Symbolism 21

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics

Florian Klaeger, Klaus Stierstorfer, Marlena Tronicke, Florian Klaeger, Klaus Stierstorfer, Marlena Tronicke

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110756531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Special Focus: Law and Literature

This special focus issue of Symbolism takes a look at the theoretical equation of law and literature and its inherent symbolic dimension. The authors all approach the subject from the perspective of literary and book studies, foregrounding literature's potential to act as supplementary to a very wide variety of laws spread over historical, geographical, cultural and spatial grounds. The theoretical ground laid here thus posits both literature and law in the narrow sense. The articles gathered in this special issue analyse Anglophone literatures from the Renaissance to the present day and cover the three major genres, narrative, drama and poetry. The contributions address questions of the law's psychoanalytic subconscious, copyright and censorship, literary negotiations of colonial and post-colonial territorial laws, the European 'refugee debate' and migration narratives, fictional debates on climate change, contemporary feminist drama and classic 19th-century legal narratives. This volume includes two insightful analyses of poetic texts with a special focus on the fact that poetry has often been neglected within the field of law and literature research.

Special Focus editor: Franziska Quabeck, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany.

Special Focus: Law and Literature

Corresponding editor: Franziska Quabeck

Introduction: Symbolism, Law and Literature

Franziska Quabeck

‘I’ll put a case to you. Mind! I admit nothing.’¹ (Charles Dickens, Great Expectations)

Both law and literature may “put a case,” as Jaggers in Dickens has it. They can engage in highly hypothetical or fictional scenarios and attempt to make a matter clear through narrative strategies. The law ideally opts for justice; literature tends to expose the opposite in its endeavor of social criticism. Both law and literature ‘put a case’ in order to arrive at an understanding of just humanity, of fair dealings, of the common good. Therefore, both fields necessarily engage in establishing failure: they see, they condemn, they expose unjust humanity, unfair dealings, the triumph of the few over the many. Their strategy is the same: it is the power of language that unites both disciplines. Yet, many scholars in this interdisciplinary field have assumed that literature may take a complimentary, a supplementary role even, to the law, with its potential of addressing the particular. While the law can hardly circumvent its responsibility to be universally or at least democratically applicable, literature has no such institutional burden. In the fairly common distinction between the law and equity, therefore, literature often seems to play the role of equity to the law’s more rigid idea of justice. Not least because of literature’s highly symbolic nature, it seems the more suitable ground for negotiations of grey areas than the law, which is by function less flexible in accounting for the particularities of each and every case. In contrast, literature chooses its own cases, it seems, thus enabling the text to act as equity to the law. As Brook Thomas put it thirty years ago, the “conflicts faced by a society’s legal system” may find themselves negotiated by the literary text:

If the function of the law is to resolve those conflicts, literature’s paradoxes result from a failure to do so. This failure continues to give literature a supplementary relation to the law, because it draws attention to inequities committed by the law’s exclusions.²

The complimentary role of literature to the law first seems overwhelmingly obvious in the Victorian novel. A legal system in need of reform, a change in the position of the defendant, the introduction of legal counsel and many other statutes found their way into both the civil and criminal courts. These provided ample subjects for literary texts that authors from Fielding to Hardy eagerly incorporated into their novels:

While the dominant canons of literary realism inclined writers and critics toward mainstream rather than extreme situations, and a system of formal and informal censorship restricted the representation of sexual and other passions, the “weird” and disturbing side of human conduct found expression in poetry, sensation novels, and the aesthetic or decadent writing of the 1890s.³

While the law fundamentally defined itself anew, the novel also came into its own and established itself as the henceforth most dominant genre. ‘Putting a case’ thus meant for both disciplines narratively exploring justice and equity, within and beyond the court. It is during this era in the British context that law and literature converge, albeit through their different means of narration:

[L]aw is inevitably a matter of language. The law can only be articulated in words. While the order of a court will be imposed on the body or the property of the parties to the case, it will originally have been spoken as a sentence. This is the fundamental connection between law and literature.⁴

In ‘putting a case,’ both law and literature engage in stories of justice and injustice, in representations of wrong and right behavior. In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1861), the lawyer Jaggers ‘puts a case.’ As he reveals to the protagonist all the secrets that resolve the conflict, Jaggers becomes a narrator within the narration but mimics his professional argumentation as if in court:

I’ll put a case to you. Mind! I admit nothing. [. . .] Put the case that a woman, under such circumstances as you have mentioned, held her child concealed, and was obliged to communicate the fact to her legal adviser, on his representing to her that he must know, with any eye to the latitude of his defence, how the fact stood about that child. Put the case that at the same time he held a trust to find a child for an eccentric rich lady to adopt and bring up. [. . .] Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children, was, their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. [. . .] Put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty little child out of the heap, who could be saved, whom the father believed dead, and dared make no stir about; as to whom, over the mother, the legal adviser had this power: ‘I know what you did, and how you did it. [. . .] Give the child into my hands, and I will do my best to bring you off. If you are saved, your child is saved too; if you are lost, your child is still saved.’ Put the case that this was done, and that the woman was cleared. [. . .] Do you comprehend the imaginary case?

(GE, 307)

Jaggers’ narration constitutes a climax in the novel, for it reveals Estella’s true identity and finally places her in Pip’s reach, who has pined after her for much of his story. It is highly ironic, therefore, that Jaggers puts the story he means to enlighten Pip as what he calls an ‘imaginary case,’ for he pretends this to be a fiction, in order to present himself as free of responsibility for any of these actions: “Mind! I admit nothing.” Dickens lets Jaggers mimic perfectly what he perceives to be unethical, legal trickery: ‘putting a case,’ for Jaggers, means that he cannot be held liable, that he can remain safe on neutral grounds beyond the court.

There are innumerable Victorian texts that ‘put a case’ for the reader, as Jaggers does for Pip. Moreover, there is an almost unmistakable parallel between the lawyer and the novelist here. As Jaggers ‘puts a case,’ he functions fully as Dickens has intended him to do. Jaggers is a liar and a fabricator who is able to tell ‘stories’ that lead to his calculated aims. In this sense, the character does exactly the same as the novelist seeks to do – they both try to make the reader believe ‘their’ story and not another’s. Thus, Jonathan Grossman has argued in his excellent study on the subject that there is an inextricable relation between “the era’s most prominent narrative paradigms – the novel and the law courts”:

[A]fter a surprisingly gradual shift in the eighteenth century from a system of justice centered on the scaffold to one focused on the trial scene, the period from the 1790s to the 1840s was uniquely dominated by the development of a narrative paradigm oriented to the law courts as a storytelling forum. [. . .] [T]he novel, in becoming the ascendant genre of the nineteenth century, played an active role in a process through which a reinvented criminal trial supplanted the spectacle of the gallows as the culmination of justice.⁵

Nineteenth-century narratives borrowed in both form and content from court proceedings, while legal narratives mimicked the novel form reciprocally. The inherent link between law and literature can be seen in the development of both disciplines during that time, and the nineteenth-century novel very consciously makes its case, or, in Dickens’s words, ‘puts a case’:

Works like these may question the boundaries established by the law, or they may simply reflect such boundaries. In either case, it is the ability of literary texts to represent and draw attention to such boundaries and how they function that produces their greatest insights into law.⁶

Incidentally, the novel has also been criticized for its aspirations to discuss ‘the law’ from the first. The most famous of all nineteenth-century ‘legal’ novels is perhaps Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–1853), which centers around an absolutely crushing critique of the Court of Chancery, as discussed in the editor’s contribution to this volume. Dickens’s analysis of the legal system tries to pinpoint the bureaucratic stalemate the Victorian court has arrived at. It is spoken in character, but Dickens clearly means to identify the shortcomings of the law as symbolized in the ‘great’ suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce:

A certain Jarndyce, in an evil hour, made a great fortune, and made a great Will. In the question how the trusts under that Will are to be administered, the fortune left by the Will is squandered away; the legatees under the Will are reduced to such a miserable condition that they would be sufficiently punished if they had committed an enormous crime in having money left them; and the Will itself made a dead letter. All through the deplorable cause, everything that everybody in it, except one man, knows already, is referred to that only one man who don’t know i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Special Focus: Law and Literature Corresponding editor: Franziska Quabeck
• General Section
• Book Reviews
• Index