Marina Warner at the opening of the Metamorphing exhibition which she has curated at the Science Museum, London In the wake of the September 11 attack, I had an email from Eileen Wanquet, a teacher of English literature on the island of La Reunion, which is in the Indian Ocean but is still a department of France. In it she wrote, ‘I’ve been worrying about why people don’t seem to learn from what happens. And in spite of all the literature which is almost prophetic…I’ve been thinking about how literature works, and how it is not politics.’
What Eileen wrote struck me with peculiar force because I was thinking about the increasing role of apology, especially public apology as it is embodied in writings of different kinds – in order to throw light, if possible, on what it means for the many distempered areas of the past and the present where human rights are violated.
As we go, if you come with me, we shall meet beckoning figures, as if travelling on some allegorical map of a pilgrim’s progress. Of course, there are well-known companions of any such road: Hypocrisy, Evasion, Excuses and Lies. But starting with Confession we shall meet less familiar figures: Regret, Remorse, Recognition, Retraction, Responsibility, Repentance, and then, towards the end of the journey, perhaps, Vindication, Expiation/Atonement, Placation, Reconciliation – flanked by two pairs of twins, Reform and Redress and Reparation and Restitution, with the angel of Redemption hovering above.
I am going to look at four scenes in literature which illuminate states that seem to me to follow upon one another in the act of apology as a relationship.
First, the existence of an injustice, testified by the sufferer. For this, I am going to take the figure of Io from Aeschylus’s magnificent study in suffering, Prometheus Bound.
Secondly, the apologist, the one who accepts responsibility – or takes the blame – and speaks of regret and – it is implied – pledges reform and redress. Here my principal subject will be St Augustine who speaks through his Confessions.
Thirdly, the response of the apologee – the person to whom the avowal of guilt is made. Here I’ll look at The Marriage of Figaro, and play the exquisite music of forgiveness and reconciliation in the last act.
“He walks on, turns back, passes Captain Dorego’s a second time. The three are seated at a table in the window. For an instant, through the glass, Soraya’s eyes meet his. He has always been a man of the city, at home amid the flux of bodies where eros stalks and glances flash like arrows. But this glance between himself and Soraya he regrets at once. (p.6) Isaacs accepts Lurie's apology but states,' We are all sorry when we are found out. The question is what lesson have we learned? The question is, what are we going to do now that we are sorry?'
The Commission asked people to tell their stories. It proposed – and seemed to reach – a revolutionary form of trying to achieve some kind of peace and settlement in a country that had been torn by internal strife. It offered amnesty to all crimes committed in pursuit of political ends, with the significant exception of rape, as we shall see, provided these were admitted. Slovo’s book also constitutes a challenge to J.M. Coetzee’s bitter pessimism, in his allegory of post-apartheid retributive and redistributive justice, the Booker prize winning, controversial novel Disgrace.
Bill
Clinton apologised to many groups, including ex-prisoners who were used in human experiments over
syphilis; he apologised to the victims of the civil conflict in Rwanda, many of
whom he might have saved; and he apologised to El
Salvador for American policies that were not his responsibility.
The
Queen of the United Kingdom formally apologised to the Maoris in New Zealand for the acts of Crown authorities in violating the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi by engaging in subsequent acts of dispossession of their lands in New Zealand; and she apologised in
India for the massacre
of Amritsar in 1919. Tony Blair has followed suit, and apologised for the Irish famine.
He
did not mention the complicity of the Vatican with Fascism, in Italy and in
Germany, and he left out any plea for the treatment meted out to homosexuals.
So while his acknowledgement of the Church’s guilt and his repentance were
convincing to some and warmly welcomed, they did not go far enough for others.
Among
the many bitter issues, past and present, in which victims, survivors or their
descendants are demanding apology, are some very serious, large questions of the
historical past. In Australia, the government has refused to apologise to the
Aborigines for their oppression during the colonial era, though it has done so
to those called ‘the stolen generation’, who were forcibly separated in infancy
from their parents to be brought up in white homes. In Japan, the ‘comfort
women’ conscripted during the Second World War, have not accepted the
conditional apology, which is all they have so far been offered. In America, a
campaign is growing for an apology for slavery.
This
last almost destroyed the United Nations (UN) conference
in Durban last year, when Britain, alone among EU countries, refused to agree
to apologise, and argued for – and eventually negotiated – a strong statement
of regret and repudiation instead.
I’m
very uneasy about the currents that carry this spate of apology forward. To be
anecdotal, the word ‘Sorry’ is almost my way of saying, ‘Hello’. It’s probably
the word I habitually use most often – sometimes as a way of hailing a waiter,
or, even, I’m not beyond saying it when someone treads on my foot. There
may be a class aspect to this, of a certain upbringing and a liberal
conscience. (Saying sorry can be a way of life.) More seriously, I want to give
my support to acts – verbal utterances – which represent revulsion against
wrongdoing, to accept that to forgive and forget is the better part, and to
acknowledge the enchanting power of language to bring about changes in the air
– aery nothings, however insubstantial, are aery somethings too. As Hippolita
says in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a story made up of immaterial words
can make a permanent impression, can ‘grow to
something of great constancy.’
It
is easy enough for them to find the opportunity. As Meursault comments wryly to
himself in The Outsider by Albert Camus, ‘In any case, you’re always
partly to blame.’ But what are we to make of self-inculpation for events in the
past? Should an existential model of subjectivity encompass the structure of
human rights? Should politics be personalised to this extent?
I
feel I’m getting in very deep here, but I want to find out why I laughed a
hollow laugh when I arrived in San Francisco the day that the Archbishop of
California was apologising to all those who had been abused as children by nuns
and priests. The thought of Blair shucking off the inconvenient complications
of Britain’s role in Ireland by saying he was sorry also made me snort; and I
want to shake the Pope, frail as he is, when he says he forgives and asks for
forgiveness – from God – for 2000 years of sins of the Church against women.
Yes, well, what you are you doing about us now?
When
it concerns the sins of the past, official apology unites two different forms
of speech, both of them deeply intertwined with ideas about self-examination,
and self-disclosure – with, in short, ways of remembering oneself. The first is
theological and sacramental, the language of repentance and atonement. The
second is psychoanalytic: the practice of the ‘talking cure’ and the
psychotherapy group meeting to help relieve bereavement, mental distress, and
the victims of abuse.
Such
apologies differ from public statements of responsibility and regret made by
those involved directly to those injured. Neither the priestly discourses nor
the curing is juridical or political in the traditional sense. But as politics
becomes increasingly presidential, and as presidential politics becomes
increasingly priestly, it is important to evaluate the change not just dismiss
it, for all its cynicism. As Roy L. Brooks writes in his book of essays, When
Sorry Isn’t Enough, ‘what is happening (in the age of apology) is more
complex than “contrition chic” or the “canonization of sentimentality”.’
In
the wake of the Second World War, the possibility of healing grief and easing
social conflicts through speech acts, through rites of mourning and expiation,
through an evolved, secular verbal magic, has passed into the public arena all
over the world.
Many
tributaries, very tricky to navigate, flow from this main current of public
avowals and disavowals; not least, must an apology lead to reparation, if it is
to be to be at all meaningful? That is, without a subsequent act of reparation
or restitution, can it be fully constituted as an apology? Or is the
performance of a speech act something that itself makes change? Is it the soft
answer that turneth away wrath? Is the recognition of wrongdoing sufficient? As
Wole
Soyinka asked, ‘Is knowledge on its own of lasting effect?’
Or is an apology
necessarily in and of itself a plea for forgiveness, which reaches completion
only if and when that pardon is granted?
Already we are starting
to see that the framework of public apology is intricate, combining issues of
language, religion and gender. In several languages, the word apology does not
exist independently of the word for forgiveness. In Ibo, as spoken in Nigeria,
to apologise is to ask for a pardon: biko gbaghala mm means please
forgive me. In French, je vous demande pardon, and likewise the Italian,
mi scusi, differ from the English ‘I’m sorry’. French has je suis
désolée. But it lacks the formality of what is a normal phrase in English
conversation, ‘I apologise’. The distinction between this and the personal
‘forgive me’ is not available. (However, French does have pardon, which
contains the admission of fault, while the weaker phrase for regret, je m’excuse,
includes a hint of a reason for the act – an excuse. As the French also say, Qui
s’accuse s’excuse – to accuse oneself is to excuse oneself.)
The
religious background is also very influential of people’s attitudes and
expectations. It is significant that the Catholic sacrament, if all the
conditions are met, shrives the penitent of the sins that have been confessed
and lifts guilt from the wrongdoer. Puritan or Protestant guilt, by contrast,
cannot be shed by mere contrition or even subsequent acts of penance. This may
underpin the difference between papal acts of apology, and the consequences of
apologies in the USA and in Anglican England. Perhaps along with the fact that
in the birthplace of making gains through the insurance market there is a fear
of the consequences that could follow public apology – demands for reparation
and monetary damages along the model of an insurance claim. But there are other
reasons too.
South African Catholic pamphlet 
Kim Hak Sun: the first Korean woman to give public testimony in 1991 to her life as a comfort woman for the Japanese Imperial Army 
The Penitent Magdalen by Titian:
Penance suits women
