A Literary History of Reconciliation: Power, Remorse and the Limits of Forgiveness by Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen (review)

Many people today take for granted forgiveness as a model for reconciliation. If two people were in a state of unreconciled conflict, the conflict could be resolved by the one party forgiving the transgressing party. Many today also are acculturated to performances of conflict resolution; we are aware intuitively that the act is not simply one-sided. The party requesting forgiveness performs a role that positions them as the potential receiver of forgiveness, and the forgiver evaluates the sincerity or verity of this performance. And doubtless, one could produce numerous examples of this ceremony of contrition—expressions of regret, public apologies, partial satisfaction, gifts, reformation of behavior. Yet across these acts of penance and remorse, one fact remains true: the power of forgiveness remains solely with the victim. Although the transaction of forgiveness may appear like an exchange, the equivalency between the items of the exchange is incongruent, and the relationship between forgiver and forgiven remains asymmetrical.

Such forgiveness, or reconciliation as Jan Frans van Dukhuizen more frequently refers to it, is poised between the summits of social construction and transcendent moral duty. His thesis is that literature distinctly narrates this liminal vantage point on reconciliation. On the one hand, acts of forgiveness encase themselves in cultural aesthetics in order to reinforce the social hierarchies that dialectically determine the terms of reconciliation. “Forgiveness discourses, therefore, can work to conceal the political nature of human hierarchies, wrapping power relations in a spiritual veneer” (20). While on the other hand, scenes of forgiveness take social and moral asymmetry as given and accordingly purport to overcome conditions of power. Thus it is that, “forgiveness can be seen as aneconomic, in that it involves no conditionality or exchange” (20). Literary theorists might receive the latter claim with scrutiny especially in light of the late twentieth-century’s debates about the possibility of forgiveness, represented in the work of Vladimir Jankélévitch, Jacques Derrida, Gilies Deleuze, Aurel Kolnai, Jean-Luc Marion, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas, among others. This broader critical theory on “the gift” is widely known, and, building on questions first raised by Marcel Mauss, its district expands out from Derrida’s provocative observation that, as an event, forgiveness operates in spite of the contradiction that true forgiveness requires the transgressor to be unforgiveable.

A Literary History of Reconciliation: Power, Remorse and the Limits of Forgiveness introduces these debates at the outset, but it makes an acute and important turn away from canonical discussions of the problem of forgiveness. This is a turn toward “reconciliation.” Why does this distinction between reconciliation and forgiveness matter? In truth, the concepts of reconciliation and forgiveness sometimes appear interchangeably, but the chronological arrangement of the book—A Literary “History”—builds out from the suggestion that reconciliation is the preeminent concept of the two. An example is the fourth chapter on Richardson’s Pamela, Godwin’s Things as They Are, and two of Dickens’s novels, Bleak House and Dombey and Son. In these novels, contrition is a prerogative exclusively of oppressed characters; they gain remittance by reiterating their social subordination, implying an unsettling confusion of the moral and economic. And still, at least in the example of Bleak House, van Dijkhuizen discovers a “form of forgiveness that seems to escape from the power paradigms,” specifically an instance performed by the marginalized. The broader category of event studied in these four novels is that of reconciliation. Generally speaking, reconciliation refers to the “settlement of differences, regardless of the various forms and meanings which such resolution can adopt in specific cultural-historical contexts, or in specific works of literature” (3). Subsequently, forgiveness is used to represent those particular performances of justice, generosity, oblivion, or recognition that define reconciliation in given contexts.

While van Dijkhuizen doesn’t make this taxonomical distinction between reconciliation and forgiveness explicit, it implicitly establishes the rationale for a “literary” history of reconciliation...