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- W2005441010 abstract "Practices of Satisfaction and Piers Plowman’s Dynamic Middle Ryan McDermott Ian mcewan’s novel Atonement seems to end with the scene of its invention, the moment its fictional author, Briony Tallis, begins to write the book we have just read. She writes in order to exonerate her sister’s lover, the man she has fatefully and wrongly accused of rape, before his conviction in the court of law can irreversibly ruin his life: “She knew what was required of her. Not simply a letter, but a new draft, an atonement, and she was ready to begin.”1 It turns out that the story we have read was meant to set the legal record straight and restore justice. However, the book does not end there. It begins again on a new leaf, where Briony confesses, now in the first person, that the people she injured had died long before they could enjoy the relatively happy reunion narrated in the previous thirty pages. Briony has been revising her story, her confession, for fifty-nine years, always too late. Her decision to write a happy ending came late in life and seemed to her the only way to satisfy the “love of order” that inspired her to write as a girl and that “shaped the principles of justice.”2 “As long as there is a single copy,” Briony writes near the real end of the book, “a solitary transcript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love.”3 Briony has to settle for giving literary immortality to those she has wronged because literature by her definition cannot atone. “There is no one, no entity or higher form that [the novelist] can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her.”4 Atonement’s ending registers Briony’s grief not only for unreconciled [End Page 169] sin, but also for the loss of a cosmos in which a sinner can make satisfaction even if the injured party cannot forgive. Even as Briony recognizes the medieval distinction between satisfaction directed to God and legal satisfaction, or restitution, directed to an offended party, her quandary is particularly modern. She stands near the extreme end of a history of satisfaction: after Gratian and Peter Lombard had formalized it as one of the three parts of penance;5 after Thomas Cranmer’s prayer book had obviated human practices of penance on account of Christ’s “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifyce, oblacion, and satysfaccyon;”6 after the Roman Catholic Church introduced the confessional box, signaling “the decay of the idea that sin was a social matter;”7 after both sacred and secular “institutionalizations of charity” evacuated of their efficacy the practices and languages of satisfaction;8 and after the modern subject tamed truth so that it could no longer transfigure the self or give subjectivity.9 If Martin Luther disrupted medieval complacency about the sufficiency of sacramental satisfaction, Briony Tallis is desperately certain that nothing can ever satisfy. It is tempting to read Briony as a figure for modern failures of acknowledgment, recognition, and communal reconciliation, alienated by at least one epoch from the medieval school of forgiveness, the penitential [End Page 170] system in which the living and the dead practiced the social grammar of reconciliation.10 Briony rightly grieves. Too late, Briony! Too late for a tribunal, too late for a confessional, too late for God. “Is’t not too late?,” asked a sixteenth-century Lutheran doctor, hoping it might not be. “Too late,” said the Evil Angel. “Never too late,” said the Good Angel, “if Faustus will repent.”11 Briony might not have a good angel to turn to, but Marlowe’s post-penitential drama reveals how her despair presumes a certain periodization of history and structure of time. “Behold, now is the acceptable time,” Paul wrote, “now is the day of salvation,” but Briony’s window of opportunity for effective satisfaction has passed, and she lives and writes after the “now,” after religion.12 Briony subscribes, then, to a subtraction story of secularization, according to which modernity is what remains after religion has dwindled away.13 To be modern means to come after..." @default.
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- W2005441010 date "2014-01-01" @default.
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- W2005441010 title "Practices of Satisfaction and Piers Plowman’s Dynamic Middle" @default.
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- W2005441010 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2014.0034" @default.
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