Yes, Marv has returned to discuss Dante’s work again. Yes, I do have an obsession. Yes, this will be a Briony Tallis blog with some light slander.
Briony Tallis interests me because of the mind-bending ethical philosophy arguments and questions she brings about. I navigate the world through a lens of strict ethical and moral codes, therefore making the philosophical conflict in this text all-consuming for me.
Can we truly atone in the same lifetime that we committed countless sins? Or is the only place for humans to truly face accountability a place that only exists beyond the veil of death? What sins do we pay eternity for, and what sins are paid with a brief time in brimstone?
I find myself confounded by the question of not only whether or not Briony Tallis was able to atone during her lifetime, but if she would ever be able to after death. Would Briony go to Inferno, where the 9 circles of hell torment your soul mercilessly for all of time? Or Purgatorio, where she suffers until the suffering she caused tipped the scale of sins to equivalence? Or did she fully atone during her life by working in the war and then fully publicizing all of her evils, no forgiveness asked, and rise to the peace of Paradiso?
I truly wish I could answer this question, especially because I dislike Briony so much. However, I know it would not be genuine if I said the solution was easy and bid her goodbye into Satan’s torturous realm. On one hand, Briony was indirectly (or, arguably, directly) responsible for the deaths of Cecilia and Robbie, directly responsible for their years of anguish, and opened the door of opportunity for Marshall to marry Lola Quincey. The youngest Tallis sister tore lives apart with her desire to exist as the valiant savior, the martyred daughter, the overlooked sister.
However, Briony became fully aware of all she did and then threw away her place at Girton in leu of working in the war and then writing, in full, the sins she committed in her self-serving nature. Her novel not only gave away her atrocities but carried the honor of those she brought harm to: Robbie and Cecilia.
I am not, in any way, commending Briony for these actions in an attempt at atonement. Her lifelong suffering, from my perspective, was the minimum punishment that she deserved in life. And while I am not confident in the question of where she would fall in the afterlife following her attempts at atoning, I am fully sure that she would deserve the worst of Inferno had she not chosen to give up her alternate, ‘normal’ life as a scholar after taking that very choice away from Robbie.
I am a major Briony hater, to be clear. I do not believe that her lifetime of suffering because of her grave actions earned her any forgiveness from anyone – Robbie, Cecilia, the reader. But Briony also never asked nor expected anyone’s forgiveness, and for that, I find that there would be mercy for her somewhere.
Writing this blog post has been quite therapeutic for me, as I feel as though I have been able to objectively (as possible) gather my final thoughts on Briony. Surprisingly, and slightly frustratingly, my evaluation of her is not so harsh as I once believed.
So I am not sure that our desire for Briony to burn should distract us from the larger issue of the novel, that being the place of fiction as an interpreter of truth. Atonement in this life is not really possible, and Briony knows it…(“the attempt was all”). But I do think that the novel itself is a kind of purgatory, an effort to show how we often try to make up for our mistakes, which can lead to some fairly impressive accomplishments that otherwise might not happen. And of course, Briony is a child when she commits her crime, but consequences often dictate the severity of punishment (consider the local boy who was just tried as an adult and sentenced for killing his mother at age 14). Still, it is a noble subject for a novel, this idea of people trying to recapture something lost (Gatsby, etc.). In Atonement, justice has not been served, but when her novel comes out we at least have the truth, though even that is subject to the myriad deceptions of one person’s memory. So, maybe we don’t have that, either.
You enjoy philosophy, so think on this: isn’t it “true” that all people and events, once they pass from present to past, also pass from the realm of fact into that of fiction? As Briony, says, once all the principal characters are dead, only their shadows remain–characters in a story, as it were. Like Cecelia’s footprints around the fountain, everything and everyone eventually fades into myth.
As for Dante, he could not imagine a world in which people get away with crimes such as these. Perhaps the guilt is Briony’s private purgatory? It would not have been enough for Dante, and it isn’t enough for many today. The idea of the Christian gospel, which piles all of the guilt on God himself, is so revolutionary and counter-intuitive that it took 1500 years to sink in. Its genius is simply accepting that there is no adequate payback program and that forgiveness can’t be earned. Briony, for her part, has done her best, and so must we.
Good post!