Fiction and Ethical Choices

 Ilana Blumberg reviews Mary Gordon's novel Payback in Can Novels Make Amends? (Public Books), and I do not know if I can answer her question.

We are left in 2020, at the end of Payback’s plot, with human injustice. Adam Bede couldn’t do a thing about it in 1859, either. Where is the line between pursuing justice and feeding ourselves on fantasies of revenge? How do we testify to loss but move forward, especially when we ourselves bear guilt for a wrong that can never be righted? With affidavits? Novels? Genuine apologies that we do not wait to be asked for but initiate ourselves?

When regret or new effort cannot fully help victims of the wrongs we have wrought or witnessed, to what work do we consecrate ourselves? Is there a way to watch out for the next to be sacrificed? Or is the mark of modernity that deadly delay between sin and reparation? Novels can’t make amends. But, as Adam Bede in the 19th century and Payback today suggest, fictional narratives about wrongdoing and reckoning ask us to confront our lives as ethical dramas that run only once, and with great consequence.

Whatever answer I could give needs changing the metaphor or payback.

I have done my share of damage to others. I would make amends to those who still live whom I have harmed. What to do about the living? My amends cannot be made directly to them. 

My solution was two-fold. First, to live up to their expectations, when all times before I had done much to live down people's expectations for me. Second, I had to avoid repeating the harm I had done.

The review essay does not attend to one question that still roils my mind: what does society owe to those it has harmed in the past? Much was made these past few years about whites being made to feel guilty about their treatment of African Americans and Native Americans. We were atrocious to both groups. History should teach us to do better in the future and to make amends for any ongoing harm. Yes, there is ongoing harm, the dead hand of the past needs removed from the rudder.

sch 12/19