THE CHARACTER OF REMORSE

Remorse like guilt, requires that one believes one has done wrong. But, remorse is more than a cool belief or passing acknowledgment The Latin roots of remorse mean ‘‘to bite again” Unpacking this metaphor is revealing First, biting is painful· Bites are jagged tearing and unclean They are very likely to become infected and fester Bites are also animal-like, ignoble inhuman and disgusting Vampires monsters and animals bite - not humans Being bitten or eaten is a horrific or nightmarish prospect In Antigone, as in a host of other stories punishment practices and myths, leaving a corpse to be bitten and eaten by scavengers is the consummate degradation As a biting then the bite of remorse is a revolting disgusting, and festering ‘‘type of self-punishment” (Sarah 1999, p.

This biting knowledge that one has done wrong is also a rebite a return of the crime Remorse ‘‘implies a degree of empathic pain on the part of one who has caused the fracture” (Cox 1997, p. 24) In remorse one becomes one’s own victim as Garvey recognized in the quotation above But the pain rebounds in a peculiar way: one is both the biter and the bitten Not only does one suffer the pain one inflicted on one’s victim but one also suffers both the pain and the degradation of having inflicted it.

Remorse bites again in another way too It recurs it lives inside one and it continues to bite There is no way out from oneself In the deepest circle of hell, Dante imagines sinners are eaten over and over and over Prometheus pays for his crime by having his liver eaten anew each day The biting of remorse is figured in these mythic stories as remorseless and eternal.

Unlike guilt which may linger like a vague cloud in the background of the conscience remorse bites and spurs one to act These recurring feel­ings of self-disgust self-hate and empathy for the victim’s pain create a turning away from oneself a desire to expunge the guilt, or a desire to flee oneself.

3.1 Remorse and Violence

Remorse is often accompanied by outward forms of self-inflicted punish­ment Oedipus blinds himself monks whip themselves teenagers cut themselves and people seek out destructive relationships or onerous forms of service Briony in Ian McEwan’s novel, Atonement, volunteers as a nurse’s assistant in the military hospital during World War II to punish herself for falsely accusing her sister’s lover of rape Arthur Dimmesdale, the clergyman whose lover Hester receives Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is tor­tured by remorse to his death cutting his own scarlet letter into his own flesh. Gene in John Knowles’, A Separate Peace, believes that serving in the front lines of World War II will assuage his guilt for causing his best friend’s crippling accident One way or another the remorseful demand their own punishment The physical pain seems to blunt the mental pain to ease the biting conscience Physical pain may seem less painful than remorse, to replace it and externalize if literally to expiate it Physical pain substi­tutes for mental agony at least for a while But unless the physical pun­ishments keep recurring something else must be done External pain alone does not destroy the self-hatred and self-disgust of the offender anymore than it alleviates the suffering and humiliation of the victim Remorse rebites

Martha Grace Duncan also reminds us that remorse can be endless destructive and even the cause of more violence She quotes EM Forster’s line in Howard's End: ‘‘Of all the means to regeneration Remorse is surely the most wasteful It cuts away healthy tissues with the poisoned It is a knife that probes far deeper than the evil.’’ (Duncan 2002, p. 1522) She gives us the case study of Peter a remorseful murderer who attempted suicide escape self-isolation and never adjusted to prison life boding ill, rather than well, for rehabilitation (Duncan 2002, p. 1522).

John Knowles also probes this insight Gene in A Separate Peace becomes violent when his friend Leper accuses him of bouncing Phineas out of the tree ‘‘crippling him for life’’ Curiously however Gene’s violent response is not a denial of his responsibility but precisely the reverse.

3.2. Remorse and Escape

In addition to prompting physical violence against oneself or others, remorse may also be accompanied by various attempts to escape from one­self through drugs or alcohol or suicide or forms of denial or repression After his unsuccessful attempt to buy back Jesus’ life, the agonized and remorseful Judas hangs himself The remorseful Rochester in Jane Eyre, pursues a different course of escape: dissipation and restless pleasure seeking through all the capitols of Europe (Bronte 2003).

But the attempt to escape short of suicide is usually unsuccessful· One cannot flee from oneself Jimmy Buffet’s famous country tune Wastin' Away Again in Margaritaville, goes through several verses of inebriated denial (‘‘it’s nobody’s fault,’’ ‘‘it could be my fault’’) but ends with the confession: ‘‘but I know it’s my own damn fault’’ Briony in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, says: ‘‘The only conceivable solution would be for the past never to have happened.... She longed to have someone else’s past, to be someone else like hearty Fiona with her unstained life stretching ahead and her affectionate sprawling family...All Fiona had to do was live her life follow the road ahead and discover what was to happen To Briony it appeared that her life was going to be lived in one room without a door.” (McEwan, 2003, p. 272) Living one’s life in one room without a door, is a perfect metaphor for remorse which traps one in one’s own past It is also of course life imprisonment

Nietzsche (1969) argues that this form of eternal, life-imprisoning indi­vidual remorse is spawned by the modern social context For Nietzsche, the ‘‘bad conscience’’ tortures the healthy activity of life and ultimately results in an effete and spineless nihilism Historically and psychologically, Nietzsche argues guilt gradually comes to the fore as strong selfish life­affirming healthy impulses must be repressed and resisted in an increasingly disciplined society Eventually guilt comes to pervade all action a guilt so overpowering that it can be alleviated and forgiven only by supernatural forces in another life (as in Christianity) Nietzsche thus believes this eternal remorse to be the ultimate nihilism: life generates guilt that only death can assuage (Nietzsche 1969) Whether or not one accepts Nietzsche’s historical and cultural account of guilt, it is clear that he too sees remorse as a form of living hell, a life imprisonment with no hope of exit except death.

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