On Atonement

I love the quiet mornings. At present, at 6:15 am, all I can hear are the songbirds outside my window and the slight hum of cars on the road near my apartment. We rise early and except for an announcement of coffee preparation I try not to say very much until at least 8:00am. Right now to the east the sky shades from blue to gray. I cannot see towards the west. They say that there will be thunderstorms in the afternoon. I am not troubled because they are usually wrong and anyway, I don’t mind the seclusion or disruption the storm would cause.

Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement had led me to consider the concept of atonement. Once a year as a practicing Jew I have celebrated the Day of Atonement: Yom Kippur. I am sure that on that day Rabbis often spoke about the concept of atonement, but I don’t remember specifically any one particular sermon on the topic of atonement itself, not at the conclusion of the day do I feel I have achieved any sense of atonement. Perhaps then I did not consider what atonement meant. But McEwan has set me thinking. 

            The Oxford English Dictionary in a definition from the early to mid 1500s says that atonement refers to the “condition of being at one with others.” A state of being at-one. In McEwan’s novel Briony has told an egregious lie that caused irreparable harm to others and that has caused a permanent break with her family. The novel, Atonement, that we learn has been written by Briony, is to serve as her act of atonement. In that novel, Briony has made Robbie Turner, about whom the lie was told and whose life by it was wholly disrupted, even destroyed, demand that Briony “go to a solicitor, a commissioner for oaths and make a statement which will be signed and witnessed. In it you’ll say what you did wrong, and how you’re retracting your evidence . . . Then you’ll write to me in much greater detail . . . [and] put in absolutely everything you think is relevant. Everything that led up to you saying you saw me by the lake. And why, even though you were uncertain, you stuck to your story in the months leading up to my trial.” That letter that Robbie and Cecelia demand becomes the novel, Atonement, and it follows Robbie’s direction exactly. But, in fact, for Briony, the lie-teller and the novelist, her lying is not even at an end. In what could be only an afterword written almost 65 years after the events narrated in the novel, Briony acknowledges that the satisfactory reconciliation with her sister and Robbie that she has narrated did not in fact occur, that in the end Robbie and Cecelia having been separated by the criminally unjust imprisonment that Briony’s lie led to, and by their engagements at the onset of World War II, he in the infantry and she as a nurse, were not ever reunited. Both were killed in the war. Briony enjoyed no state of being at one with others. Save for her having written the novel, there was for her no atonement. Actions have consequences that cannot ever be erased. Results can sometimes be somewhat altered, but the act having been committed remains. Briony recognizes that her uniting of the lover’s at the end is only an act of kindness because in life this meeting could not occur. Briony admits, “But I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me.” For her there could be no atonement. 

            A second definition of atonement states that it is as an “act of being at one, or condition of being at one after strife or discord.” Again, though she writes in the novel of such a meeting, Briony never realizes atonement. She cannot: she is too cowardly, and unable to attend to and console Cecelia after Robbie’s death from septicemia on the beach at Dunkirk. There would be for Briony no atonement here.

            A third definition, also from the 1500s, says that atonement is a “reconciliation or restoration of friendly relations between God and sinners.” I am reminded of a story told of Henry David Thoreau, who when laying on his deathbed was asked if he had make peace with his God. He replied that he was not aware that they had quarreled. For him the act or state of atonement was needless. In Atonement, Briony asserts that novelists are God, creating and manipulating, organizing events and lives, and that therefore for her as novelist (hence, as God) there was no higher authority to which she could turn to be reconciled or could grant her forgiveness. There could be no atonement for novelists or for God.  And I consider now that if I am the novelist of my life, then there is no possibility of atonement for me.

            But I wonder what would it mean for my life to recognize that atonement is impossible? That because of my actions, most of which I cannot wholly explain, there is no chance for a return to others? Neither would there be a return to a state of being at one after strife or discord. Nor can I effect a reconciliation between a higher authority and a sinner. I think what must result would be a state of alienation, of precarious and lonely existence. I know something of alienation. I think of the monster being pursued by his creator, Dr. Frankenstein for whom neither will atonement be available. I think of Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, who is aware that he and Brett couldn’t have had such a damned good life together. I am thinking of lines in Gretchen Peters’ song, “Our Lady of Guadaloupe”: “I am the least of all your pilgrims here/But I am most in need of hope.” She yearns for atonement, but she has her doubts.

I believe that without atonement we are drawn not out but in to ourselves and to the recognition of the consequences of our actions. And though these effects must be accepted, finally there can be no relief from them. Atonement is unavailable. I think of Briony Tallis who admits that in her novel “I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me.” She is not reconciled. She wishes for the power to conjure them alive again to celebrate her 77^th birthday . . . she claims that such conjure is not impossible, but acknowledges, “But now I must sleep.”