Practices of Satisfaction and Piers Plowman ’s Dynamic Middle

Abstract

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