition, even if it is painful, adds to the richness of society. Culture without memory and philosophy without memory has no meaning. It is impossible to live without experience.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Various works can be described by the specific sorts of spaces and indeterminacies they deal with the reader, even as one’s feeling of what these are will change over history as new interpretive practices outfit readers with novel assumptions regarding the examples they will track down in texts. Various readers will fill holes and make joins across a text’s clear spaces in various ways, and, the indeterminacies that are “there” for certain readers may not exist for others. For instance, whether a person has oblivious sexual cravings, a matter of some desperation for a psychoanalytic pundit isn’t a hole that other readers might see except if it is unequivocally performed. The role of Harmony can be found within the whole novel in images that the characters depict about themselves. In this research paper, the novel of “Atonement” has been considered as the case study.
1. Atonement novel review
The novel Atonement was written by Ian McEwan in 2001, about Briony Tallis, a 13-year-old English girl with a talent for writing, who lives on her family’s country estate with her parents Jack and Emily Tallis, both members of the landed gentry. As a result of Jack’s generosity, Cecilia’s older sister just graduated from the University of Cambridge with Robbie Turner, her childhood friend, and the housekeeper’s son, whose university education had been funded by Jack (Dengler et al., 2017; Reckwitz, 2021).
Neuro-aesthetic order as a significant concept can be traced throughout the whole characters in society. Therefore, all the main characters possess art which signifies the richness of their work and art. Briony, as the younger daughter of the Tallises, is skillful in the field of creative writing. The account of her aesthetics is shown from the beginning of the novel to the end. Briony’s brother, Leon, is supposed to come back home with a friend so Briony has written a play to perform in the honor of her brother’s arrival. Consequently, what she does during those days is work on her play. Her story fluctuates and depicts different feelings which are sometimes contradictory; in fact, the tone of the play is “at some moments chilling, at others desperately sad”(Atonement 1) which reflects the state of Briony’s psychology. However, it is worth mentioning that Briony is not mentally problematic; rather, she is just a kid who enjoys her imagination to make stories that are admired by others. Briony’s aesthetic is “conveyed in a rhyming prologue”(Atonement 1) which enriches her mental image. Moreover, to show how Briony’s powerful imagination functions, McEwan gives a short background of her character’s cultural status: The first story she wrote at the age of eleven was a foolish imitation of half a dozen folktales, lacking, as she later realized, that vital knowledge of the world that compels respect from readers. Nevertheless, this first clumsy attempt revealed that the image was the source of the story: once she had begun, everyone would know what had happened. Trying to pretend in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, and too embarrassing to reveal (Costa, 2021; Zhang et al., 2020).
Briony started writing when she was a little kid, and she could write her first short story at the age of eleven. Although her short story had some drawbacks, her aesthetic in the form of text is not inevitable. It was during writing her first short story that she realizes that there is a deep the bond between the power of imagination and the writing of secrets that must keep hidden from others. Armstrong in How Literature Plays notes:
The findings summarized here are the result of extremely indirect laboratory procedures that demonstrate the imagination and ingenuity of the scientists not only in developing their measuring equipment but also in designing their experiments. Studying neurobiology leads to an appreciation of science as a creative endeavor. A community of investigators is not merely producing historical fabrications and validating them, as some crude versions of social constructionism claim, as some crude versions of social constructivism claim [8].
Inside the underlying meanings of metahistorical components, it has been expressed that the decision of a specific method of tragedy and contention relies on a particular philosophy. Eventually, the inclination of one method of contention over different does not happen haphazardly and there is a sort of philosophy behind picking one over the other. Toward the end of the novel, Briony concedes that she has controlled the reality of the story for the reader thus the force of the author is accentuated: “how might a writer accomplish compensation when, with her outright force of determining results, she likewise God?”In her creative brain, she has drawn the lines and the terms. No expiation for God, or authors. Considering White’s clarification on Irony, it could be explained why Briony is amusing here: “the point of the Ironic assertion is to confirm implicitly the negative of what is on the exacting level certified emphatically, or the opposite”[7].
This is the pinnacle of Irony in the novel since Briony has composed the entire thing as compensation. She never found the opportunity to make an expression of remorse to Cecilia or Robbie, so she composed the novel to join them in fiction. A few lines later she says: “I like to feel that it is not shortcoming or avoidance, yet a last venture of graciousness. To allow my darlings to live and join them in fiction”. She denied them genuine joy, so her shortcoming over recovering them to life pulls her to compose fiction her whole life. It makes sense why incongruity is “logical” since it presents something and implicitly implies something different. It likewise explains why incongruity is “trans-ideological” since it might appear to be a disciple of the side to which it is, intentionally and implicitly, adversative. In this way, the philosophical ramifications and tropological direction of the novel join because of the presence of incongruity, which turns into the actual pith of Atonement: an opposite portrayal of a piece of history, for example, The Second Great War. The inversion doesn’t escalate the difficulties that existed during the conflict, rather, concentrates them inside: it looks for the underlying foundations of battle inside Britain, instead of outside, and with a few inferred suggestions concedes and certifies the reality, for which it sets things right.
2. Psychology of Memory Studies
The psychology of memory studies, like the subject area and its conceptual frameworks, is diverse and influenced by the traditions of different disciplines. Among the common methods of the tradition of social sciences, accurate evaluation of historical sources and archival studies, case studies, interviews, surveys and eyewitness reports can be mentioned. “In psychology and neuroscience, real experimental interventions are sometimes used. However, currently, most of the researches on memory studies include scattered studies of memory-related issues in the most parts of the world, which are done using the available evidence and without connecting different data with each other. Although precise quantitative and qualitative approaches that are used in social and human sciences can be used in memory studies, there has not been a clear definition and verification for the use of these methods in the field of memory studies.
In the realm of cultural studies and research on memory as a cultural form, two main aspects should be distinguished from each other. The first way is to pay attention to memory as a research method, which requires collecting information verbally or in writing about the subject of the researcher’s interest [for example, collecting information about a special event or a special period of time, or studying political, cultural celebrities, and similar cases.] Second, the study of memory as a method is the study of memory as a subject for research. In this view, the category of memory is considered as a subject for generating experimental information and analyzing it. In this view, the focus of attention is the utilization, and activation of memory and its functioning mechanism and process in everyday life. Historical documents - autobiographies (whether taken from narrative interviews or relying on written autobiographies) are traditionally used in the study of memory as a subject for research.
Cultural studies, due to reluctance to pay serious attention to methodological issues or great flexibility in the application and verification of these issues, rather than placing memory as a research method in the study and research agenda, memory has been seen as a subject for research. Among the media and tools that have been attractive for the study of memory as a research topic for researchers of this tradition, popular music and photography have been technologies for producing memory. These two cultural technologies are considered as carriers and mediators of personal and social memories. Photo, picture and music influence the production of historical meanings and include and reflect the processes of remembering. “As a form of historical representation, music and photography have a great influence, they play a role beyond the facilitating factor in the reproduction of memory, and at the same time they constitute what is historically represented and what is historically experienced. Sound and image are the main raw materials through which memory and identity, experience and time are realized and provide a method for thinking in the present time compared to the past.
Memory as a research method requires the use of recall to generate data that can be evaluated through different methods of analysis. Traditionally, psychoanalysis has relied the most on memory as a therapeutic method. Memory narratives provide a rich source of information and are widely used in the form of narrative interviews, life stories, unstructured qualitative interviews, and oral history interviews. Although the validity of these methods and the narrator’s description of reality and reality or its fabrication have been the source of serious disputes and debates. The recommendations are to use a combination of methods to improve the quality of information. It seems that what differentiates the use of memory as a method in cultural studies is more related to the choice of memories to be studied, the way memories are formatted, and the type of payment they are made of than related to the technique and methodological considerations. Cultural uses of memory as ways to generate data are related to the form and the apparent content of memory.
And finally, memory can be used as an empirical approach that emphasizes the lived experience of memory as a form of temporal awareness and action rather than paying attention to the textual forms that memory takes. In this case, memory is used as a method to produce memory narratives, which can later be studied to investigate the role of memory in people’s daily lives. In this application, the memory places and texts are examined more than in terms of their textual and inherent historical abilities, but they are examined according to the implementation and application of these abilities in the daily face of a person with them.
CONCLUSION
The tradition of memory studies as an interdisciplinary field of study that has seen significant growth in the production of theoretical and experimental literature in recent years has given a new agenda to the cultural sciences and has helped the development and prosperity of interdisciplinary studies. Group memory acquaints us with our destiny and history, legitimizes our actions and aspirations, and provides social groups with an important tool for cultural identification. Institutions and places of cultural preservation transmit experiences that have historical roots and, due to their special cultural situation, they have the ability to create change and transformation in the society.
The main likely addition for the humanities from discussions with neuroscience is a pulling together of consideration on a few center inquiries of normal interest. Unfortunately, the sidelining of these fundamental inquiries has remained inseparable with an underestimation of the lettered humanities in the foundation, as professionals from other disciplines have seen as less and less of interest in the thing we are doing even as, incidentally, scholarly pundits have felt themselves to enlarge their degree of order.
In this paper, with a review of the Atonement novel and the approach of neuro-aesthetics, it was evaluated with an emphasis on the social framing of the collective memory and the unique identity of the groups. A compromise was the sharing element of Tragedy and Comedy; notwithstanding, the effect of every mode was unique, that of distress for Tragedy and joy for Comedy. Albeit Romance, alluded to as a show of reclamation, and Satire, alluded to as dramatization of separation, move every which way, this very contrast places them in a similar class. It’s likewise been referenced that the mode in which standard portrayal of World War II has occurred, has been Romantic Tragedy; notwithstanding, Atonement introducing sad elements of battle in addition to having unexpected perspective on those highlights is a Satirical Tragedy. In the tradition of psychological and human sciences, despite the diverse and often virgin fields of study, memory studies have not been very prosperous. The references, notes and scattered articles available are generally related to classical anthropology and to some extent literary and artistic traditions and reflections, which can be seen along the traditional view of memory and essentialist thinking and to some extent worried about the past.
Acknowledgments: Not applied.
Funding statement: The authors did not receive any funding.
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