Repressive Mythologies: Defensive Nostalgia in Ishiguro, McEwan and Ondaatje

This article argues that the three novels under discussion demonstrate a critique of British nostalgia for an idealist past that may not have been real. This nostalgia can be interpreted as a defense against social and ideological changes taking place, both when the novels are set (around WWII) and when they were written. Brexit can be seen as one more recent expression of this nostalgia. The article focuses on three aspects of defensive nostalgia: the fetish, the quality of masking reality and finally, the function of the mythical imagination in the writing process. The first is exemplified in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, the second in Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight and the third in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Freud and Marx, largely, underpin much of the argument, in which the characters are shown to be unable to extricate themselves from fetishizing their respective pasts, turning them into mythical tropes and using those tropes as masks to hide, even from themselves, the uncomfortable realities they don’t wish to face.