Why We Care

Why We Care April 8, 2005

With Ian McEwan’s recent Saturday getting strong reviews everywhere, I decided I needed to read the only McEwan novel that I possess, the 2001 Atonement . Atonement focuses on the story of the Tallis family. On a sultry day in Surrey in the 1930s, through a series of petty conflicts and misunderstandings, the lives of the Tallises are unalterably changed. Leon Tallis is coming home for a visit, and in preparation his imaginative little sister Briony has written a play, the Trials of Arabella, and is attempting to enlist her reluctant cousins to enact the play. Meanwhile, Robbie Turner and Briony’s older sister Cecelia have had a tiff that has convinced Robbie that he is in love with Cecelia. He inadvertently sends Cecelia an obscene note, through Briony, which arouses Cecelia, and the two retreat to the library for a furtive sexual liason. Briony interrupts them in the library, having already read Robbie’s note and concluded that he is a sexual maniac. When her cousin Lola is attacked in the dark later that evening while everyone is outside searching for Lola’s missing brothers, Briony is convinced, and convinces Lola, that Robbie is the attacker. The charge sticks, and the remainder of the book describes the consequences of what McEwan calls Briony’s “crime.” Can she make atonement? Can the author make atonement, fulfilling the longings of his frustrated lovers?

It is a powerful book, and one of the most powerful things about it is the way the interrupted sexual encounter hangs over the remainder of the book. In real life, I would find it appalling, but in McEwan’s fictional world, the desire of the two lovers is so palpable that the reader is left straining along with the lovers themselves to see their desires satisfied. I was left wondering, how did McEwan do that to me? Why do I even care what happens to these people, who only exist somehow, somewhere, in the chemical reaction between the words on the page and the thoughts in my head?

Part of that puzzle was answered by a brilliant lecture from the British theologian Jeremy Begbie on sentimentality. Begbie summarized sentimentality under three points: 1) sentimentality misrepresents God and God’s work by trivializing or evading evil, and projecting innocence where there is no innocence (eg, “oh, he’s not such a bad person”); 2) sentimentality is emotionally self-indulgent (which Begbie explained by reference to Milan Kundera’s definition of kitsch ?Ekitsch sheds two tears, one for the beauty of children playing on the grass and one for the feeling that one gets seeing the beauty of children playing on the grass; what really moves the sentimentalist is the fact that he’s being moved”; 3) sentimentality avoids costly action and costly discipleship, and is content to feel strongly. Begbie points out that art often encourages sentimentality, and focused his criticisms on contemporary Christian music. He is by no means an outright opponent of contemporary Christian music, but he opposes the common mode of “love songs for Jesus.”

Though art can encourage sentimentality, Begbie also argued that art can be an aid in combatting it. He focused on music, starting with the familiar idea that music moves from equilibrium to tension to rest, and pointing out the analogies between this musical structure and the movement of drama, biblical history, and other narrative forms. Music is a story of exile and return, of leaving home and coming back. Music can combat sentimentality by teaching delayed gratification rather than emotional self-indulgence. The tension leaves the listener with a desire for resolution, but the listener has to wait for resolution. He made two particular point: a) a listener cannot ignore the tensions in order to get to the resolutions, since the resolution is what it is only because of the preceding tensions; the sentimentalist wants only resolution without tension; 2) the listener cannot rush through toward resolution, since there is always a delay. Christian music becomes sentimental when it minimizes the tensions of life (very unlike the Psalms), and when it rushes through tension toward a premature resolution.

Begbie applied this pattern to Easter week, noting that we can neither rush past the tension of the cross, nor the silence of Holy Saturday, in order to get to Easter; though neither can we stop at Good Friday and wallow in our lamentations over the death of Jesus. Easter exposes the depths of human sin as well as God’s victory over human sin. In one of the most powerful parts of the lecture, he pointed out that silence is, musically, never a simply nul or void; it is pregnant with expectation, and the wave of tension/resolution arches through the silence and charges the silence with hope. (He effectively demonstrated by playing through “Amazing Grace” and stopping for a few seconds before the final chord of each line.) To put it otherwise, we cannot ignore the tears of Good Friday, nor rush past the silence of Holy Saturday, on our way to the surprise and laughter of Easter.

Begbie’s analysis of music, I think, helps explain the experience of McEwan’s novel. The liaison in the library is intensely erotic, but it is quite literally coitus interruptus. McEwan sets of a powerful romantic tension, and then leaves it unresolved for a good deal of time (the lovers are separated by World War II!). It seems that one reason we care for fictional characters is musical: Like the notes of a piece of music, the characters have no actual reference in the world; the fiction writer is playing with tensions and rests. Along with the lovers, the reader desires a resolution, like a listener to a piece of music that is waiting for the final chord of a perfect cadence.


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