The theme of ‘apology’ is in the air: governments are saying it to former colonial subjects, or to political prisoners in post-dictatorships; former terrorists to their targets; banks and businesses to looted or polluted clients; churches and cults to victims of abuse. Why are they doing it? In her approach to today’s latest ‘political enthusiasm’, we accompany Marina Warner – novelist, critic, and subversive anatomist of myth and the collective subconscious – on a sparkling tour of the literature of apology over twenty-five centuries. This article is the first in a series of six published on openDemocracy.
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.
South African Catholic pamphlet 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.’
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 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 Penitent Magdalen by Titian:Penance suits women
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.
