Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction

A Cognitive Reading

Marek C. Oziewicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317610816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This book is the first to offer a justice-focused cognitive reading of modern YA speculative fiction in its narrative and filmic forms. It links the expansion of YA speculative fiction in the 20th century with the emergence of human and civil rights movements, with the communitarian revolution in conceptualizations of justice, and with spectacular advances in cognitive sciences as applied to the examination of narrative fiction. Oziewicz argues that complex ideas such as justice are processed by the human mind as cognitive scripts; that scripts, when narrated, take the form of multiply indexable stories; and that YA speculative fiction is currently the largest conceptual testing ground in the forging of justice consciousness for the 21st century world.

Drawing on recent research in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences, Oziewicz explains how poetic, retributive, restorative, environmental, social, and global types of justice have been represented in narrative fiction, from 19th century folk and fairy tales through 21st century fantasy, dystopia, and science fiction. Suggesting that the appeal of these and other nonmimetic genres is largely predicated on the dream of justice, Oziewicz theorizes new justice scripts as conceptual tools essential to help humanity survive the qualitative leap toward an environmentally conscious, culturally diversified global world. This book is an important contribution to studies of children's and YA speculative fiction, adding a new perspective to discussions about the educational as well as social potential of nonmimetic genres. It demonstrates that the justice imperative is very much alive in YA speculative fiction, creating new visions of justice relevant to contemporary challenges.

1 Toward Modern Justice Consciousness

An Idiosyncratic History of Justice with a Note on the Rise of Young People’s Literature

Until the late eighteenth century an indispensable part of carnival in all European countries was the elaborate torture of animals, especially cats. Cats were used in charivaris; as their fur was being torn away, their claws pulled out, or their paws grilled, the resulting howls gave the name to the practice of mock serenades people performed for fun across civilized Europe. Parisians incinerated cats in sacks or grate boxes; the citizens of Saint Chamond liked to chase flaming cats through the streets; in Burgundy and Loraine crowds danced around burning maypoles with shrieking cats tied to the tops. In other places throughout France—the European pinnacle of civilization in the 1700s—cats were roasted over bonfires, tossed in the air and clubbed on the ground, or were shaved and dressed up to look like whomever the crowd loathed. No matter how a particular celebration started, all captured cats were subsequently executed by hanging, drowning, lacerating, shredding, quartering, or other forms of elaborate mauling (Darnton 83ff). Far from being a sadistic fantasy on the part of a few individuals, the torture of animals was “a deep current of popular culture” and “a popular amusement throughout early modern Europe” (90). These ceremonies involved entire communities, with the educated elite—bishops, mayors, nobility, and dignitaries—shrieking with glee alongside commoners. Although the first steps to abolish public ceremonies of animal torture were taken in some regions of France as early as 1765 (85), popular habits of torture as amusement survived well into the twentieth century.

The French were not uniquely predisposed to this kind of violence. An account of English sports brought to Virginia in the seventeenth century tells of a hierarchy of gory entertainments that a modern scholar has aptly called “a great chain of slaughter” (Fischer 360). These bloodsports flourished throughout the nineteenth century and were access-graded so that virtually every male in the English-speaking world could be ranked according to the size of animals he was allowed to kill for pleasure. One favorite entertainment of farmers in Virginia and in the south of England was gander pulling. After an old male goose was suspended upside-down from a tree, its neck lathered with grease, the contestants galloped past the goose, trying to tear off its head. The game was dangerous. Many riders would be thrown off their horses or lose fingers to the angry beak. However, one player would eventually succeed in ripping off the gander’s head and claim the body as his prize. Other sports included killing hares, songbirds, maiming frogs, torturing lizards, and pulling the wings off insects and butterflies (363–4). When Tolkien introduced Bilbo’s stone-throwing skills—commenting in an aside that “[a]s a boy he used to practice throwing stones at things, until rabbits and squirrels, and even birds, got out of his way as quick as lightning if they saw him stoop” (Tolkien, Hobbit 201)—the remark was meant as praise and alluded to a world where stoning small animals for fun was a common and legitimate form of play.

What do the above examples have to do with the history of justice? Wouldn’t a summary of historical court rulings or public debates have better exemplified justice lacking? My answer is a qualified no. Unlike Richard Posner and scholars in the law and literature movement, I am not interested in literary representations of law and its procedures. My concern is with justice as a wider cognitive universe that includes law but draws its creative sap from a youthful sentiment about what makes things fair and right. The accounts of popular, inhumane entertainment that I have listed are as good an entry point as any other. Even more than legal precedent, they speak of the widely accepted cultural standards and sensibility of the early modern period. And if these sports sound like reports from a galaxy far, far away, it is only because they open a window on a world in which ideas of popular entertainment, or stewardship or child rearing, were radically different from our own. Just like gander pulling—legal or otherwise—would today be seen as sadism, so too the many orphan-saving schemes from the past would appear to modern child advocates as child abuse or enslavement. Be it the eighteenth-century practice of placing orphans in workhouses together with and at the mercy of embittered, often depraved or insane adults¹, the nineteenth-century “improved” schemes of shipping orphans to the British colonies (Parr 11ff), or the practice of “plac[ing] them out” in the American rural West (see Holt)—all of these well-meant initiatives strike the modern reader as no less callous than the claims of certain nineteenth-century commentators that poor people do not mind being hungry and homeless because they are well-adapted to these circumstances (Dimock 165). More examples can be provided, of course, but my point is that what counted as doing the right thing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is very removed from ideas about justice and the right we hold today. This chapter will address how the concept of justice has evolved and how this evolution helped create space for the emergence of young people’s literature.

THE EXPANDING SCOPE OF JUSTICE

Over the past 25 centuries, an understanding of the idea of justice in the Western tradition has continually expanded. Some developments were built by accretion on preexisting formulations. Others emerged through rejection or reformulation of those earlier notions. In general, the trajectory has been that of expanding scope and depth: from justice as applicable to Greek men, to noblemen, to Christian men, to rational men, to human beings of both genders and all ethnicities, and recently, to all sentient beings and the natural world. This complex and polyvocal process was marked by two large arcs that unevenly informed its various phases. The first arc led from pre-modern communalism through early modern individualism and then on to contemporary communitarianism. The key question in this trajectory was whose needs justice is supposed to serve. The other arc spanned the evolution of the idea of justice and its operative premises from hierarchical absolutist through non-hierarchical absolutist and on to, recently, non-hierarchical situational. The question in this second arc was who defines justice and how is it applied. The two arcs developed at different speeds, their elements morphing constantly into different configurations at any given time. In this overview, however, I suggest the process may be best theorized as forming three major phases: Old Justice, New Justice, and Open Justice. Now, to talk about arcs, phases, and tripartite classifications smacks of neat taxonomies, but any totalizing ambition is the furthest thing from my purpose. Categories do not exist until they are imagined, and I do not believe any history of justice can uncover an ontological given. My proposal is conditional, a situated construct, whose porousness I want to acknowledge upfront. At the same time—while Old, New, and Open Justice represent just one possible grid imposed on a continuous process—they are not arbitrary divisions. At each phase the range of choices and possible perspectives for theorizing justice was significantly broader. Also, each new accretion to thinking about justice can be identified by a pronounced preference for a dominant framework within which justice was conceptualized. As the understanding of justice evolved, certain claims were universally discarded and new ones were adduced to the picture: the legitimacy of slavery being an example of the former, while the equality imperative illustrating the latter.

Two further caveats are necessary. One is that there is, obviously, a difference between philosophical reflection about justice and the legal execution of justice. What philosophers say informs and challenges current ideas of law. Yet, legal practice never fully reflects philosophical postulation and there is a large gap between the two—usually with law lagging behind philosophical argument by decades. Given the distinction between justice and law, mine is not a discussion about the evolution of law or legal systems, but the evolution of theorizing about justice. My limited purpose is to demonstrate how the scope of justice in the Euro-American tradition grew and to suggest what direction this expansion took. The second caveat is that the history of justice discussed below is not meant to suggest a sequence where one phase replaces the one before it in such absolute terms as a train departs one station and arrives at another. Rather, my operative metaphor is that of an organic growth by accretion, much like a shrub with stems of various thicknesses and lengths, not all of them blooming at the same time or with the same intensity, but all drawing sap from the same root clump. Thus, New Justice added to Old Justice, and Open Justice added to New and Old Justice, but all three continued to grow, albeit with uneven speeds. At each stage a number of developments contributed to changing the conceptual domain of justice, often reconfiguring what is central versus what is peripheral. For example, retribution, which was central for Old Justice, was displaced by deterrence in New Justice and deterrence, in turn, had to surrender before distribution in Open Justice.

The cluster of ideas comprised by the shorthand term Old Justice began with the ancient Greek philosophers, flourished through Church fathers, and dominated justice thinking throughout the pre-Enlightenment period. In this cognitive universe, justice was conceptualized as hierarchical and absolute. It was hierarchical because it was defined from the perspective and for the purposes of a small elite at the top of a social hierarchy—an elite who believed in a hierarchical natural order and identified order with hierarchy. Justice was also legitimized absolutely by nature or God: an intrinsic, exhaustive, and all-encompassing quality, at once reflective of the world as its indwelling truth and synecdochic for its creator as singular, categoric, and good. Additionally, justice was communal, seen as a value focalized through the needs of a hierarchically ordered community—Greek polis or Christian civitas Dei—rather than those of an individual.

The stems of New Justice appeared in late Renaissance, came to a full bloom during the Enlightenment, and dominated justice thinking throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. In this framework justice continued to be seen as all-encompassing and absolute—predicated on Hobbesian pure necessity, Lockean tacit consent, Kantian pure reason, or hypothetical agreement as later for Mill and Rawls—but was increasingly seen as a non-hierarchical concept. In philosophical reflection, if not in judicial practice, justice was now perceived as derivative of mediation of human relations rather than of a God-mandated virtue, which equated the morally transgressive with criminally sanctionable. Justice now applied equally to all people, irrespective of their social position, gender, or ethnicity. In practice, of course, it took another 140 years for this promise to even begin to be fulfilled. New Justice was predicated on rational usefulness, thus a shift from retribution to deterrence, and it was theorized through the lens of individualism. Unlike in the Old Justice paradigm, justice was now seen as essential to safeguarding the rights of an individual—albeit theorized as a categorical “rational person,” not an actual self—relative to the needs of the community.

Only since the philosophical advent of Open Justice in the 1980s has justice finally been uncoupled from its absolutist claims. This phase began roughly after WWII and accelerated in the 1980s as a reaction to the narrowly individualistic contractarian and utilitarian New Justice thinking. In this most recent Open Justice phase, justice was reformulated as situational and provisional, balanced between the claims of community and those of the individual—with the individual now seen as an actual, gendered, situated person with particular traits. The ideal of non-hierarchical scope of justice was brought more in line with the realities of the world after the human and civil rights revolutions. By the close of the twentieth century Open Justice had become the most progressive mode in philosophical, political, and scholarly reflection as well as the ideological fuel for all reform movements that are now transforming the globe. Western legal systems, however, are still dominated by the paradigm of New Justice.

One useful way to appreciate the dynamics of internal relations among these three phases is to see them as reflecting what Raymond Williams has called residual, dominant, and emergent features². According to Williams any cultural practice or idea at any historical moment is challenged simultaneously by its past, not-yet-gone understanding and by a host of new, emerging reformulations, one of which will eventually become dominant (Williams 121–4). Old Justice was thus a dominant framework until well into the seventeenth century, and only then was it challenged by the emergent culture of New Justice. The two coexisted throughout the eighteenth century, until by the end of the nineteenth century New Justice had become the dominant culture, while Old Justice continued in its many residual forms: “effectively formed in the past but … still active in the cultural process” (122). No longer seriously challenged by Old Justice, New Justice triumphed with the enfranchisement of women in the 1920s, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 1940s, and in the Civil and Minority Rights Movements of the 1950s through the 1980s. Roughly at that time, however, its hegemony was slowly being toppled by the emerging culture of Open Justice, which conveyed the realization that the world is not just one and “universal”—the keyword of New Justice—but one and “diverse,” needing situated, different, and flexible responses rather than a uniform grid posited by New Justice. In Williams’ terms, Old Justice is a residual culture today, New Justice is the dominant one—at least in the legal domain—whereas Open Justice is the emergent culture, one that creates “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship” (123). Its eventual dominance seems ensured by the fact that it has already taken over the fields where visions of the future are being forged: literature, ethics, political philosophy, cultural studies, and increasingly customizable technology.

Each of the three phases can be identified chronologically but also through its flag bearers. The Old Justice period began with ancient Greek reflections about the rights of citizens as well as the obligations that bound them as members of the polis. For Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle—concerned with cultivating civic virtue in the context of highly restricted forms of communalism, such as those available to adult male citizens of Greek city-states—justice was necessarily hierarchical and absolutist. It was an excellence embodied within a just person, meaning a male citizen of the polis placed at the top of the power structure by the accidents of gender and birth. The holding of justice excluded non-citizens, women, and slaves.

These hierarchical ideas found their best expression in the work of Aristotle, who saw justice as proportionate equality reflecting the principle that equals must be treated equally while unequals should be treated unequally (Pakaluk 203). For Aristotle and his followers justice was intimately bound with questions of virtue and moral desert. If virtues are universal givens that define the most desirable way of life, justice is both teleological and honorific: justice means giving people what they deserve ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Toward Modern Justice Consciousness: An Idiosyncratic History of Justice with a Note on the Rise of Young People’s Literature
• 2 How We Know What We Know: Justice Scripts in Literary and Filmic Narratives
• 3 The World Is Not Fair: Poetic Justice Scripts
• 4 Find Them and Kill Them: Retributive Justice Scripts
• 5 No Future without Forgiveness: Restorative Justice Scripts
• 6 Humans Are Animals Too: Environmental Justice Scripts
• 7 We All Have a Dream: Social Justice Scripts
• 8 Against Unseen Exploitation: Global Justice Scripts
• Index