Symbolism 21: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 9783110756456, 9783110756395

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Symbolism An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Editorial Board Heinz Antor ‧ Susan Bassnett ‧ Daniela Carpi ‧ Marc Chénetier ‧ Cristina Giorcelli Yasmine Gooneratne ‧ Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht ‧ Maria Herrera-Sobek Linda Hutcheon ‧ Eva-Marie Kroeller ‧ Francisco A. Lomelí ‧ Susana Onega Frédéric Regard ‧ Kiernan Ryan ‧ Ronald Shusterman ‧ Stefanos Stefanides Toshiyuki Takamiya ‧ Richard H. Weisberg ‧ Walther Chr. Zimmerli

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Volume 21 Edited by Florian Klaeger, Klaus Stierstorfer and Marlena Tronicke Founding Editor Rüdiger Ahrens

ISBN 978-3-11-075639-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-075645-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-075653-1 ISSN 1528-3623 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021940646 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Foreword from the Editors Volume 21 of Symbolism starts with a newly configured editorial team. Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ruediger Ahrens, OBE, the annual’s founding editor, will continue his supportive input in this role, but his duties as executive editor will now be taken over by Dr. Marlena Tronicke, English Department, University of Münster, who had already served as assistant editor for several years. The focus on “Law and Literature” in volume 21 originates from the context of the Münster Collaborative Research Centre 1385 “Law and Literature,” funded by the German Research Foundation, which started in the summer of 2019. Though anchored in the Münster context, the contributions collected in this special focus reach out to a wider network of scholars. The editors are very grateful to Franziska Quabeck, the guest editor of this volume, to have undertaken such a venture under very different and, indeed, often difficult, circumstances, shaped as most projects have been by the continuing pandemic. To our great delight, the volume has still come together on what all felt to be an important area to explore in this series. Next to literature, the law is surely the one field with the most obvious relevance in research on the symbolic, far beyond such emblematic images that will immediately occur to many, as the figure of blind justice or the scales of justice. Court procedures in their multiplicity and complexity are saturated with symbolic aspects and literature has, of course, always had a particular sensitivity to pick up on these and use them in its own field, while law not infrequently profits from the symbolic power inspired by literature. This productive interdisciplinary dialogue is presented in a number of prospects in the volume which also includes a general section and a number of book reviews. As always, the editors wish to thank the editorial team at De Gruyter, Stella Diedrich above all, for their always reliable and competent support. As ever, they are especially grateful to Chris Wahlig in Münster for her invaluable administrative and editorial assistance which only makes a volume like this possible. Florian Klaeger University of Bayreuth

Klaus Stierstorfer University of Münster

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-202

Marlena Tronicke University of Münster

Contents Foreword from the Editors

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Special Focus: Law and Literature Corresponding editor: Franziska Quabeck Franziska Quabeck Introduction: Symbolism, Law and Literature

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Susanne Gruss Reading the Unconscious of the Law: From Psychoanalytical Legal Theory to Early Modern Law and Literature 15 Corinna Norrick-Rühl Contracts, Clauses, Controversy: John Hersey, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books 35 Stephan Karschay Decadent Echoes, the Language of Censorship and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness 55 Sarah Heinz “Stay on Country”: The Indigenous Australian Challenge to White Property, Terra Nullius, and Native Title in Tara June Winch’s The Yield 77 Stefanie Mueller Legal and Poetic Figurations of Wholeness in from unincorporated territory and the Insular Cases 97 Birte Christ ‘the real feel of hard time’: Lyrico-Carceral Temporalities in C.D. Wright’s One Big Self: An Investigation (2007) 115

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Marlena Tronicke “I Have Shown You Milk”: Performing Legal Truths in Nina Raine’s Consent and Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin 135 Anna Auguscik Law on Ice: Polarizing Legal Expertise in Popular Climate Change Fiction 153 Markus Schmitz The Fiction of Justice: Human Smuggling in European Law and Middle Eastern Refugee Narratives 175 Franziska Quabeck In Defense of Mr Micawber: Symbolic Equity in Dickens

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General Section Camilo Peralta Tolkien’s Dragons: Sources, Symbols, and Significance

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Dong Yang Suspending the Assemblage: Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995) and the Return of the Self 235

Book Reviews Jessica Apolloni Stephanie Elsky. Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature 257 Linda Hess Siobhan Somerville, Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies Jayana Jain Shazia Rahman. Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism: Pakistani Women’s Literary and Cinematic Fictions 269

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Elisa Leroy Amy Cook. Shakespearean Futures: Casting the Bodies of Tomorrow on Shakespeare’s Stages Today 275 Heidi Lucja Liedke Marisa Palacios Knox. Victorian Women and Wayward Reading: Crises of Identification 281 List of Contributors Index

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Special Focus: Law and Literature Corresponding editor: Franziska Quabeck

Franziska Quabeck

Introduction: Symbolism, Law and Literature ‘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

1 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Edgar Rosenberg (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999): 307; further references in the text, abbreviated as “GE.” 2 Brook Thomas, “Reflections on the Law and Literature Revival,” Critical Inquiry 17.3 (1991): 510–539, 536–537. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-001

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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)

3 Kieran Dolin, “Stranger Cases in Victorian England,” in Law and Literature, ed. Kieran Dolin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017): 157–171, 157. 4 Kieran Dolin, A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature (New York: Cambridge UP, 2011): 2.

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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

5 Jonathan H. Grossman, The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2002): 3–4. 6 Dolin, Law and Literature, 8.

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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 it, to find out – all through the deplorable cause, everybody must have copies, over and over again, of everything that has accumulated about it in the way of cartloads of papers (or must pay for them without having them, which is the natural course, for nobody wants them); and must go down the middle and up again, through such an infernal country-dance of costs and fees and nonsense and corruption, as was never dreamed of in the wildest visions of a Witch’s Sabbath. Equity sends questions to Law, Law sends questions to Equity; Law finds it can’t do this, Equity finds it can’t do that; neither can so much as say it can’t do anything, without this solicitor instructing and this counsel appearing for A, and that solicitor instructing and that counsel appearing for B; and so on through the whole alphabet, like the History of the Apple Pie.7

While Dickens meant this as a scathing critique of a system turning upon itself in total disregard of the achievement of justice, the novel was in turn heavily criticized by his contemporaries for his alleged lack of knowledge about the law in the first place. In his review of the novel, the famous judge Fitzjames Stephen immediately tried to put Dickens in his place as a literary author, by claiming Dickens “knows absolutely nothing of law or politics.”8 As Michael Slater comments, the literary barrister, and later judge, James Fitzjames Stephen, who delighted to lambaste Dickens in The Saturday Review from the mid 1850s on, crushingly (and snobbishly) observed in 1857 that Dickens’s ‘notions of law, which occupy so large a space in his books, are precisely those of an attorney’s clerk.’9

7 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1993): 83–84. 8 Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971): 349. 9 Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2009): 29.

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The literary author, whose novel is supposed to engage in a critical discourse with the law, thus involuntarily runs into the critical scrutiny of the legal opposition himself. The same conflict arose only a few years later through the publication of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). Collins took the literary mimicry of judicial proceedings even further, as he announced on the very first pages of the book that it was intended to provide evidence as if in court: If the machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion, and to conduct every process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences of oil of gold, the events which fill these pages might have claimed their share of the public attention in a Court of Justice. But the Law is still, in certain inevitable cases, the pre-engaged servant of the long purse; and the story is left to be told, for the first time, in this place. As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now. No circumstance of importance, from the beginning to the end of the disclosure, shall be related on hearsay evidence. When the writer of these introductory lines (Walter Hartright by name) happens to be more closely connected than others with the incidents to be recorded, he will describe them in his own person. When his experience fails, he will retire from the position of narrator [. . .]. [T]he story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness – with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and to trace the course of one complete series of events, by making the persons who have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage, relate their own experience, word for word.10

Collins thus did not necessarily aim to critique the law per se and only appropriated what he deemed typical court proceedings, but he was equally caught in the limelight of legal criticism – to the point that he addressed the matter in the preface to the full edition. A literary author like Dickens, Collins had to defend his narrative transgression into the legal sphere, as indicated in his Preface to the 1861 edition of The Woman in White: I have endeavoured, by careful correction and revision, to make my story as worthy as I could of a continuance of the public approval. Certain technical errors which had escaped me while I was writing the book are here rectified. [. . .] Some doubts having been expressed, in certain captious quarters, about the correct presentation of the legal “points” incidental to the story, I may be permitted to mention that I spared no pains – in this instance, as in all others – to preserve myself from unintentionally misleading my readers. A solicitor of great experience in his profession most kindly and carefully guided my steps, whenever the course of the narrative led me into the labyrinth of the Law. Every doubtful question was submitted to this gentleman, before I ventured on putting pen to paper; and all the proof-sheets which referred to legal matters were corrected by his hand before the story was published. I can add, on high judicial

10 Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996): 5f.

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authority, that these precautions were not taken in vain. The “law” in this book has been discussed, since its publication, by more than one competent tribunal, and has been decided to be sound.11

Practically from this decided literary interest in the legal profession onwards, therefore, literature and the law have also been at odds with one another: the literary text that many think supplementary to the law in the nineteenth century thus stands accused itself of bearing false witness. Kieran Dolin has argued that for “readers reflecting on law and culture today, the Victorian impulse to ‘put the case’ provides a powerful heuristic for understanding the conflicts of the period and their relevance to our own.”12 This is especially true, it seems, if we bear in mind that this wish to ‘put a case’ was then, and is now, always contested by the legal profession itself. This special issue shares the assumption that “[l]iterature and law [. . .] can work together in the production of cultural ideals and values,”13 which has become one of the premises of law and literature studies, for most scholars in the field assume that “literature has something to offer the law in its resolution of social conflicts.”14 At the same time, Mark Fortier reminds us that law and literature “have different approaches to authority.”15 They certainly “share an interest in justice,”16 but despite their common ground, they have developed different strategies. It is because of their different approaches that literary texts are often understood as supplementary to the law: “Literary works do not merely reflect or register contradictions, they imaginatively reshape and transform them.”17 Law and literature engage in a common discourse that is generally regarded to be a fruitful one, for the two disciplines can complement each other. By nature, this exchange is often highly symbolic and marks moments of positive ‘crisis’: “moments of crisis in which the struggle over certain words or forms of representation can be traced in both the legal and the literary fields, stories in which symbols developed in one migrate to the other.”18 The structure of this volume moves from primarily theoretical concerns to the very practical sides of the law, as it shapes literature both in terms of authorship and censorship. Most contributions gathered here ‘put a case’: they

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Wilkie Collins, “Preface to the Present Edition” [1861], in The Woman in White: 3–4, 3. Dolin, “Stranger Cases,” 171. Dolin, Law and Literature, 2. Dolin, Law and Literature, 3. Mark Fortier, Literature and Law (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019): 23. Fortier, Literature and Law, 26. Thomas, “Law and Literature Revival,” 537. Dolin, Law and Literature, 13.

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point to literature’s supplementary role for the law, critically engaging in different discourses in various historical contexts, but always keeping in mind the potential of literature to represent failures of justice. Almost all of the literary texts discussed in the following chapters choose “images and stories” as “a way of intervening in the world, of reshaping understandings and challenging relationships of power.”19 The chosen texts range from the Renaissance to the present day, thereby indicating changes in literature’s engagement with the law that Eugene McNulty has sketched: If the poetic law-literature dynamic brings us face to face with language as the very building block of literary and legal performance, contemporary fiction has frequently turned to the ways in which the act of narrative can trace the exchanges between the private and public spaces of the law, between legal performance and social consequence, between the law and the Law.20

For these purposes, the literary texts featured in the contributions of this volume have been chosen from all three major genres: narrative, poetry and drama. While the reader will detect the differences within this wide range of novels – from Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) to Tara June Winch’s The Yield (2019) – these texts nevertheless share an interest in telling stories that are otherwise hegemonically suppressed. They make a case for minorities and create images that run counter to the law’s perception. All novels discussed in this volume can be regarded as directed towards literary negotiations of the shortcoming of the law – be those nineteenth-century English statutes, a twentieth-century Supreme Court ruling or the twenty-first-century UN-charter. The narrative texts gathered here tend to tell stories that run counter to the ‘stories’ of the law, but this volume also shows that non-linear poetic texts are no less relevant for law and literature studies. The poems discussed within this volume use the potential inherent in the poetic form to ‘put their case’ both on and beyond the page, playing with the poetic possibilities of non-linear literary composition. The third major genre, drama, is represented here both in its early modern and contemporary manifestations, indicating the fruitful potential of a text’s performance in comparison with the law’s performativity. Last but not least, several of the chapters in this special issue discuss the highly symbolic investment in character. Literary characters are always both referents in a structured universe and creatures of the text’s subconscious. As Alex Woloch has argued in his seminal work on the significance of character, “the literary character itself is divided,

19 Dolin, Law and Literature, 207. 20 Eugene McNulty, “Law in Contemporary Anglophone Literature,” in Law and Literature, ed. Kieran Dolin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017): 220–235, 228.

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always emerging at the juncture between structure and reference.”21 There is an inherent ambiguity in the being that is customarily referred to as ‘literary character,’ because they almost always bear a symbolic burden, as many literary texts discussed here point out. In her inspired psychoanalytic reading of the theory of law and literature, Susanne Gruss draws our attention to the repression of rivalling legal systems and other texts that allow legal systems to work in the first place. This legal unconscious, Gruss argues, has been fairly neglected in law and literature studies, although it allows innovative new insights, especially in her case in point, which is early modern drama. She singles out the early modern revenge tragedy as an inherently transgressive genre, in which the revenger as hero necessarily finds himself within the horns of a dilemma, due to an ‘affective bond’ to a patriarch or sovereign, as a representative of a legal system and the genre’s own laws that demand the hero’s vigilantly taking the law into his own hands. The plays’ central figures thus represent the breakdown of the law and invite a reading of early modern drama through legal psychoanalysis, as Gruss shows. The hero’s escape from his own drama in early modern revenge tragedy represents the genre’s propensity to transgression that most literary texts share. In this sense, it comes as no surprise that so many of the articles that have found their way into this volume are concerned not only with the law but also with their own laws. Literary texts can serve as a subject of the law and vice-versa in very different ways, and the following two articles consider the substantial ramifications of legal scrutiny into both authorship and censorship. Corinna Norrick-Rühl shows in her historical study of the relationship between John Hersey and Reader’s Digest publications how the very publication process can call into question not only the author’s control over their own work, but also their symbolical attachment to it in the figure of the author or author function. NorrickRühl raises the very difficult question of what happens to an author, literally (e.g., economically) and symbolically (in their author persona), when their works enter mass distribution and even condensation. She considers the trilateral relationship between author, publisher, and book club, in which the club symbolically takes over the author’s cultural significance, which is of legal, but also ideological concern, as it calls the author’s very integrity into question. While the book club therefore gained economically from the author’s symbolic function for their own work, the cultural significance of the work’s

21 Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2003): 17.

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own creator radically fell victim to aesthetic concerns of the book as a material commodity. Book distribution that questions the very role of the work’s author might appear more often as a negative effect of dependent authorship, but such legal control measures of literature may equally produce positive, even productive effects on the text itself. Both Norrick-Rühl’s article and Stephan Karschay’s subsequent contribution to this volume thus “contribute to a more complex and nuanced understanding of authorship in the field of power relations.”22 Karschay shows in his contribution to this volume how Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness, may be regarded as an example of how “censorship produced both repressive and productive effects.”23 He argues that the association with the decadent movement alone made Hall’s novel an object of scrutiny and censorship, thereby foregoing all potential of repression and ‘coming out’ as a queer text welcoming its criticism. Writing and publishing in the shadow of Oscar Wilde’s case, which looms large over the whole decadent movement, seems to allow Hall an openness about queer, bisexual or transgender identities prior to the codification of these terms that paved the way for the plurality of genders and sexes even now in the twenty-first century. Despite publishing under intense scrutiny in an age when the shock of the trials of Wilde had not ceased to enrage the legal establishment, Karschay argues, the affiliation with the decadent movement also allowed Hall a greater transgression, through her novel, than otherwise imaginable. Thus, finding productive energy in the decadent movement’s symbolic power to ‘destroy’ the young generation, Karschay suggests, allowed Hall an even more heartfelt plea for an existence between the historically established genders and a queer identity than at any other point in time. Unusually inept, the judge in the censorship case against Hall perceived that her novel constituted a plea for a non-normative existence and tried to give a voice to the voiceless, who had no acknowledged identity in early twentiethcentury society. It is certainly one of many aspects that unite the articles gathered here, since so many of them address central legal and especially territorial issues that present a non-hegemonic viewpoint. While this approach in law and literature studies usually calls forth a number of usual suspects that take such a literary approach, the texts discussed in the middle part of this volume convince not least because of their absolute novelty in the context. Mark Fortier has argued that, “without a doubt, modern literature has been more extensively 22 Barbara Leckie, “The Force of Law and Literature: Critiques of Ideology in Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu,” Mosaic 28.3 (1995): 109–136, 114. 23 Nancy L. Paxton, “Creativity and Censorship Laws: Lessons from the 1920s,” in Law and Literature, ed. Kieran Dolin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017): 322–337, 323.

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used by law and literature scholars than any other literary source,”24 yet the contemporary texts assembled here have been of little interest in the field so far, which is why they fit this collection extraordinarily well. Sarah Heinz’s subject of interest is a very timely Australian novel that heavily criticizes the notion of ‘white property’ from an Indigenous perspective, thereby drawing attention to the fact that to speak of property in this context is to speak of the legacies of colonialism, racism and genocide. Heinz’s discussion of Winch’s The Yield shows how different generations depicted in the text negotiate their symbolic non-existence, in view of ‘white’ laws that deny them their own land and, by extension, their own identity. They are non-persons on their own ground, symbolically extinguished by legal sanction. Like Hall almost one hundred years earlier, Winch voices a plea for acknowledgement, albeit for an entirely different group in an entirely different legal context. Yet, the anxiety to belong, the pain of not belonging, is a criterion these novels share, as they negotiate the legal oppression of identities and properties resulting from white, male, normative subjectivity. Heinz’s chosen novel is a representative of a new strand within Indigenous Australian writing that seeks to address the highly unjust notion of terra nullius, which allowed the settlement on and appropriation of territories in utter disregard of the Indigenous population, and with the poetry of contemporary Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez Stefanie Mueller takes on a similar case, albeit in a vastly different geographical context. Once again, the symbolic impact of legal territory and literature’s challenge of legal appropriation of land is the main concern of the chapter, but Mueller chooses a poetic text which runs deliberately counter to narrative linearity. She argues that the poetic, non-linear form of symbolic representation challenges the language of the law, especially in view of the fact that Perez writes poetry in English, but infuses the poems with Chamorro words, thereby representing the insularity of his chosen topic through the choice of linguistic hybridity. In an analogy between content and form, the poem thus demonstrates its concerns and prevents the reader from accessing a straightforward representation. The poem thus performs the titular unincorporation of Guam on the page, Mueller argues, and challenges the ‘naturalizing’ impetus of legal language. The idea of a stable law is subverted through poetic ambiguity, which once again emphasizes poetry’s power to draw attention to the artifice of the language of the law. Hence, Mueller’s contribution exemplifies poetry’s importance for law and literature. Birte Christ’s chapter on C. D. Wright follows suit in its appeal for the significance of poetry for studies both in Law and Literature and law and literature.

24 Ian Ward, Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008): 142.

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Her chosen poetic text foregrounds time, rather than space, but demonstrates just as powerfully an analogy between content and form. Christ shows that the poetry collection One Big Self: An Investigation (2007) constructs lyrical time as an analogy to carceral time and thereby invites an identification with the imprisoned ‘other.’ The inclusion of two chapters on poetry in this volume thus seeks to address a common oversight of poetry in law and literature studies that both Mueller and Christ have also drawn attention to elsewhere. As Christ argues, poetry still seems to suffer from the reputation that it is somehow turned ‘inward,’ concerned with the self and the particular, not the political. Her reading, however, shows that the poem is heavily invested in political aspects, immersing the reader in a rhythm of carceral space and time, yet thwarting any attempts at identification. The poetic form controls the reading experience, thus challenging its own capacity to speak across the binary of poetry and law. The poem’s non-linear form ‘puts a case’ of incarceration through a highly topical critique of the institutionalized American penal system, and Christ’s argument also places poetry firmly on the map of Law and Literature studies. Literary texts tend to engage in all kinds of social and political criticism, but the manner in which they do so is diverse. Anna Auguscik discusses two texts that engage in a debate on climate change through semi-fictional means, placing different characters as symbolic of the different sides of the argument. Both KS Robinson’s Antarctica (1998) and Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004) place themselves in dialogue with environmental law and controversially and provocatively enter the debate on climate change. As such, they embody the complicated stance on environmental law through questionable lawyer characters, who are no proper ‘characters’ after all. Both texts also share an invasion by their own authors who play with the nature of fiction, in order to contribute not only to the general awareness but also to the legal debate, which results in an ‘obsession’ with the legal discourse and its representatives, Auguscik argues. These representatives, the lawyer characters, are symbolic of the conflict at large and through their emblematic inclusion, the texts addressed in Auguscik’s chapter undermine their own genre, deliberately troubling the differentiation between fiction and nonfiction, novel and treatise. Robinson’s and Crichton’s novels place themselves in the highly charged nexus of politics and expert knowledge, exemplifying power relations at odds and embodying the stalemate that prevents necessary change. The topicality of the texts explored by Auguscik corresponds with the timely debate Markus Schmitz’s contribution enters into, because the ‘refugee debate’ that he dismantles for its paradoxical symbolisms taps into equally pressing concerns. Schmitz’s chapter challenges the symbolic representation of human smuggling as an act of crime. The novels Schmitz examines in his chapter counter over-generalizing migration policies with the tragedy of the individuals’

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experience and overtly challenge the language of the law. Schmitz’s deconstruction of the ‘refugee debate’ shows how this particular discourse wavers paradoxically between a symbolic representation of migrants as both victims and criminals. The literary texts he includes enter critically into the same debate, deciphering both ‘the legal and the illegalized migrant experience.’ Once again, the literary text enters into the legal discourse that objectifies a unitary image of ‘the migrant’ or ‘the refugee’ and tries to compensate a story that the law, in its universality, cannot tell. The penultimate contribution to this collection places law and literature on a par through the fictional trial on the stage. While the narrative aspects of both law and literature are usually foregrounded as their common origin, the drama shares a formal aspect of the law that the novel does not, through the very nature of performance. Marlena Tronicke addresses two recent British plays that exemplify the performative aspects of both law and literature, Nina Raine’s Consent (2017) and Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin (2020). She shows that these plays ‘put the case’ of women before the law in two very different historical contexts – present-day and eighteenth-century – thereby emphasizing the fact that, in terms of sexist hegemony, women are deliberately discriminated against in both plays. The legal aspects featured vividly on stage are compared to the spoken word in the court, both then and now, and Tronicke’s reading of the plays deciphers the inextricability of both performance and corporality that objectifies the female body. In the last chapter, this special issue on law and literature returns to the nineteenth century and the question of equity versus justice. As I suggest, the characters in Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) are charged as symbolic representations of law and equity, and Dickens ‘puts the case’ of the law as a villain. As in many other texts discussed here, the law thus takes an unflattering position in this reading of the novel, but this is not to say that this collection of essays is intended to take sides in the trial of law and literature. In fact, while all the contributions here originate from a perspective that seems to give the literary text priority, they are no less critical towards the literary than the legal composition. In this sense, this special issue tries to put its five cents into the fields of both law and literature and Law and Literature studies through a wide variety of subjects and contexts, laws and literatures.

Susanne Gruss

Reading the Unconscious of the Law: From Psychoanalytical Legal Theory to Early Modern Law and Literature Abstract: This article delineates psychoanalytical legal theory and stresses its underexplored potential within the law and literature paradigm in general, and for an analysis of early modern English law in particular. Using Jacques Derrida’s legal writing and the ‘mystical’ origin of the authority of the law he proposes as a starting point, the article moves to French legal historian Pierre Legendre’s psychoanalytical legal framework. Influenced by his training in Lacanian psychoanalysis, Legendre positions the subject in an affective relationship to the Law (of the Father) which mirrors the self-fashioning of James I, for instance, as a pater patriae. The second prominent representative of psychoanalytical legal theory, British legal historian Peter Goodrich, introduced Legendre’s body of work to an English-speaking audience and analyses the development of the English common law in the early modern age in terms of repression (of unrecognized strands of legal writing and thinking). This article argues that both of these theorists could be used fruitfully for an analysis of early modern law and literature and early modern drama, especially since their theories have not yet been fully explored within the field of law and literature.

Jacques Derrida’s Legal Thinking in British Law and Literature Psychoanalysis has always been intimately connected to both literature and the law even though the first connection is, perhaps, more immediately obvious than the second: Sigmund Freud (in)famously used mythological and literary texts such as the myth of Narcissus, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599–1601), or E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1816) to explicate and illustrate narcissism, the Oedipus complex, and the uncanny/ castration anxiety, respectively. But as the law may be regarded as a societal means to keep transgression at bay, it is likewise never far from psychoanalytical thought. Freudian individuation is based on the fear of a father figure that threatens to punish transgressive desire; the (male) Lacanian subject becomes a fully articulate member of the symbolic order (i.e., of language) via access to the Law of the Father, the nom/non https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-002

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du père; and for Julia Kristeva, to name a female critic invested in questioning and deconstructing the predominantly patriarchal frameworks of Freud and Jacques Lacan, the abject reminds us of social taboos and has to be contained in order to keep our subjectivity in a state of constantly precarious stability. Sue Chaplin, who explores the connection of law, literature, and psychoanalysis with reference to gothic fiction, notes that for Kristeva, the law is a “‘dividing line’ that serves to exclude filth and thereby to define the integrity of individual and communal identity, and what Kristeva’s analysis points to is precisely the instability of this borderline.”1 In this article, I will explore law, psychoanalytical (legal) theory, and its relevance for an analysis of law and literature in early modern English literature by way of an introduction to the much lesser known psychoanalytical legal framework of Pierre Legendre, a French psychoanalyst and legal historian who adopts and expands a predominantly Lacanian approach to think about the law by way of a subject’s affective conjunction to the law as a symbolic order based on family structures (Lacan’s law of the father). In a next step, I will look at the work of Peter Goodrich, who is both a representative of British law and literature and a specialist in early modern English law,2 thus bridging the gap between twentieth-century legal theory and early modern English law and literature, one of the predominant fields in the development of law and literature as a critical paradigm ever since the 1980s.3 Goodrich’s main strand of argumentation – that legal systems only work because rivalling legal systems and texts are repressed

1 Sue Chaplin, The Gothic and the Rule of Law, 1764–1820 (Houndmills and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 22. 2 In contrast to the largely US-American Law-and-Literature movement, which positions literature as an ‘ethical corrective’ as of yet missing in legal education, British law and literature is strongly influenced by post-structuralist thought and predominantly interested in a deconstruction of the underlying ideological assumption of the law as a seemingly ‘universal’ text. It has become one of the cornerstones of a poststructuralist theory of justice in the British legal academy since the mid-1980s. For a brief delineation of the development of British critical legal studies see Greta Olson, “De-Americanizing Law and Literature Narratives: Opening Up the Story,” Law and Literature 22.2 (2010): 338–364, esp. 347–349. Olson stresses that, in British works, law “is understood to manifest itself not only in legislation, judgments, and public policy but also in images themselves” (Olson 2010, 349). 3 Many critics have argued that the early modern age is particularly fruitful for an analysis of law and literature, not least because the disciplines were not yet as clearly distinct as they are now. Early modern plays frequently include court and trial scenes, writers such as John Marston or Francis Beaumont were enrolled at the Inns of Court, and staple texts of the early Lawand-Literature movement in the United States that are still crucial in today’s iterations of the field include Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596–1599) and Measure for Measure (1603–1604).

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(which, in effect, creates a legal unconscious) – can be applied to the construction of the early modern English common-law discourse as the dominant legal and political ‘language’ at the expense of other legal texts and systems. In a short conclusion, I point to revenge tragedy as one exemplary and notoriously ‘transgressive’ genre that might profit from psychoanalytical legal readings by reference to Legendre’s, Goodrich’s, and Georges Bataille’s critical frameworks. The starting point for my delineation of psychoanalytical theory is, perhaps surprisingly, the legal thinking of Jacques Derrida, which develops over almost a decade, starting with “The Law of Genre” (1980), which – as the title indicates – is as much concerned with genre as it is with the law. It is followed by “Before the Law” (1984), which focuses on Kafka’s short story of the same name (one of the set texts of US-American Law-and-Literature courses), and culminates in “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’” (1989).4 Derrida’s ‘trio’ of articles on genre and legal thinking not only facilitates the conception of law in terms of genre (and of genre in terms of the law), his critical writing also provides a vantage point for the perception of the law in terms of psychoanalysis and repression. The elusive ‘mystical foundation’ of authority/law he positions in the last essay, where he argues that the source of law is something that always already evades rational narrative, can easily be interpreted as a point of origin that has been suppressed – an unconscious of the law, as critics looking at the law in psychoanalytical terms have pointed out. Pierre Legrand, for instance, highlights that legal thinking as Derrida describes it “has been repressing all memory of the impurity of its condition [. . .].”5 With reference to the English legal system this fits descriptions of the origin of the English common-law system (or rather, the lack thereof) in texts such as prominent common lawyer Edward Coke’s Reports (publ. 1600–1659).6 The largely unwritten, precedent-based common law arguably became the predominant legal discourse in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. In the discursive introduction to his Reports (which document the trials and cases Coke witnessed

4 Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980): 55–81; “Before the Law,” trans. Avital Ronell and Christine Roulston, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992): 181–220 (the English translation of Derrida’s 1982 lecture was first published as “Devant la loi” in 1987); and “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” trans. Mary Quaintance, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002): 230–293 (an earlier version of the text including both the French original and an English translation was published in the Cardozo Law Review 11.5/6 [1990]: 919–1045). 5 Pierre Legrand, “Introduction (Of Derrida’s Law),” in Derrida and Law, ed. Pierre Legrand (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate): xi–xlv, xxii. 6 For an accessible edition of Coke’s Reports see Edward Coke, The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, Knt.: In Thirteen Parts, eds. John Henry Thomas and John Farquhar Fraser, 7 vols. (London and Dublin: Joseph Butterworth and Son and J. Cooke, 1826).

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throughout his long career as a common lawyer), Coke repeatedly emphasizes the supposed antiquity and timelessness of the common law and the concomitant universality of this unwritten corpus of foundational English law. In doing so, however, he essentially veils the fact that, in publishing his Reports and framing them with paratextual material that gains currency via his own position as a legal authority, he was creating a (legal) narrative of the common law. Derridean legal thinking can thus, I would suggest, be read as the ‘mystical foundation’ of much critical legal thinking in the UK. The ‘modus operandi’ of British law and literature studies is characterized by a self-conscious attempt to demarcate and establish a specifically British approach to law and literature distinct from US-American Law-and-Literature that is based on the English legal system and its cultural specificities. Clearly differentiated from Law-and-Literature in terminology and self-description – Greta Olson lists self-denominations such as “British critical legal studies, critical jurisprudence, or a postmodernist or an aesthetic philosophy of justice”7 – British law and literature was and is, as the terminology already indicates, strongly influenced by poststructuralism. Whereas Law-and-Literature remains associated with the problematic interpretation of (canonical, capital-L) Literature as law’s ethical corrective, the British equivalent is more interested in deconstructing and consequently destabilizing the law itself, an objective which is habitually linked to psychoanalytical reading strategies. “A common theme,” Olson notes, “is to prove to law its repressed unconscious, metaphoricity and entanglements. Effectively, law goes into analysis.”8 Consequently, psychoanalysis is one important theoretical approach for British law and literature practitioners to access the field. Legal texts and legal culture are analyzed for traces of their ‘unconscious,’ using both psychoanalytical and literary reading strategies: The gaps, slips and other condensations of the text, or case law and judgment, are taken as expressions of a textual unconscious, of an unwritten history of legal affections and repressions as they motivate both judgment and law.9

7 Olson, “De-Americanizing Law and Literature Narratives,” 346. 8 Greta Olson, “Law Is Not Turgid and Literature Not Soft and Fleshy: Gendering and Heteronormativity in Law and Literature Scholarship,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 36 (2012): 65–86, 79. 9 Peter Goodrich and David G. Carlson, “Introduction,” in Law and the Postmodern Mind: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Jurisprudence, eds. Peter Goodrich and David G. Carlson (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998): 1–11, 5.

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Law denotes the Lacanian law of the father in many poststructuralist readings that make use of a psychoanalytical framework, which brings with it a heightened interest in language and questions of representation.10 Ronnie Warrington and Costaz Douzinas (self-)consciously describe modern legal systems as “a literature which represses its literary quality,”11 that is a corpus of texts that can (and must) be interpreted for the symptoms of its repressed literariness or fictionality.12 This approach embraces a view of legal texts that goes beyond their rhetorical creation of (jurisdictional) meaning and treats them as equivalent to literary and other cultural texts.

Pierre Legendre: Being Intimate with the Law My theoretical steppingstone for this article is French psychoanalyst and historian of law Pierre Legendre, a trained Lacanian psychoanalyst who remains somewhat of a rogue presence in contemporary legal thinking. Despite Peter Goodrich’s attempts to popularize Legendre’s “psychoanalytic jurisprudence” in his own texts,13

10 See Costas Douzinas, Ronnie Warrington and Shaun McVeigh, Postmodern Jurisprudence: The Law of Text in the Texts of Law (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). The three critics define the position of law in poststructuralism as follows: “The law of the father and of desire in psychoanalytic versions; the law of power and discipline in political versions; the laws of mappings of places and knowledges in spatial and post-epistemological versions” (ix). 11 Ronnie Warrington and Costas Douzinas, “The Trials of Law and Literature,” Law and Critique 6.2 (1995): 135–165, 141. 12 Similar diagnoses of an unconscious of legal institutions can, of course, be found in texts associated with US-American Law-and-Literature. In “Nomos and Narrative,” Robert M. Cover writes about the history of American courts: “It is remarkable that in myth and history the origin of and justification for a court is rarely understood to be the need for law. Rather, it is understood to be the need to suppress law, to choose between two or more laws, to impose upon laws a hierarchy” (Harvard Law Review 97.1 [1983]: 4–68, 40). It is, however, not a major characteristic of the movement. 13 Peter Goodrich, “Introduction: Psychoanalysis and Law,” in Pierre Legendre, Law and the Unconscious: A Legendre Reader, ed. Peter Goodrich (London: Macmillan, 1997): 1–36, 5. See especially Peter Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), chapter 8, “Law’s Emotional Body: Image and Aesthetic in the Work of Pierre Legendre” (262–295); Goodrich’s edition of key texts by Legendre, Law and the Unconscious: A Legendre Reader (London: Macmillan, 1997); Peter Goodrich and David Gray Carlson (eds.), Law and the Postmodern Mind: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Jurisprudence (Ann Abor: U of Michigan P, 1998); and Peter Goodrich, Lior Barshack and Anton Schütz (eds.), Law, Text, Terror: Essays for Pierre Legendre (London: Glass House P, 2006). Apart from Goodrich’s Legendre Reader, which compiles translations from key texts, much of Legendre’s work is not (yet) available in English.

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and notwithstanding the fact that the conception of an ‘unconscious’ of the law is a well-established element of law and literature criticism by now, Legendre has not (yet) made much impact on readings of law and literature. This is certainly at least partly due to Legendre’s Lacanian training, which becomes palpable in a style that is at times deliberately obscure, evocative in its metaphoricity but resistant to clear-cut analysis (and, I should add, to succinct academic summaries). In “Dance of Law” (1978), for instance, he convincingly explores the similarities of law and dance by focusing on the ceremonial character of both; his opening statement, “Everyone comes to dance with the Law . . .,”14 while suggestive in its visuality, remains as enigmatic as Franz Kafka’s gatekeeper in The Trial (1915). This is typical for Legendre’s writing, his self-professed style barbaroide which, as Goodrich notes, “is avowedly heretical, [ . . . and] tends to ignore conventional academic criteria of blandness or lucidity in favor of a more poetic and wavering texture.”15 In a similar fashion, Anton Schütz observes that Legendre’s texts are characterized by “a direct and always either sensuously appealing or sensuously aggressive, sometimes hyperbolic, sometimes ultraexplicit, style of formulation.”16 Legendre himself is (self-)conscious of the fact that psychoanalytical approaches are not accepted in legal studies (or were not accepted at the time of writing) – “the history of law,” he writes drily, “is horrified at the very mention of Freud, or, worse still, Lacan”17 – yet also plays quite consciously and at times smugly with his notoriety as an outsider to the establishment of legal thinking who has, one might add, been an accepted part of this very establishment for many years (Legendre is professor emeritus of Sorbonne University, where he held a professorship of Medieval Legal History until 2005); quite fittingly, then, Schütz refers to Legendre as “an outlawed insider.”18 For my thinking in the context of this

14 Pierre Legendre, “Dance of Law” [1978], in Law and the Unconscious: A Legendre Reader, ed. Peter Goodrich, trans. Peter Goodrich, with Alain Pottage and Anton Schütz (London: Macmillan, 1997): 37–66, 37. “Dance of Law” is an extract from Legendre’s La Passion d’être un autre: Etude pour la danse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978). 15 Peter Goodrich, “An Abbreviated Glossary,” in Law and the Unconscious A Legendre Reader, ed. Peter Goodrich (London: Macmillan, 1997): 257–262, 257. 16 Anton Schütz, “Sons of Writ, Sons of Wrath: Pierre Legendre’s Critique of Rational LawGiving,” in Law and the Postmodern Mind: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Jurisprudence, eds. Peter Goodrich and David G. Carlson (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998): 193–222, 197. 17 Pierre Legendre, “The Masters of Law: A Study of the Dogmatic Function” [1983], in Law and the Unconscious: A Legendre Reader, ed. Peter Goodrich, trans. Peter Goodrich, with Alain Pottage and Anton Schütz (London: Macmillan, 1997): 98–133, 101. Legendre’s article was first published in Annales: Economies – Sociétés – Civilisations 38 (1983). Further references in the text, abbreviated as “MoL.” 18 Schütz, “Sons of Writ,” 195.

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article, Legendre’s work is crucial in his combination of psychoanalysis, law and literature, as well as his exploration of transgression. Two of Legendre’s key arguments are of particular use, in order to think through these concepts. One is his fundamental assumption that the unconscious is an indispensable aspect of any analysis of legal structures. In an interview with Goodrich, for example, Legendre emphasizes that “structural constructions of normativity, which are concerned with the human subject who is endowed with an unconscious, necessarily deal with unconscious representations.”19 The other is that psychoanalysis and the Law are both based on (family) relations, the body, and reproduction.20 As briefly noted at the beginning of this article, Lacan links a child’s entry into the symbolic order (i.e., the acquisition of language and the social norms, conventions, and restrictions it entails) with the intervention of the father – the nom/non du père: “It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law.”21 For Lacan, entry into the symbolic consequently means a simultaneous entry into a legal definition of the self via the figure of the father as law-giver and law-enforcer. In a variation of the Lacanian symbolic, Legendre prioritizes law over language in the development of subjectivity and thus identifies a juridical component in the formation of the subject: “For each subject,” Legendre argues in “The Masters of Law: A Study of the Dogmatic Function” (1983): Law is a function played by the father, or what we call the father, according to a triangular Oedipal logic. The entire structure of legality is built upon these foundations because these are the principles of authority and legitimacy. Institutions, therefore, have a primary rela(MoL, 117) tion to the mechanism of human desire and to its genealogical recognition.22

Legendre’s approach to legal thinking is, as this quote demonstrates, deeply enmeshed in psychoanalytical thinking, especially in concepts on the formation

19 See Peter Goodrich, “The Lost Temporality of Law: An Interview with Pierre Legendre,” Law and Critique 1.1 (1990): 3–20, 18. 20 In using both lowercase ‘law’ and uppercase ‘Law,’ I follow Goodrich’s distinction of both concepts in Legendre’s work. Goodrich uses “the uppercase Law to mimick Lacan’s definition of symbolic Law, and the lower case to refer to positive law [. . .].” Peter Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990): 18. 21 Jacques Lacan, “The Symbolic Order” (from “The Function and the Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”) [1953], in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1998): 184–189, 186. 22 Chaplin notes that Legendre “theorises human subjectivity as juridical subjectivity: selfidentity is constituted through a system of lineage institutionalised as law.” (Chaplin, The Gothic, 57).

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of the subject, and posits an inherently intimate and familial connection of the individual to the Law that results in an intimately affective connection to (positive) law. In Legendre, Law becomes the foundational social principle of authority, a paternal principle that is similar to Freud’s construction of the social in terms of the family or Lacan’s theorization of society in terms of the symbolic order and, importantly, visible in legal history (the position of the paterfamilias as a figure of absolute power in Roman law would be one such example).23 As in Lacan, entry into the symbolic order (i.e., into Law) is described as a ‘second birth’ which is linked, for Legendre, to institutionalized law – the “birth into an institution of speech” at the same time “founds the regulation of life in all societies,”24 he points out in “Hermes and Institutional Structures: An Essay on Dogmatic Communication” (1993). This argument is reiterated in several of Legendre’s texts: in the slightly earlier “The Judge amongst the Interpreters: Psychoanalysis and Legal Judgment” (1992), for a instance, he highlights that “the foundation of Law is the foundation of social speech”;25 and in his “Introduction to the Theory of the Image: Narcissus and the Other in the Mirror” (1994), Legendre stresses that accepting the Law as symbolic allows him to describe it as having “a representational effect which civilises the subject [. . .].”26

23 Not incidentally, Legendre is a specialist on Roman law. His doctoral thesis The Penetration of Roman Law into Classical Canon Law from Gratian to Innocent IV, written before he became acquainted with Lacan, focuses on Roman law (La Pénétration du droit Romain dans le droit canonique classique de Gratien à Innicent IV, publ. Paris: Imprimerie Jouve, 1964). It is quite possible that his early involvement with Roman law sparked his conceptualization of the symbolic order in terms of the Law after his Lacanian training. 24 Pierre Legendre, “Hermes and Institutional Structures: An Essay on Dogmatic Communication” [1993], in Law and the Unconscious: A Legendre Reader, ed. Peter Goodrich, trans. Peter Goodrich, with Alain Pottage and Anton Schütz (London: Macmillan, 1997): 137–163. The article was first published in Lucien Sfez (ed.), Dictionaire critique de la communication (Paris: PUF, 1993). Further references in the text, abbreviated as “HIS.” 25 Pierre Legendre, “The Judge amongst the Interpreters: Psychoanalysis and Legal Judgment” [1992], in Law and the Unconscious: A Legendre Reader, ed. Peter Goodrich, trans. Peter Goodrich, with Alain Pottage and Anton Schütz (London: Macmillan, 1997): 164–210, 185. Excerpt translated from Les Enfants du texte: Etude sur la function parentale des Etats. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1992. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “LU.” 26 Pierre Legendre, “Introduction to the Theory of the Image: Narcissus and the Other in the Mirror” [1994], in Law and the Unconscious: A Legendre Reader, ed. Peter Goodrich, transl. Peter Goodrich, with Alain Pottage and Anton Schütz (London: Macmillan, 2007): 211–254, 229. Excerpt translated from Dieu au mirroir: Etude sur l’institution des images (Paris: Librarie Arthème Fayard, 1994). See Alain Pottage, “Crime and Culture: The Relevance of the Psychoanalytical,” The Modern Law Review 55.3 (1992): 421–438, 422. Pottage observes that, for Legendre, “[t]o be a subject of law is to be civilised into the order of culture.”

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In extension of Lacan, the symbolic order (and, with it, identity) is structured via the Law. As Alain Pottage notes, for Legendre, “[s]ubjectivity and subjectification are essentially juridical. [. . .] The cycle of life as the succession of birth and death is symbolized in juridical terms.”27 As a social (and familial) principle, Law thus affects the role of each subject within the family, within a given institution or within a society, and consequently can be described as a subjective attachment of each individual to the Law (and, by extension, the law) that is crucial for the functioning of any legal discourse. For Legendre, the Law, crucially, must be conceptualized in affective as well as in rational terms; he talks about an “other dimension of law,” which “forces us to consider the function of the institution as a bond, which integrates the elements of subjectivity, the subject and its unconscious representations.”28 What he tries to visualize is, consequently, the engagement of the subject, of affect and social institutions in legal language and legal structures that are always founded in and linked to the unconscious.29 “The domestic family structure,” then, Goodrich points out, not only becomes “the point of entry into the symbolic” (as in Lacan), it also implies “a law which attaches itself to the most intimate or private spaces of subjective life, a law that embeds itself within the affective structure of the individual [. . .].”30 Interestingly, both this familial construction of the Law and Legendre’s emphasis on the emotional connection of the individual to the legal structures we are embedded in allow an easy engagement of poststructuralist and psychoanalytical legal theory with early modern conceptions of the relation of individual and law, which was habitually linked to family structures: James I, for instance, consciously stylized himself as England and Scotland’s pater patriae, and described the relationship of the king to his subjects as that of a (loving, but allpowerful) father to his children in political texts like The Trew Law of Free

27 Alain Pottage, “The Paternity of Law,” in Politics, Postmodernity, and Critical Legal Studies: The Legality of the Contingent, eds. Costas Douzinas, Peter Goodrich, and Yifat Hachamovitch (London and New York: Routledge, 1994): 147–186, 151. 28 Pierre Legendre, “The Other Dimension of Law,” in Law and the Postmodern Mind: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Jurisprudence, eds. Peter Goodrich and David G. Carlson (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998): 175–192, 190 [original emphasis]. 29 See Clemens Pornschlegel, Nach dem Poststrukturalismus: Französische Fragen der 1990er und 2000er Jahre – Essays zu Olivier Rolin, Gilles Châtelet, Maurice G. Dantec, Mara Goyet, Claude Lefort, Alain Supiot, Pierre Legendre (Vienna and Berlin: Turia + Kant, 2014): 170: “Es geht vielmehr darum, das wechselseitige, für das Auftauchen eines menschlichen Subjekts notwendige Ineinandergreifen institutioneller und subjektiver Strukturen zu begreifen, jene Subjektivierungsmechanismen und -techniken, mit denen jede politische Organisation [. . .] an das unbewusste Begehren der Subjekte rührt [. . .].” 30 Goodrich, “Psychoanalysis and Law,” 31.

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Monarchies (1598). In this text – often read as James’s absolutist ‘manifesto’ – he describes the king as “a louing Father” who looks after his subjects like the head of a household would after his family, and who is accountable only to God, “who placed him as his lieutenant ouer them.”31 Following an argument by Paul Raffield, the function of early modern royal portraiture can equally be read as that of an ideological tool which addresses the affective ties of ruler and subject: “Insofar as the authority of law has been linked to the affective capacity of the image to control and direct the gaze of its audience,” Raffield convincingly maintains, “the depiction of the monarch as Imago Dei remained a potent rhetorical instrument. The royal portrait lent visible, tangible form to the mystical basis of the law’s authority.”32 At the same time, this subjectivity of the Law, understood as an affective attachment, highlights the instability and constructedness of positive law as yet another legal fiction based on personal affiliation and affection – in the case of James I, an ideological narrative used to legitimize his own understanding of the divine right of kings. As Legendre emphasizes, a “legal system is first and foremost a social technique of communication; it is the only technique which can assure the entry of human subjects into the order of Law” (MoL, 103). Goodrich points out that Law, “for Legendre, is intrinsic to the formation of the individual subject, and law is both historically and theoretically at the centre of the symbolic order in relation to which individual identity is formed.”33 Clearly influenced by deconstruction, Legendre’s symbolic order of the Law is based on a source of authority that is forever absent, an “unsayable or immutable yet invisible source of law, which can only be represented or symbolised in the various figures of the power of law [. . .].”34 As for Derrida, for Legendre the Law is ‘mystical’ and not tangible, yet it defines who and what we are. At the same time, and following a similar trajectory as Derrida, the law is always already linked to transgression: “Whatever has to do with the social transmission of law necessarily has to do with the notion of interdiction, or, in other words, with transgression” (MoL, 131) and excess.35 Comparable to the French deconstructionist, 31 James I and VI, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies [1598], in Political Writings, ed. J. P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 62–84, 65. 32 Paul Raffield, Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution: Late-Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law (Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Pub, 2010), 2. 33 Goodrich, “Psychoanalysis and Law,” 6. 34 Goodrich, “Psychoanalysis and Law,” 13. See also Goodrich’s interview with Legendre for a more detailed discussion of the impact of psychoanalysis on Legendre’s thinking: Law and Critque 1.1 (1990): 3–20. 35 See Schütz, “Sons of Writ,” 205: “Being incapable of preventing transgression, the Law can do no more than authorize ways of reacting.”

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Legendre connects law to an element of lawlessness that exceeds and defies law – “the exception, the outside of law that is so by virtue of its lack of law, its excess textuality, its status beyond the limit”36 – at the same time as it is integral to the law. In Goodrich’s words, there “is inevitably more to law than the letter or litera of the rule. There is already indeed in that very formulation an ambiguity or excess: the letter has to be written, it corresponds, it comes from a place, a person, an institution.”37 More importantly, for my own interest in early modern law and literature, life (and with it, Law) are metaphorically linked to theatre and the stage by the French theorist. In “Masters of Law,” Legendre describes legal interpretation as “a system of interpretation in the literary or theatrical sense” (MoL, 125). This argument, which is clearly reminiscent of the ‘law as literature’-paradigm in Law-and-Literature, is strengthened in both “Hermes and Institutional Structures” and “Judge amongst the Interpreters.” In these texts, Legendre emphasizes that the subject’s attachment to legal structures is mirrored by the rulers’ use of theatrical tropes and ritual to reciprocate this affective investment (“Political love [. . .] represents by theatrical means,” LU, 161) and – in an analysis of the importance of ritual in legal judgements – pinpoints “the theatrical rites of tragedy” (LU, 199) as one of the most familiar social rituals that allow cultures access to the Law of the father (i.e., the legal sphere). What Goodrich, Barshack, and Schütz describe as “the social theatre of institutional life” in Legendre’s texts is effectively framed in theatrical terms,38 which facilitates a utilization of his theses for the analysis of literary texts (and their engagement with legal frameworks). Law in Legendre becomes manifest not only in literary texts, but in ‘texts’ more generally, “in rites and ceremonies, orchestrations, liturgies, images, staging itself for the spectators of the state,”39 as Julie Stone Peters argues, essentially turning legal communication into a performative representation of the Law. Deconstruction and psychoanalysis hence converge in legal performance, which is used to conceal the ‘mystical’ foundation of the Law – and thus legitimates authority via

36 Peter Goodrich, Lior Barshack and Anton Schütz, “Introduction,” in Law, Text, Terror: Essays for Pierre Legendre, eds. Peter Goodrich, Lior Barshack and Anton Schütz (London: Glass House P, 2006): 1–10, 6. 37 Peter Goodrich, “A Theory of the Nomogram,” in Law, Text, Terror: Essays for Pierre Legendre, eds. Peter Goodrich, Lior Barshack and Anton Schütz (London: Glass House Press, 2006): 13–33, 33. 38 Goodrich, Barshack and Schütz, “Introduction,” 3. 39 Julie Stone Peters, “Legal Performance Good and Bad,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 4 (2008): 179–200, 189.

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performativity40 – as well as opening up the possibility of resistance to the law by alluding to that which has been suppressed by the Law.

Peter Goodrich: Psychoanalysis and/in Early Modern Law By this point, Peter Goodrich has haunted a substantial part of this article as a key player in British (poststructuralist) law and literature, an advocate and tireless promoter of Legendre, and an adherent to legal psychoanalysis in his own critical work. Goodrich’s thinking is of specific interest here as he additionally specializes in early modern studies and consequently brings together psychoanalytical legal theory and the study of early modern English law, two aspects which still rarely go together, as I have stressed above. As a legal historian, “Goodrich’s historical work has always insisted on the tradition of the common law as a genre of argument and action in which rhetoric assumes a primary role,”41 and I will therefore turn to his work not only to explore psychoanalytical legal theory further, but also to build a bridge from (poststructuralist) law and literature to early modern law, early modern literature, and early modern law and literature. Goodrich, who currently holds a post as professor of law at Cardozo Law School and is the managing editor of Law and Literature as well as the founding editor of Law and Critique, two of the pivotal journals in the field, is habitually associated with critical legal studies, postmodern jurisprudence, psychoanalytical legal studies, as well as the legal history of early modern England.42 In the interdisciplinary combination of linguistics, psychoanalysis, and legal analysis that is characteristic of his approach, Goodrich “has opened up a new form of critical enquiry with his insistence that the language of law contains a hidden reservoir of emotions and passions that are generally repressed but become concretized in legal facts [. . .].”43 He links early modern legal culture and 40 See Peters, “Legal Performance,” 196. 41 Desmond Manderson, “Literature in Law – Judicial Method, Epistemology, Strategy, and Doctrine,” University of New South Wales Law Journal 38.4 (2015): 1300–1315, 1301. 42 See Peter Goodrich, Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995): 13, where Goodrich aligns his own monograph with critical legal studies: “Critical legal studies has as one of its goals that of rewriting the arts of law, that of writing differently and so also thinking the difference of law.” 43 Monika Fludernik and Greta Olson, “Introduction,” in In the Grip of the Law: Trials, Prisons and the Space Between, eds. Monika Fludernik and Greta Olson (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2004): xiii–liv, xl.

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postmodern (legal) thought via the metaphoric similarities of the language he analyses, “[t]he attribution of darkness, melancholy, fragmentation, waste and irrationality are common themes in the early doctrinal tradition in common law [. . .].”44 “Fragmentation” and “irrationality” are equally, of course, strongly associated with the fragmented culture of postmodernity (as is the sense of crisis as well as the “loss of confidence in orthodoxy,”45 mentioned slightly later in the same text), in which the “arbitrary judgments” of legal institutions serve to question law as yet another grand narrative. At the same time, these characteristics were consistently attributed to the language of early modern law, and Goodrich uses these historical parallels in order to argue that legal language is never accidental (nor, for that matter, objective). An analysis of ‘law as literature’ that takes into account the rhetorical structure of texts as well as the traces of what has not been said allows critics, he maintains, to uncover an institutional unconscious. In the context of the (early modern) common law especially, the ‘authentic truth’ (as well as the ‘source’) of law eludes representation. Olson summarizes that, for Goodrich, “the establishment of law as a science involved a disregard for the context in which legal texts were created.”46 Establishing legal systems and the law as a scientific discipline often disregards the historical complications of competing legal systems (such as the common law, statute law, the court of equity, the court of admiralty, the ecclesiastical courts, and various other courts in early modern England) in order to create an illusion of longevity, universality, and (perhaps most importantly) reliability. This specific version of psychoanalytical law and literature is developed (among other things) in Goodrich’s most influential monographs to date, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (1990), Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law (1995), and Law in the Courts of Love (1996).47 In

44 Douzinas, Goodrich and Hachamovitch, Politics, Postmodernity, and Critical Legal Studies, 3. Even though the “Introduction: Politics, Ethics and the Legality of the Contingent” was cowritten by the three editors of the above, Goodrich’s thinking is clearly visible in this specific quotation. Descriptions of (the language of the) the common law as an irrational structure also mark the beginnings of Goodrich’s Languages of Law (5–9) and Oedipus Lex (1–13). 45 Douzinas, Goodrich and Hachamovitch, Politics, Postmodernity, and Critical Legal Studies, 3. 46 Greta Olson, “Narration and Narrative in Legal Discourse” (May 31, 2014), The Living Handbook of Narratology (acc. 13 January 2017). 47 Peter Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990); Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1995); Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). Further references in the text, abbreviated as “LoL,” “OL” and “LCL.”

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all three texts, the development of the English legal system in the early modern age and the position of the common law in early modern England are primary topics of analysis. Both Languages of Law and Oedipus Lex start out with an eclectic overview of the reputation of the legal profession in early modern England in humanist tracts, legal texts, historiographic accounts and medical textbooks such as Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). In the texts Goodrich analyses, the law is conceptualized metaphorically in terms of condemnation, addiction, and melancholia – a medicalization and pathologization of the law which convincingly (and conveniently) links it to the unconscious. Languages of Law is more interested in an, albeit at times unconventional, history of the common law, and forms the starting point of Goodrich’s attempts to popularize Legendre, a circumstance which also informs Goodrich’s own arguments. Douzinas, Warrington, and McVeigh, for instance, sum up Goodrich’s own depiction of a subject’s legal position as follows: “We are law’s creation. Our name, referent and cause [. . .] are theatrical repetitions of the veridical and juridical truths that the linguistic and legal contracts communicate to us.”48 This quotation indicates Goodrich’s indebtedness to Legendre’s theses as well as his interest in performance and literature; in combination with is specialization in early modern English law, it is surprising that his work has not made a bigger impact in law and literature analyses in this subfield yet. Goodrich’s position as a rogue historiographer of the common law (a self-conception which might equally explain his interest in Legendre) serves to introduce the concept of the common law as a successful mythical narrative which “rests on a strategic obscuring or forgetting of its own processes of institutionalisation.”49 For Goodrich (and this is a concept that he has adapted from Legendre), the law binds its subjects in an affective manner that cannot be articulated consciously. He writes: If law binds, it binds deceptively, it binds unconsciously and it binds affectively – through acceptance, through the identities of speech and the masks of personality rather than explicitly through any paramilitary invasion of everyday life. (LoL, 9)

While this quotation merely alludes to psychoanalytical theory (the law “binds unconsciously”) rather than making explicit use of it, in Oedipus Lex Goodrich fully develops his notion of a “psychoanalytic jurisprudence” (OL, 11). The objective language of the law and the ways in which it orders lives and society is, 48 Douzinas, Warrington and McVeigh, Postmodern Jurisprudence, 125. 49 Greta Olson and Martin A. Kayman, “Introduction: From ‘Law-and-Literature’ to ‘Law, Literature, and Language’ – A Comparative Approach,” European Journal of English Studies 11.1 (2007): 1–15, 6.

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Goodrich maintains, a mere façade constructed and reiterated (or, one might say, performed) to hide the law’s dark underbelly, its unconscious: “Is it possible,” he asks, “that the positive imagery of law, the dreams of order, science, reason, and justice, are simply the melancholic lawyer’s projection to cover the lack of reason, system, and justice in a common law” (OL, 8) that is infinitely fractured in the multiplicity of its customs, statutes, and precedents? His language is consciously allusive: the law “dreams,” lawyers are “melancholic,” and the law’s strategy is one of ‘covering up’ – that is, of repression. His general approach combines rhetoric, aesthetics, and, of course, psychoanalysis in an analysis of institutional repression which he employs to critique the (common) law by highlighting its “pretensions to rational authority.”50 The cultural specificities of the common law – its disparate and at times obscure sources as well as the different languages (Latin, Law French, and English) – make it an especially fruitful topic for psychoanalytical criticism, Goodrich argues. He also links the multiplicity of the English legal system to a notion of an excess in the law which could not be put into (rational) words and therefore had to be repressed, in order to create “that fantasm of unity necessary for the maintenance of the profession itself” (OL, 27). His goal is a rewriting of the law, which recovers those aspects that have been repressed, “the faces of the vernacular, of nature, of equity, of justice, of women, of aliens, of ethics, of subjectivities, and more distantly and darkly of violence, desire, and the failures or miscarriages of law” (OL, 37). With Law in the Courts of Law, Goodrich explicitly positions himself in the context of Law-and-Literature and, more specifically, ‘law as literature.’ The monograph is written as a series of essays that attack established law (and legal writing) – a consciously oppositional and polemical stance that bears a strong resemblance to Legendre’s position, whose predilection for an unconventional style that defies academic conventions Goodrich shares – and revisit several of the central paradigms and concepts of Law-and-Literature but frame them within an early modern context. Goodrich defines law as a genre (“the literary genre of law,” LCL, 8), as “a literature which denies its literary qualities” (LCL, 112). He emphasizes its fictitiousness, which represses the moment of its invention or composition (or, to return briefly to Derrida, its ‘mystical foundation’). For Goodrich, law is a literary genre, which denies its generic affiliation to literature, in order to protect is authority: “In claiming to escape from the contingencies of genre, in forgetting its sources, its languages, its judges and legislators, law aspires to assume the modern character and quality of the discourse of fate” (LCL, 112). He

50 Olson, “Narration and Narrative,” n.p.

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defines genre in terms of an “institutional memory,” which includes “the criteria that govern the circulation and interpretation of texts” (LCL, 124). If dramatic genres such as tragedy or tragicomedy are, according to this legally framed definition of genre, determined and codified according to their canonization (as a literary form of “institutional memory”) and interpreted according to specific characteristics that enable audiences and readers to understand those texts as tragedies or tragicomedies, then the legal genre in Goodrich’s terms should be read according to the same parameters. However, as legal texts work to occlude their genesis and historical transmission and therefore cannot be interpreted in a straightforward manner, reading the law has to focus on the unconscious of legal texts, i.e., on that which is not mentioned in the legal text because it has been repressed. As these repressed elements are always resonant in legal texts and threaten to resurface or at least disturb the seemingly ordered legal text, Goodrich argues, legal language is necessarily excessive (another element that links his writing to Derrida and Legendre). Law “follows rules and not events, norms and not values. The event of judgment escapes law, it is the point of its failure. It is also the moment of excess, of a variability which exceeds the stability of a system” (LCL, 179). Both Oedipus Lex and Law in the Courts of Love – which might, as David S. Caudill suggests, be read as companion pieces51 – aim to recover ‘lost’ or repressed legal narratives which are, in a reading that positions normative law as both masculine and patriarchal, associated with a feminine tradition of the law. This conceptualization of repressed legal narratives as ‘feminine’ is problematic in so far as it upholds the gender stereotypes that impede some thinking in law and literature more generally (the law as masculine and literature as feminine). Maria Aristodemou, for example, follows a similar trajectory in trying to uncover a ‘female genealogy’ of law in Law and Literature: Journeys from Her to Eternity (2000), and likewise uses Freud, Lacan, and Goodrich (among other theorists) to develop her feminist reading of the law.52 Olson importantly highlights that readers and practitioners should be cautious about Aristodemou’s specific approach of legal rewriting, which consciously associates literature with the

51 David S. Caudill, “Law’s Own Repressed Memory Syndrome: Peter Goodrich, Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law; Peter Goodrich, Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences,” Law Text Culture 3.1 (1997): 269–275, 269. Caudill argues that “Oedipus Lex can thus be viewed as describing a type of psychoanalytic methodology for interpreting the history and texts of social institutions, while Law in the Courts of Love (in which psychoanalysis is discussed only in passing) highlights in detail that which has been repressed and forgotten in the institutions of law.” 52 See Maria Aristodemou, Law and Literature: Journeys from Her to Eternity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000): passim.

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feminine and then “refuses to privilege law’s claim to truth or normativity over literature and fantasy.”53 While this and comparable readings have their merits in the historical development of law and literature, which initially prioritized law and treated literature as an ancillary add-on (the ethical supplement lacking in legal studies), Olson persuasively describes the “construction of the literary as a goddess-like personification of the feminine [as] highly disconcerting” in its reinforcement of binary categories.54 Even though Goodrich uses gender to differentiate legal traditions (and hence creates an intradisciplinary imbalance between his gender metaphor rather than an interdisciplinary one), the notion of marginalized legal narratives is important. In Law in the Courts of Love, for example, Goodrich explores “minor jurisprudences” (LCL, 2) that have been repressed, challenges the ideological status of the common law as the unitary basis of the English legal system, and explores the sartorial conventions at the Inns of Court as well as other quasi-legal practices as ‘forgotten’ or ‘repressed’ sources of jurisdiction in early modern England. By arguing that the history of the law is simultaneously a masculine history, and by exploring examples of repressed (feminine) legal traditions, Goodrich is able to “challenge the image of law as unified and stable [. . .].”55 At the same time, the counter-jurisdictions Goodrich explores are at times more anecdotal than substantiated by hard evidence. While this might make his ‘other’ genealogies of the law questionable, it is also a conscious approach that elides traditional legal histories and constructs legal history as fictional stories (or, to use Goodrich’s term, as a literary genre).

From the Unconscious of the Law to Early Modern Drama Both Legendre’s and Goodrich’s psychoanalytical legal theories offer helpful concepts for a new analysis of early modern law and its relation to early modern drama and genre. As I have already mentioned, Goodrich’s analysis of the early modern common law (and its construction via the repression of ‘other’ legal stories) could be a crucial context for the analysis of early modern common-law language and ideology in texts such as Coke’s Reports. Legal frameworks inform most early modern revenge tragedies: the avenger as a disillusioned citizen who

53 Olson, “De-Americanizing Law and Literature Narratives,” 349. 54 Olson, “Law is not Turgid,” 80. 55 Caudill, “Law’s Own Repressed Memory Syndrome,” 272.

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experiences the legal system as ineffective or inaccessible and is subsequently ‘forced’ to take the law into his own hands to right past wrongs is a classic trope – examples include Thomas Kyd’s paradigmatic Spanish Tragedy (1582–1592), Shakespeare and Thomas Peele’s Titus Andronicus (1588–1593), Henry Chettle’s little-known Tragedy of Hoffman (1602), or Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), to name but a few. The trust Kyd’s Hieronimo – a dedicated servant of the king at the beginning of the play (he is the Knight Marshall of Spain) – puts into the sovereign and the legal system is quickly and brutally debunked; in Titus Andronicus, the main protagonist’s affective bond to the law and the state is symbolically played out via the sacrifice of his children during the war against the Goths and equally disappointed when Titus’s appeal to the Roman judges, senators, and tribunes for the lives of his remaining adult sons goes unheard;56 the father of Clois Hoffman is the victim of an ineffective and corrupt legal system that allows the sovereign to get rid of a faithful servant by executing him for piracy, a verdict the vengeful son successfully subverts as the play progresses; and Middleton’s Vindice famously punishes the Duke’s rampant sexuality and his disregard of his subjects by using the poisoned skull of his fiancée Gloriana (one of the Duke’s victims) as a murder weapon. In each of these plays, the revengers are characterized by their affective bond to a legal system (represented by the sovereign as a quasi-father figure in most cases) that lets them down cruelly. The excessive (or transgressive) violence that is so typical of these plays and, most importantly, the revengers’ defiant insistence on a ‘lawful’ or ‘just’ revenge that always goes awry quickly, consequently lends itself to readings that borrow elements from Legendre and Goodrich, both of whom constantly associate the law with excess and/or transgression (as does Derrida before them). In a reading reminiscent of Kristeva’s abject, Chris Jenks interprets taboos and laws of transgression as being intimately linked to the transgressive act: Every rule, limit, boundary or edge carries with it its own fracture, penetration or impulse to disobey. The transgression is a component of the rule. [. . .] Transgression is not the same as disorder; it opens up chaos and reminds us of the necessity of order.57

In addition, Legendre’s and Goodrich’s deconstructive psychoanalysis of the law, whose stability is always already under threat, ties in with the work of Georges Bataille, perhaps the most prominent theorist of transgression in the twentieth century. In Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1957), in particular, Bataille accounts

56 See William Shakespeare [and Thomas Peele], Titus Andronicus [1594], ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1995): 3.2. 57 Chris Jenks, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003): 7.

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for the combined horror and attraction of the corpse (another prominent aspect of the spectacle on the early modern stage), and explores the interdependence of violence and taboo. The taboo not only becomes an organising principle for society: like the law and the law of genre in Derrida, it contains the idea of transgression. It is in the taboo that the attraction of transgression, of corruption and decay, originate. Law is (and this is a point Goodrich also makes) posited at the border of culture, always “constituted by the possibility of its own erasure,”58 a potentially irrational concept that relies on the notion of logos as its founding myth but threatens to efface logos at the same time as it is evoked. Transgression, Paul Hegarty points out in his discussion of Bataille, is a possibility contained within taboo – or else there would be no need for the taboo. [. . .] What is at stake, then, is more than simply breaking a rule – it is the replaying of the fact of having rules, and of there being an outside to them.59

Transgression as the stepping outside the norm, outside the order or the Law, “requires punishment in order that the law holds. Transgression cannot, then, be separated from law, or notions of law – it is not in the act, but the illegality of an act that transgression lies.”60 Bataille – and this is where his theory reads almost like a cross-over between Derridean legal theory, Kristeva’s abject, and Legendre’s legal framework and consequently leads me back to psychoanalysis – inextricably links law, taboo, and transgression. In Bataille’s words, “[t]here exists no prohibition that cannot be transgressed. Often the transgression is permitted, often it is even prescribed.”61 In revenge tragedy as in other early modern plays, the breakdown of legal structures almost automatically leads to a breakdown of identity (or the stereotypical ‘madness’ of the avenger). This identity is regularly depicted in terms of the relationship between (tyrannical) ruler and revenger, a distinction between excessively corrupt sovereign (as a personification of the Law) and excessively vengeful subject that becomes questionable. Middleton’s Vindice, for instance, has repeatedly been read as a ‘manic’ revenger whose instable identity is externalized with the invention of an alter ego (Piato) that threatens Vindice’s original identity when Piato is ordered to kill the revenger (i.e., himself); this doubling is heightened when Vindice employ’s the dead Duke’s body as that of ‘Vindice,’ allowing Piato accomplish his

58 Chaplin, The Gothic, 27. 59 Paul Hegarty, Georges Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist (London: Sage, 2000): 109. 60 Hegarty, Georges Bataille, 125. 61 Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality [1962], trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986): 63.

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murderous task.62 More importantly, perhaps, the avenger’s almost hysteric glee in the face of the Duke’s gruesome death aligns him with his victim: when the Duke wails out in agony as his face is literally eaten away by the poison Vindice has applied to Gloriana’s made-up skull (which the Duke has kissed), the revenger sarcastically notes, “What, is not thy tongue eaten out yet?,” and has his opponent’s tongue nailed to the stage, mimicking and eventually surpassing the Duke’s cruelty and thus undermining the distinction between unjust sovereign and ‘just’ revenger.63 Similar instances of the conflation between revenger and the representative of the Law, the (tyrannical) ruler, can be found in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1601–1602), Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy (1611), or Philip Massinger’s The Duke of Milan (1623).64 With the breakdown of the seemingly clear distinction between guilty ruler and innocent subject, once the gory transgressiveness of the revenger’s plot equals or surpasses his (and sometimes her) foe’s evil deeds, revenge plays dramatize a breakdown of the Law that can be read anew through the lens of psychoanalytical legal theory and Legendre’s and Goodrich’s understanding of the repressive and affective characteristics of the legal system. An extensive rereading of early modern law and early modern drama through the lens of legal psychoanalysis is, perhaps, where law and literature should be headed next.

62 For a classic example of this reading, see T. F. Wharton, Moral Experiment in Jacobean Drama (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988). More recently, Michael Neill has looked at Piato’s murder of ‘Vindice’ in particular, arguing that “this episode develops a queasy suggestiveness from the way in which it renders concrete the protagonist’s gathering loss of holdfast on his own selfhood.” Michael Neill, “Middleton and the Supernatural,” in Thomas Middleton in Context, ed. Suzanne Gossett (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011): 295–305, 302. 63 Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy [1606], ed. MacDonald P. Jackson, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007): 547–593, 3.5.192. 64 For an extension of this argument, see Susanne Gruss, “Jacobean Gothic and the Law: Revengers and Ineffectual Rulers on Middleton and Massinger,” in Gothic Transgression: Extension and Commercialization of a Cultural Mode, eds. Ellen Redling and Christian Schneider (Zurich: LIT, 2015): 35–53.

Corinna Norrick-Rühl

Contracts, Clauses, Controversy: John Hersey, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books Abstract: Book studies as a discipline offers the field of law and literature a new range of theoretical considerations, from both the literary and the legal angle. In the publishing industry, the legally binding publishing contract is the first step toward publication of a text. With the publishing contract the author (that is, the original copyright holder) delegates to the publisher the right to publication; often other subsidiary rights are delegated as well, depending on the terms of the contract. As this article will illustrate, the negotiation of publishing contracts and licensing clauses merits a closer look. The correspondence in publisher archives can paint a vivid picture of the contractual, legal and often very personal relationships that shape and influence the creation and distribution of a text. In essence, this perspective offers a deeper understanding of the impact of corporate and private law on literature. This archives-led study will focus on the role of book clubs, specifically Reader’s Digest Condensed Books (est. 1950), in twentieth-century American literary history, concentrating on Pulitzer Prize-winning American author John Hersey (1914–1993) and his book A Single Pebble (1956). The archives of the American publishing house Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., which are housed at Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities in Austin, Texas, provided the archival material for this study.1

1 The Ransom Center Distinguished Fellowships Endowment from the Harry Ransom Center (Austin, Texas) provided support for my research. I would like to thank the archivists and the staff at the Harry Ransom Center, especially Elizabeth L. Garver, Kate Hayes, Kelly KerbowHudson and Richard Watson, for their expert guidance before and during my fellowship in February 2020. – I would like to express my gratitude to the following rights holders for giving me permission to quote verbatim from the unpublished correspondence: Brook Hersey, Alice L. Knopf and Susan Knopf. In other cases, every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders and obtain permission to reproduce this material. Please do get in touch with any enquiries or any information relating to the unpublished materials or the rights holders. – I am grateful to Chandni Ananth and Michael Erwig for assistance with transcriptions and comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to extend my thanks to my colleagues in the collaborative research center Law and Literature (DFG SFB 1385 Recht und Literatur), with whom I have been working closely since June 2020. Our discussions have helped shape this article, and I am much indebted to them, especially PD Dr. Franziska Quabeck (Münster) and Prof. Dr. Peter Schneck (Osnabrück), for exchange and input. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-003

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As a discipline, book studies can offer the field of law and literature new approaches and insights, both for literary as well as for legal scholars. From the perspective of the publishing industry, law and literature are firmly intertwined. Formally speaking, the publishing process begins with a legally binding publishing contract.2 Through this contract, the author as original copyright holder delegates to the publisher the right to publication and often other subsidiary rights as well, depending on the terms of the contract. While the contracts remain the bedrock of the publication process, the other documents that accompany them in publishers’ archives tell a fuller story. The correspondence between authors, editors, or other publishing house staff as well as subsidiary rights holders paints a vivid picture of these contractual, legal and often very personal relationships that shape and influence the creation of a text. By centering these processes of publication and negotiation, archival research can help us trace connections between actors and institutions in a multidimensional view of textual production typical of book studies.3 As Priya Joshi writes, the novel is several kinds of commodities. It is a material product, like others, that is fabricated both in small batches and mass produced, in workshops and sometimes in factories, processed, assembled, and eventually purveyed in a dizzying array of outlets and platforms.4

For about a century, since the inception of book clubs in the 1920s, book clubs have been one of these outlets or platforms, contributing to the mass distribution of texts well beyond the reach of the traditional brick-and-mortar book trade. Additionally, the clubs sometimes mass-distributed slightly diverging textual variants

In the footnotes, the following abbreviations are used (in alphabetical order): AAK Inc. = Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; BOMC = Book-of-the-Month Club; HRC = Harry Ransom Center; MVA = Mainzer Verlagsarchiv; RDCB = Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. 2 Lynette Owen, “Rights,” in Oxford Handbook of Publishing, eds. Angus Philips and Miha Kovač (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019): 365–376. “The author as the creator is normally the primary owner of copyright in a work together with all attendant rights; however, most authors will then delegate the handling of such rights to their literary agent or their publisher, depending on the terms of the publishing contract” (Owen, “Rights,” 365). 3 Recently, the idea of a novel network has been put forward. For more detail on a networked view of the (contemporary) novel, see The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities, eds. Tim Lanzendörfer and Corinna Norrick-Rühl (Cham: Palgrave, 2020). On the cross-overs between book studies and literary studies, see most recently Caroline Koegler, “Uneasy Forms of Interdisciplinarity: Literature, Business Studies, and the Limits of Critique,” Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 32.3 (2021, forthcoming). Thank you to Dr. Koegler for sharing her unpublished manuscript with me. 4 Priya Joshi, “The Novel as Commodity,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, ed. Eric Bulson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018): 219–237, 219.

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after editorial adjustments to the original texts: parallel editions, all contractually and legally defined. This article focuses on the trilateral relationship between authors, publishers, and book clubs in the 1950s, a decade in which book clubs grew rapidly in number and reach in the USA. All three – the author, the publisher, and the book club – play an important role in the literary value chain, but each has a different perspective vis-à-vis the text. Whereas the relationships between authors and their literary texts are often the subject of scrutiny, the perspective and influence of the publisher and, to a greater extent, that of the book club editors and judges are usually disregarded in literary studies. Arguably, publishers and book clubs share a perspective on the text that foregrounds its status as a commodity and potential asset to the publisher or book club brand. By choosing an archives-led approach, and focusing on the connections between three different types of actors involved in textual production, distribution, and reception, this article highlights the potential of book studies to inform the burgeoning field of law and literature. In this specific case study, the three actors in the trilateral relationship are the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author John Hersey (1914–1993), the publishing company Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. which published Hersey’s work throughout the twentieth century, and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. This book club, which published collected volumes of abridged books from 1950 onwards, was extremely successful – and somewhat contentious.

The Author: John Hersey As a journalist and literary author, John Hersey has recently received increased critical attention since the publication of Jeremy Treglown’s new biography, titled Mr. Straight Arrow, in 2019.5 Hersey, celebrated for his “daunting standard for moral concern delivered with high literary grace,”6 was a journalist and war correspondent for Time and Life during the Second World War. During this time, he contacted Knopf with his first book project, Men on Bataan, which was published on June 1, 1942. Hersey went on to publish over two dozen books 5 Cf. Jeremy Treglown, Mr. Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). Cf. e.g. Roy Scranton, “How John Hersey Bore Witness,” The New Republic (June 27, 2019), (acc. 30 December 2020). 6 Carter Wiseman, “A Life in Writing: John Hersey, 1914–1993,” Yale Alumni Magazine (October 1993), (acc. 30 December 2020).

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with Knopf. His first novel, A Bell for Adano (1944), received the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1945. Hersey’s next book, Hiroshima (1946), was highly anticipated and its marketing campaign was a well-orchestrated literary event. It is, as Nicholas Lemann recently wrote in The New Yorker, “the one widely read book about the effects of nuclear war. Its place in the canon is assured.”7 The original version of the book was written for The New Yorker, which devoted an entire issue (August 31, 1946) to the text – “a signal the magazine has chosen to send only that once.”8 The text was also broadcast in several evening instalments by the American Broadcasting Company (September 9 to 12, 1946), before Knopf published it in a first printing of 25,000 copies and six variant bindings on November 1, 1946. The book was simultaneously publicized by the Book-of-the-Month Club as a loss leader (a book given for free to new members) and as a book dividend (a free extra for longstanding members).9 The book, “often called the first nonfiction novel,”10 has been in print ever since. Hiroshima was followed by The Wall (1950), which played a role, as I will indicate below, in shaping Hersey’s attitudes toward book clubs. The Marmot Drive (1953) came after. The case study below will focus on his fifth novel, A Single Pebble (1956), and its mass distribution through the book clubs. However, Hersey is not only a good example because of the extant archival record of his correspondence with his longtime publisher. He also spoke out repeatedly against “commercial censorship,”11 and advocated for the integrity of texts as published. Regarding changes requested for a classroom edition of A Bell for Adano, he wrote in 1952, “The money I might earn from this school edition doesn’t mean as much to me as the integrity of the book.”12 He was, in this sense, a champion for authors’ rights.13 After his death in 1993, Judith Jones, vice-president of Alfred A. Knopf, wrote,

7 Nicholas Lemann, “The Art of Fact,” The New Yorker (April 22, 2019): 66–70, 66. 8 Lemann, “The Art of Fact,” 66. 9 Cf. BOMC, “Get a FREE copy in book form . . .,” The New Yorker (October 12, 1946): 111. 10 Lemann, “The Art of Fact,” 68. 11 John Hersey, letter to William (Bill) A. Koshland (AAK Inc.) (August 30, 1952), transcribed in Dictionary of Literary Biography vol. 355: The House of Knopf, 1915–1960: A Documentary Volume, eds. Cathy Henderson and Richard W. Oram (Detroit: Gale Cengage Learning, 2010): 269. 12 Hersey, letter to Koshland (August 30, 1952), transcribed in Henderson and Oram (eds.), The House of Knopf, 269. 13 On Hersey’s refusal to “flog his wares,” cf. e.g. Russell Shorto, “John Hersey, the Writer Who Let ‘Hiroshima’ Speak for Itself,” The New Yorker (August 31, 2016), (acc. 19 January 2021). 29 In the corresponding concluding tableau, set in 2061, i.e., in another year in which the comet will presumably appear, these domestic chores have morphed into “wrestling with a bin bag,” “cleaning a carpet with a Dust Buster,” or “chopping leeks and anxiously watching a video baby monitor” (TW, 124), which brings the play’s investment in contemporary gender politics full circle.

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work as inferior to the quasi-divine and unimpeachable workings of the law. Concurrently, he characterizes the law as operating incidentally, because its functioning relies upon pulling disgruntled laypeople out of their daily routines. The play’s setting in 1759 is key in this context: as per the titular metaphor – a poetic, Old and Middle English expression for ‘sky’30 – the dramatis personae anxiously await the arrival of Halley’s Comet, which can be seen from Earth approximately every seventy-five years and which signifies a preoccupation with history repeating itself, specifically with the cyclical nature of gendered structures of oppression. In this “pressure cooker situation” of having to accomplish domestic chores in a state of apprehensive anticipation,31 jury duty is a mere nuisance and unwarranted distraction. Apart from marking one of the comet’s sightings, the year 1759 hints at a number of further themes, all of which are related to the negotiation of gendered power structures, that allow Kirkwood to stage “a conversation with a version of ourselves that was forged in the eighteenth century.”32 Those either explicitly or implicitly mentioned in the text include, but are not limited to, the ever more confident self-fashioning of a rising empire,33 the nascent medical sciences’ steady progression into a field governed by male expertise (female knowledge in this field was still widely relied upon until the eighteenth century, if often relegated to the private sphere, with childbirth and midwifery being the most obvious examples),34 and the debate of whether justice can only be sought from God, or whether it can be equally administered by human-made legal institutions. Above all, this particular historical moment enables Kirkwood to draw on the so-called jury of matrons as a premise and structuring device that combines questions of gender, legal truth, justice, and the purpose and reliability of the jury system. The jury of matrons is a special jury tradition in English common law that can be traced back as far as the Middle Ages. Even though effectively

30 “Welkin, n.,” The Oxford English Dictionary (acc. 25 January 2021). 31 Sarah Hemming, “Lucy Kirkwood on Going from Kitchen to Courthouse with ‘The Welkin’” (January 10, 2020), Financial Times (acc. 20 January 2021). 32 Hemming, “Lucy Kirkwood,” n.p. 33 See Hemming, “Lucy Kirkwood,” n.p. 34 See Lisa Smith, “The Relative Duties of a Man: Domestic Medicine in England and France, ca. 1685–1740,” Journal of Family History 31.3 (2006): 237–256, 237–239.

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abandoned in the nineteenth century following an increasing reliance on medical evidence, it was only formally abolished in 1931.35 The jury of matrons originated out of a legal system that denied women legal personhood independent of their husbands and barred them from all other forms of active participation. As Sara M. Butler details, [t]his little-studied institution was the sole channel for a woman to participate in the adjudication of the law as a woman, and in which she could be appreciated for the kind of expertise only a woman might bring. Matrons lent their proficiency to both common law and ecclesiastical courts in a variety of situations. Especially when: a widow professed to be pregnant with her recently deceased husband’s heir; a woman claimed to have been raped; the body of a newborn was unearthed and the community hoped to identify its mother; or a wife pled a suit of nullity (that is, an annulment) on the basis of her husband’s sexual dysfunction.36

Most frequently, however, such juries assembled when women convicted of capital crimes ‘pleaded the belly;’ in fact, this is the only of the jury’s functions carried over into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.37 Whenever they “petitioned for a stay of execution on the grounds of pregnancy, justices assigned a group of matrons to conduct a physical inspection to ascertain whether she was in fact pregnant.”38 Death sentences would then be stayed or commuted, which in the eighteenth century frequently meant transportation to the Australian penal colonies.39 Even though legal historians have so far gathered little evidence as to who formed part of these all-female juries, it seems likely that, at

35 Kevin Crosby, “Abolishing Juries of Matrons,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 39.2 (2019): 259–284, 259f. Crosby notes that “[j]ury service, as with citizenship more generally, was being reimagined at this time as something that must be capable of standardisation, of being reflected in clear, consistent, positive rules, rather than in flexible, and potentially regionally divergent, practices” (Crosby, “Abolishing Juries of Matrons,” 261). 36 Sara M. Butler, “More than Mothers: Juries of Matrons and Pleas of the Belly in Medieval England,” Law and History Review 37.2 (2019): 353–396, 355. On the history of this tradition, its larger status within English common law, as well as its exact proceedings see Butler’s article in its entirety. See also Crosby, “Abolishing Juries of Matrons,” 259–264. 37 Crosby, “Abolishing Juries of Matrons,” 263. 38 Butler, “More than Mothers,” 356. 39 As Dolin explains, this increasing transportation of convicts to the penal colonies not only serves imperial interests; also, “the penal settlement in New South Wales was founded in response to a crisis in the criminal justice system at home. It was part of a long-term shift in British penal policy, a shift in the technology of punishment from the gallows to the prison, from terror to individual reform” (Kieran Dolin, A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007]: 98).

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least until the seventeenth century, they were laywomen rather than, for instance, midwives (like Elizabeth Luke in the play).40 Reverting to this unique instrument in English legal history, Kirkwood explores the multiple, and sometimes contradictory, ways in which women’s bodies and limited agency in the legal system are intertwined. Arifa Akbar remarks that [w]omen’s biology, in this court of law, has a paradoxical power: women’s ovaries render them incapable of reason and judgment, according to a male doctor, yet it is only Sally’s ovaries, and growing womb, that can save her from the hangman’s noose.41

On the one hand, The Welkin showcases blunt discussions about the mundane realities of menopausal hot flushes, pregnancy symptoms, miscarriages, and gynecological speculum examinations. On the other hand, the matrons display a striking illiteracy as to the workings of their own bodies. Since determining an early-stage pregnancy would require not only basic knowledge of the female anatomy but also at least some degree of gynecological expertise, the task bestowed on Kirkwood’s jury of matrons therefore seems to be merely symbolic – which, of course, raises the question of what exactly their contribution symbolizes. About two thirds of The Welkin depict the jury’s deliberations behind closed doors, with Coombes being the only silent observer admitted to the room. For this reason, it has been deemed “a winking feminist twist on [Sidney Lumet’s 1957 film] Twelve Angry Men.”42 Instead of focusing on the case at hand – that is, the matrons’ task to ascertain that Sally Poppy, who has been sentenced to hang for the murder of a child, is indeed pregnant as she claims – the twelve women arrive at the courthouse with different presuppositions regarding their

40 Butler, “More than Mothers,” 357. The reasons for this, Butler argues, can be explained on the grounds of legal tradition: “The Continent’s adoption of Roman law created a need for medical expertise that simply did not exist in the English context. The courts of both the church and the ius commune bestowed on judges a much more expansive role than that to which we are accustomed with the Anglo-American legal tradition. [. . .] England, on the other hand, had no defined expectations about evidence, and because they failed to document the process of evidence collection, what it took to persuade a jury of the defendant’s guilt remains somewhat of a mystery. The prevailing assumption is that it did not include expert testimony proffered by medical professionals, traditionally understood to be an innovation dating to the seventeenth century” (Butler, “More than Mothers,” 357). 41 Arifa Akbar, “The Welkin Review – Maxine Peake Leads Lucy Kirkwood’s Jury of Matrons” (January 23, 2020), The Guardian (acc. 11 January 2021). 42 Akbar, “The Welkin Review,” n.p. On this comparison see also Maragonis, “A Woman’s Work,” n.p.

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role in the process, and with noticeably different agendas. While Charlotte Cary hopes the consultations will be over quickly enough for her to meet “a dinner engagement at five” for which she has “been promised boiled bacon” (TW, 24), Mary Middleton announces that she has “a field of leeks must be pulled by night. Will the judgment take very long do you think?” (TW, 35). Elizabeth’s response, “The judgment has been passed. We are called only to consult upon the sentence, was that – has no one made that clear to you?” (TW, 35), bespeaks the problem that many of the matrons are not only ill-informed, but also ignorant of essential legal terms and concepts. Several even arrive with their minds firmly made up that Sally should die: MARY: Anyway, you can tell just looking at her, can’t you? ANN: That she isn’t with child? MARY: That she’s a liar. (TW, 64)

Thus, on one level, the jury system as such is put up for debate, and the ideal of the capable, impartial juror unmasked as illusory. But the play seems equally skeptical with regard to the added layer of gendered biases. Although here, contrary to the trial itself, Sally is indeed tried by a jury of her peers, this is not presented as a feminist utopia or viable alternative to a patriarchal legal system. Moreover, most of the women are rendered distinctly unlikeable. The opposite of an anodyne victim of injustice, Sally does little, if anything, to earn either the matrons’ or the audiences’ sympathy. Benedict herein sees a noteworthy departure from another apparent intertext: whereas Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) equally focuses on “a community, bound by restrictions, at war with itself and ideas of truth,” Kirkwood’s “drama about people facing group-think and mob mentality is much tougher on its protagonists. Kirkwood refuses easy sympathies.”43 Quite the reverse: whereas some of the women are portrayed as more sympathetic with Sally’s plight than others and all of them take turns picking at Coombes as the representative of the patriarchy, they are simultaneously characterized as “upholders of a misogynistic legal system that disbelieves and condemns a woman on a man’s word; and at times they are a miniature version of the baying mob outside, who want to see Sally swing.”44 Elizabeth forms the sole voice of reason (not least due to her background as a midwife) and female solidarity, but her authority and motives for trying to effect an acquittal, too, are at least temporarily

43 Benedict, “‘The Welkin’ Review,” n.p. 44 Akbar, “The Welkin Review,” n.p.

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questioned when she is revealed to be the biological mother.45 Still, Elizabeth is the only character that considers Sally’s predicament from a systemic point of view. When asked why they should vote to acquit, she replies: Because she has been sentenced to hang on the word of a cuckolded husband. [. . .] Because every card dealt to her today and for many years before has been an unkind one, because she has been sentenced by men pretending to be certain of things of which they are entirely ignorant, and now we sit here imitating them, trying to make an ungovernable thing governable. (TW, 64)

In addition to her emphasis on the inherently misogynistic framework of the legal system, what stands out is her description of the law as “ungovernable,” a statement of resignation that refers to the jury of matron’s inherently futile task of delivering a just verdict as much as to women’s resistance against such patriarchal power structures. Notably, the play never questions Sally’s guilt; brandished as an adulteress and denounced by her cuckolded husband, she immediately confesses to having murdered young Alice Wax. The sole ‘truth’ to be established, therefore, is that of her alleged pregnancy. In one of many comical dialogues, this endeavor is depicted as doomed from the start: ELIZABETH: I am not afraid of the prisoner. I am afraid that if the girl is in the early months, that may be impossible to know for sure, and yet you ask us to make a judgment that may see her hanged. How much time is allowed us? JUSTICE: As long as is necessary. An hour should suffice. ELIZABETH: An hour? JUSTICE: If the child has quickened it will be readily apparent to you. ELIZABET: How? JUSTICE: In. . .ways.

45 While within the matrons’ discussions this revelation is used against Elizabeth, taken as proof of her bias, one could equally argue the reverse case of her readiness to comply with legal practice against her own daughter. In light of the play’s larger interest in female solidarity, or lack thereof, it is worth noting that Kirkwood uses this plot element to open up a debate on women’s alleged lack of rationality, and their ‘natural’ bond toward their children. When pressed to admit to acting out of ‘motherly feelings’ for Sally, Elizabeth replies: “And have you decide I am governed by my womb and not my brain? Accuse me of feeling and not thinking, when I have come here as a rational creature, not some duzzy mawther. [. . .] I do not love this thing. I never have” (TW, 89).

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ELIZABETH: There are no ways. [. . .] No. There is no clean verdict to be had here, we will be twelve women walking on a carpet of opinion as if that were fact. You give us an hour to make a decision that must be lived with for an eternity. (TW, 30)

The Justice, unaware as he is of basic biological facts, and Elizabeth argue on two different levels: while for him, finding the verdict is a matter of legal protocol, she questions the general feasibility and ethics of the task at hand. As thus emerges early on, these two fabrications of truth – one legal, the other medically verifiable – might be irreconcilable. In a Schrödinger’s cat type of scenario, Sally both is, and is not, pregnant. To avoid waiting until a pregnancy would begin to show (i.e., the lifting of the box that confirms the cat as either alive or dead), the jury must reach an agreement on the status of her pregnancy. In other words, the jury of matrons is asked to create a legal fiction, a pragmatic but “curious artifice of legal reasoning” within (predominantly English) common law that assumes as true something which is either demonstrably or probably false and thus provides a basis for the law to operate in a certain way.46 No matter the outcome, the jury’s verdict will be assumed as true, however impossible to verify, and this presumed truth consequently enables the court to either stay or execute Sally’s sentence. As the play proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear the legal fiction thus created amounts to little more than what Elizabeth aptly names a “carpet of opinion.” To gather ‘evidence’ for their decision-making, the matrons bombard Sally with questions about possible symptoms of early pregnancy, some reasonable and some utterly ludicrous. Amongst other things, they inquire about dizziness, ask her if she is “too tired to blink” or if “everything taste[s] of onions,” if she has “a sore throat,” if she feels warm or cold, or “a great desire to eat strange things, such as, for example, a piece of your husband’s buttocks” (TW, 46). Such hapless interchanges occur repeatedly, which is why Ann Lavender’s frustrated “I do think it very queer that we know more about the movement of a comet that is thousands of miles away than the workings of a woman’s body” can be termed programmatic (TW, 102). While justifiably taking neither absence nor presence of these idiosyncratic symptoms as indicative of Sally’s condition per se – inconclusively, she cannot confirm anything of what the matrons suggest to her – all doubts should be cleared the moment Elizabeth suddenly

46 Nancy J. Knauer, “Legal Fictions and Juristic Truth,” St. Thomas Law Review 23 (2010): 1–49. Knauer’s article provides a detailed discussion of various forms of legal fictions, the concept’s genesis throughout legal history, as well as its relation to truth in a legal sense of the term.

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manages to squeeze milk from Sally’s breast, thus providing the sought-after proof they have previously established as definitive (TW, 48). And yet, when Elizabeth declares, “That is evidence. That is truth, look at it!” (TW, 79), the women question said evidence because they believe Elizabeth, always under suspicion for the stereotypical associations of midwifery with the supernatural, might have conjured up magic to save the prisoner. Instead, they call upon the authority of a male doctor, who only confirms Elizabeth’s findings. Her outrage, “Why should the word of a doctor mean more to you than my own? [. . .] We do not need the doctor, I have shown you milk!” (TW, 81) crystallizes the systemic prioritization of male over female authority. Also, it speaks to society’s habits of not only mistrusting women’s voices but also discrediting evidence that appears inconvenient – particularly, one might add, if it is derived from a female body. It is this male expertise that eventually prompts the matrons to come to an agreement. When Coombes asks them about their verdict, Sarah Smith announces they have found that “Sally Poppy is with quick child” (TW, 108). This declaration performatively creates her pregnancy before the law and hence grants her a commutation of sentence. As Kirkwood suggests, however, while in this particular instance legal truth is conterminous with medically demonstrable truth, this outcome is largely coincidental.

Conclusion Ultimately, neither play accepts the version of truth that has been established in court and during the jury deliberations, respectively. In Consent, the jury follow Ed’s defense and acquit Gayle’s attacker from all charges in the absence of conclusive evidence against him. Gayle, desperate about the repeated delegitimizations of her statement, commits suicide. In the final scene of The Welkin, Lady Wax, the murdered girl’s mother, pays Coombes to beat up Sally so that she loses the child. The ending thus substitutes one legal (and medical) ‘truth’ with another, actuating markedly different legal consequences. To spare her the humiliation of being hanged in front of a raging mob, Elizabeth strangles Sally in the penultimate scene. Thus, in both cases, legal truth is rendered inconsequential in the sense that it either patently conflicts with moral truth (and is hence perceived as untrue and unjust in equal measure), or in the sense that it can be revoked within an instant. At the same time, however, these figurations of legal truth prove acutely consequential in the ways they impact the female body. Reconsidering Farmer’s observation on “the importance of orality and immediacy” for both trials and theater mentioned at the beginning of this essay,

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and thinking through the potentially slippery formations of truth produced in these contexts, it is worth recalling that court proceedings do not lay absolute claim to truth. On the contrary, as Farmer explains, it is the judge’s role “to ensure only that the rules are respected and that the decision of the jury is justifiable on the basis of facts presented in court.”47 By posing epistemological questions concerning the very process of finding a verdict, and furthermore probing the ontological status of what is accepted as fact in the first place, both Consent and The Welkin negotiate what Biet pinpoints as a crucial node of law and literature studies’ productive potential: Literature, then, beginning from the as if of law, borrows legal fictions and brings them to life, drawing them into question and giving those they address (readers and spectators) a space for reflection, and doubt. Both fields, then, practise the art of as if, of distancing and fictionalisation, in order to produce an effective and possible truth, which brings together citizens, readers or spectators who agree upon the effectiveness of this truth.48

First and foremost, Raine and Kirkwood portray this idealistically termed “art of as if,” epitomized by the concept of the legal fiction, as not only ineffective but also questionable, especially where the female body becomes a site of contention for competing notions of truth. In this way, both plays evidence that the law, which should apply equally to all, is in fact heavily gendered. Secondly, apart from calling attention to specific instances of women’s systemic ostracization, The Welkin furthermore suggests that a society in which women are their own worst enemy is, to borrow from Elizabeth Luke again, “ungovernable” by law. In a world that continues to play off women against each other as instruments of patriarchal misogyny, such a claim surely has currency. Thirdly, both plays posit one basic question: does the law believe women? They imply that it does not, or to a limited extent only. In both Consent and The Welkin, the law not only polices but also determines women’s bodies, in the former case figuratively and in the latter quite literally invading them so as to settle their status before the law. Considering the female body as an enigma that might, or might not, have been violated, that might, or might not, be pregnant, the law thus renders the female body a symbolic site on which to negotiate such (maledriven) legal fictions – and, by extension, perform wider debates on ‘truth’ as an ambivalent and unstable construct. As both Consent and The Welkin caution us, in some cases such practices “of distancing and fictionalisation” prove detrimental rather than productive.

47 Farmer, “Trials,” 470f. 48 Biet, “Law, Literature, Theatre,” 282 [original emphases].

Anna Auguscik

Law on Ice: Polarizing Legal Expertise in Popular Climate Change Fiction Abstract: Focusing on the representation of legal discourse in two examples of popular climate change fiction – KS Robinson’s Antarctica (1998) and Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004) –, this paper examines the novels’ complicated relationship with expert knowledge. Despite the similarities observed in previous readings, I argue that the novels differ not only regarding their stance on climate change but also in their acceptance or non-acceptance of (legal) expert knowledge and lay out which effects this may have on their performance as expert texts. While Antarctica chooses to diversify and distinguish expert perspectives, arguing in favor of the necessity and specificity of legal and other kinds of expertise, State of Fear restricts expertise to one character backed up by the authorial voice and ultimately proposes a paranoid and authoritarian solution. Despite these differences, both novels contribute to an understanding of the public debate of the relationship between expert-based knowledge production and political decision-making and deserve to be made part of a discussion that seeks to bring climate change fiction into dialogue with environmental law. In a 2009 article, entitled ‘What is Called Ecoterrorism?’ ecocritic Lawrence Buell investigates the trajectory of that term in U.S. discourse. By formulating the question as “what is called” rather than “what is,” he alerts the reader to ecoterrorism’s discursive constructedness. The term’s initial usage, he explains, encompasses two diametrically opposed but co-existent coinages: “[F]rom the right – in order to stigmatize radical activists – and from the left, in order to stigmatize authoritarian state and corporate mistreatment of environment and/ or animals.”1 Its current use testifies to the success of the former meaning making. Buell’s literary sources – the 1975 classic The Monkey-Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey with its “sympathetic treatment of ecosabotage,”2 and the 2004 eco-thriller State of Fear by Michael Crichton, whose “plot turns on a conspiracy among environmentalists” – occupy opposite political positions when it comes to their stance on ecoterrorism.3 Yet, he argues, both, if inadvertently in Abbey’s

1 Lawrence Buell, “What is Called Ecoterrorism,” Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 26 (2009): 153–166, 156. 2 Buell, “Ecoterrorism,” 154. 3 Buell, “Ecoterrorism,” 155. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-009

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case, contributed to the use of the term with its right-oriented rather than leftoriented meaning. Towards the end of his paper, Buell introduces two aspects of analysis that resonate with my discussion of popular fiction, which negotiates the intersections between climate change and legal expertise. The first aspect is the centrality of law to democratic rule and the inevitable clash with this rule of any unlawful and “unpopular” action, “in a polity where rule of law basically obtains and is widely thought to be supported by participatory consent of the governed.”4 The second aspect remains rather marginal in his paper but, I contend, deserves a more central treatment. In a footnote, Buell mentions other novels that appeared between Abbey’s and Crichton’s publications, which comply with the latter in that they, in his reading, also “imagine bio-centrists not as heroes but as sociopaths.”5 Among them, he places Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica (1998), which he distinguishes as “the most nuanced of these” and yet one which “treats ecomilitants as sinister invisibles refusing to renounce acts of extreme violence in Antarctica against scientists, low-impact questers and adventurers, and even neo-indigenous reinhabitors.”6 My contribution takes up those two aspects from Buell’s article, in order to lend additional nuance to the comparison between Robinson’s and Crichton’s novels and further probe their stance on legal matters. Published in the U.S. around the turn of the millennium, Robinson’s Antarctica and Crichton’s State of Fear are widely received and, especially the latter, wildly debated examples of popular fiction with a potential for polarizing the debate on climate change. Antarctica is generally read as a novel in which the dangers that society is facing in result of global warming are “reproduced,”7 as, throughout his work, “Robinson articulates the urgent need for a new relationship with the natural world.”8 In contrast, State of Fear has been described as “debunking [. . .] concerns about anthropogenic global warming as alarmism,”9 or, less reserved, “Viagra for climate sceptics.”10 Focusing on the apparent similarity in representing not only the boundaries between legal and illegal activities but also lawyers and their expertise, I 4 Buell, “Ecoterrorism,” 164. 5 Buell, “Ecoterrorism,” 164. 6 Buell, “Ecoterrorism,” 164. 7 Elizabeth Leane, “Antarctica as a Scientific Utopia,” Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 32.89 (2003): 27–35, 30. 8 Sherryl Vint and Mark Bould, “Dead Penguins in Immigrant Pilchard Scandal: Telling Stories About ‘the Environment’ in Antarctica,” in Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays, ed. William J. Burling (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2009): 257–273, 258. 9 Buell, “Ecoterrorism,” 155. 10 Myles Allen, “A Novel View of Global Warming,” Nature 7023.1 (2005): 198.

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examine the novels’ complicated relationship with expert knowledge – a positioning that is crucial to their stance on the scientific expertise behind climate change but also goes beyond this. Despite the similarities observed by Buell and others, I will argue that they differ not only regarding their attitude towards climate change (or global warming11) but also in their acceptance or non-acceptance of (legal) expert knowledge and lay out which effects this may have on their performance as expert texts. Firstly, the novels’ plots lead the reader to different conclusions in relation to the need to acknowledge expertise. While both novels make ample use of legal experts on and off the ice, the contrasting solutions they propose encompass either the urgent need for the recognition of fields of expertise as “competing knowledges,”12 including the law (in the case of Antarctica), or the necessary disposal of legal knowledge and personnel (in the case of State of Fear). In other words, whereas Robinson’s novel somewhat optimistically relies on the authority of achieving consensus through legal and democratic means, Crichton’s leans on the authority of the charismatic and ultra-knowledgeable character of John Kenner (backed up by the authorial voice), ultimately succumbing to an authoritarian solution. Secondly, the novels’ stance on expertise on the level of plot is either supported by their genre and paratextual positioning (Antarctica) or seems to cause contradictions (State of Fear). While both writers perform as expert author personas, they do so in different settings and with different subject positions, which impacts the readings of their texts as narratives about expertise. Antarctica is a thick mix of various genres, “a hybrid and self-reflexive sf text that draws on a variety of modes, from the mystery, love story, and survival adventure to discourses on science, law, history, and critical theory, and opening up into poetry.”13 It is exhaustive, painstaking in detail, and engages the reader in the toilsome process of negotiating policy and its legal framing. According to the acknowledgements on the final pages of the book, Robinson’s expertise is based on his experience in Antarctica as part of the U.S. Antarctic Artists and Writer’s Program led by the

11 On the specific use of these terms, see Maurice Lineman, Yuno Do, Ji Yoon Kim and Gea-Jae Joo, “Talking about Climate Change and Global Warming,” PLoS ONE 10.9 (2015): 1–12: 9. 12 Anna Margaretha Horatschek, “From Knowledge to Knowledges: An Introduction,” in Competing Knowledges – Wissen im Widerstreit, ed. Anna Margaretha Horatschek (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020): 1–34. 13 Tom Moylan, “‘The moment is here . . . and it’s important’: State, Agency, and Dystopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling,” in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, eds. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge, 2003): 135–153, 146.

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National Science Foundation. Beyond the covers of his book, he advocates the necessity of utopian writing in the Anthropocene in author readings, at conferences, as well as in his writing about fiction.14 In contrast, Crichton performs as an expert on climate science itself.15 His text is full of footnotes and graphs which can be attributed to the diegetic world and inhibit the otherwise fastpaced thriller, but it also includes two appendices, an extensive bibliography, and a semi-fictional introduction which, along with the “author’s message,” figure in his own name. The novel’s dismissive take on expertise appears directly at odds with its performance as an expert text, as well as with Crichton’s selffashioning both in the paratext and in public, where he enjoyed a degree of attention that is rarely granted to writers: State of Fear earned him a call from Karl Rove and a private meeting with then President Bush. The novel also earned him a voice in a Senate hearing in 2005 and speaking invitations across the country on climate change.16

Crichton was heard outside the realm of literature and his statements also forced others to speak up, thereby challenging established fields of expertise and changing constellations of those participating in the debate.17 When the author was acknowledged as authority on the issue by representatives from the political discourse, scientists and science communicators felt moved to respond to this fictional use or misuse of science, including “serious reprimands [. . .] in the pages of Nature, The New York Times, from the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Union for Concerned Scientists, American Geophysical Union.”18 Book reviewers and literary critics have focused mostly, if not exclusively, on the novel’s position on the science of climate change and only few have also stressed the necessity of commenting on it as a poorly written novel.19

14 Cf. Kim Stanley Robinson, “Remarks on Utopia in the Age of Climate Change,” Arena Journal 35/36 (2011) (acc. 27 January 2021). 15 See also Solvejg Nitzke, “The Adaptation of Disaster: Representations of Environmental Crises in Climate Change Fiction,” Komparatistik Online (2018): 38–58, 43. 16 George Handley, “Climate Scepticism and Christian Conservatism in the United States,” in Climate Change Scepticism: A Transnational Ecocritical Analysis, eds. Greg Garrard, Axel Goodbody and George Handley (London: Bloomsbury, 2019): 133–173, 156. 17 On the novel’s discursive impact see Anton Kirchhofer and Anna Auguscik, “Triangulating the Two Cultures Entanglement: The Sciences and the Humanities in the Public Sphere,” Journal of Literature and Science 10.2 (2017): 26–37. 18 Handley, “Climate Scepticism,” 156. 19 Handley, “Climate Scepticism,” 163.

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Despite occupying opposed positions as to whether manmade climate change constitutes an immediate and imposing threat to humanity, the novels arguably show similarities regarding their plots, character constellations, and thematic scope. Apart from Buell’s observation on their emplotment of an ecoterrorist threat, other scholars, too, have noticed such parallels. Elizabeth Leane examines the ways in which these two examples of contemporary Antarctica fiction use the continent symbolically. They “employ the powerful trope of the continent-as-canvas” to develop scenarios that extrapolate current problems and propose possible if not necessarily plausible future solutions.20 In a reading of Crichton’s State of Fear and Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy, Jeanne Hamming examines these novels’ failure to produce new narratives in the face of climate change. Hamming shows that Crichton’s and Robinson’s treatments of climate change stand out as newly imagined, though strangely familiar, expressions of a heternormative [sic], national masculinity played out in the context of American environmental politics.21

This is all the more problematic in “that a novel like Robinson’s, which issues from the political left, ends up reproducing the same cultural logic as a novel like Crichton’s, which issues from the political right.”22 Indeed, the three installments of the trilogy (2004–2007) can be understood as a sequel to the 1998 novel, with recurrent themes (from Washington politics to capitalist greed to climate change science), institutions (especially the National Science Foundation), and characters, such as Senator Phil Chase. The texts share a penchant for male protagonists ‘manning up’ in the course of the events and viewing the world very much from the perspective of Washington’s needs. In fact, the trilogy’s title already appears as a chapter title in Antarctica when we first encounter the senator and his staff expert. The novels’ extended focus on, if not obsession with, legal discourse and its representatives can be read as another such similarity between them; one closely related to but also somehow at odds with Buell’s observations because it eventually strengthens their differences, as I hope to show. As his argument suggests, the novels share a scenario in which the status quo is threatened by radical ecoactivists. Indeed, both novels begin with illegal environmentalist action and both their plots

20 Elizabeth Leane, Antarctica in Fiction: Imaginative Narratives of the Far South (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012): 1. 21 Jeanne Hamming, “Nationalism, Masculinity, and the Politics of Climate Change in the Novels of Kim Stanley Robinson and Michael Crichton,” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 54.1 (2013): 21–45, 23f. 22 Hamming, “Politics of Climate Change,” 24.

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rest on legal issues. Yet, they are on opposite poles regarding the positioning of illegal activity in its relationship to ‘the rule of law’ and, by extension, their acknowledgment of expertise. State of Fear begins with an introduction, signed with the author’s initials but already part of the diegesis, which suggests that what we are about to read explains the sudden failure of a (fictional) lawsuit brought against the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States by a Pacific island nation, supported by rich donors and a plethora of environmentalist lawyers. At the beginning of the actual plot, we see ruthless and criminal activists target a naïve scientist and murder him after they manage to extract information vital for setting in motion a worldwide chain of artificially induced events that simulate climate catastrophes to provide false proof for global warming. Here, global ecoterrorists are the militant force of a much larger underlying scheme to dupe the American people, which involves politicians, the media, and especially lawyers. In a standoff between the politico-legal-media complex and the military-industrial complex, the latter is shown to be preferable. In the end, the lawsuit is prevented by a super-agent and soldier combo as we learn that lawyers (and by extension all other experts) – apart from John Kenner and the hapless young character-focalizer Evans –, are a nuisance and best eliminated alongside the ecoterrorist threat. In Antarctica, Wade Norton, a legal expert and self-professed bureaucrat, must stop the illegal ecotage in local hotspots in Antarctica in situ, as well as help ratify the Antarctic Treaty to reinstall the rule of law between the U.S. and other national interests on a more global stage. Although a large number of unsympathetic characters also happen to be lawyers, the law in Antarctica is not a culprit but a solution. Crucially, the proposed way out of the corporate exploitation vs. pure wilderness conundrum via a resistant but lawful compromise is an alternative, albeit better solution to a shared problem. In my reading, then, and specifically in contrast to Crichton’s novel, Robinson’s text is not only more “nuanced” as Buell proposes but can hardly be described as dismissive in reference to ecoterrorism or ecotage.23 These two examples of popular climate change fiction are not yet part of a recent interest in reading climate change narratives alongside environmental law. However, the analysis of their respective engagement of legal expertise, I argue, contributes to an understanding of public negotiation of expertise in general, as well as allows insights into the media-specific parameters of participation in this debate. Antarctica works with diversification – via multiple focalizers with opposing interests and competing narratives representing distinct cultures of

23 See also Moylan, “State, Agency, and Dystopia,” 147.

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expertise – and thus argues in favor of the necessity and specificity of legal and other kinds of expertise. In contrast, the principle in State of Fear is one of restriction – with all expertise focused in the hands of one character, one company, one author’s message – which not only creates problems and contradictions for the text as a thriller but ultimately ends up proposing a paranoid and authoritarian solution.

The Necessity and Specificity of (Legal) Expertise in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica (1998) Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica rests on legal matters, some overt and centerstage, others less exposed but engaging the text in legal discourse nevertheless. At the beginning of the novel, in a soundbite of its humor, a minor character signposts the relevance of law on a par with the highest ordering principles: “[b]elow the 40th latitude south [. . .] there is no law. Below the 50th, no God. And below the 60th, no common sense,” to which another replies: “And below the 70th [. . .] no intelligence whatsoever.”24 Indeed, the necessity of consent-based rule of law is upheld throughout the novel until an eight-point list of propositions to be used for the ratification of the Antarctic Treaty is presented because “some law needs to be in place” (Ant, 624). Antarctica features lawyer characters, juxtapositions of legal and illegal conduct, and, most important to its plot development, discussions of the Treaty, the legal structure ensuring Antarctica its “exceptionality.”25 The novel’s strong interest in the law has not hitherto played a major role in secondary readings, which agree on science as the novel’s main topic though not on its function for the text’s politics. Elizabeth Leane reads the novel as a “modern scientific utopia,” in dialogue with and often in line with feminist science studies and so-called “successor science.”26 Sherryl Vint and Mark Bould, however, worry that the novel’s anthropocentricism introduces a risk to pander to the “rhetoric of Natural capitalism.”27 Strikingly, both readings reduce the novel’s vision to a central character. Leane ties her observation of the novel’s

24 Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica (New York: Bantam Books, 1998): 23. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “Ant.” 25 Elizabeth Leane, “Fictionalizing Antarctica,” in Handbook on the Politics of Antarctica, eds. Klaus Dodds, Alan D. Hemmings and Peder Roberts (Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2017): 21–36, 26. 26 Leane, “Scientific Utopia,” 32. 27 Vint and Bould, “Dead Penguins,” 270.

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suggestion that science needs to change, in order to realize the promise of a successful scientific utopia to Wade Norton whom she calls “Robinson’s narrator.”28 Vint and Bould argue that it is mainly through Ta Shu and Carlos that Robinson chooses to voice his emphasis on nature as landscape rather than environment. Instead of reading any of his characters as the author’s mouthpiece, I focus on the novel’s use of multiple focalizers, character trajectories, and competing narratives. Antarctica’s interest, I argue, is to unfold the complexities of the Treaty and the plethora of conflicts on a synchronic and diachronic axis through diversification of knowledge cultures, thereby stressing the plurality of expertise. The story hinges on a moment in the near future in which the rule of law is imperiled by the impending but resisted renewal of the Antarctic Treaty that regulates national, economic, and scientific interests on “the highest, coldest, driest, iciest, windiest, and least significant of the continents” (Ant, 44). As it turns out, it is anything but insignificant. The larger picture of the novel involves the fight fought in Washington, personified by the conflict between Republican Senator Winston, who opposes approval for the ratification of the Treaty by the US government (as we find out, upon lobbyist pressures and for personal profit), and his opponent, Democratic Senator Phil Chase, a Californian politician who fights “Götterdämmerung” capitalism (Ant, 45) and travels the world to make it a better place. In our non-fictional reality, the system of legal contracts, which has been first introduced during the Cold War and which ensures the continent’s sole dedication to “peace and science,” as the 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection or Madrid Protocol specifies,29 will be up for debate in 2048. Crucially, the date would end the moratorium on exploration for oil, gas, and other natural resources, as well as the shaky political equilibrium between various political entities “scrambling” for power.30 The U.S.-centered bipartisan conflict signals at the global nexus of Antarctica’s significance for the West and East as well as the North and South axes of conflictual interests. The continent has been central to the colonial activities of the U.K. and its settler colonies from Captain Cook’s voyages to the age of heroic exploration with the rivalry of Scott and Amundsen as its peak; the U.S. in its rivalry with the Soviet Union; the former Western imperial nations and the rising superpower China; to, even more recently, the disputes between political entities of the North and South hemisphere. In the novel, all these 28 Leane, “Scientific Utopia,” 30. 29 Klaus Dodds and Mark Nutall, The Scramble for the Poles: The Geopolitics of the Artic and Antarctic (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity P, 2016): 92. 30 Cf. Dodds and Nutall, The Scramble for the Poles.

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parties are represented by characters whose interests are not only diverse but also often opposed, and who are brought together on this exceptional continent with “transformative” powers.31 At the forefront of the events in the novel, this state of legal insecurity is played out locally in various smaller battles in which social, economic, tourist, and even scientific activities come against the barely existent legal structures. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has hired a “Götterdämmerung” capitalist contractor company, Antarctic Supply and Logistics (ASL), which makes the life of its workers difficult. X, who works for ASL as a seasonal General Field Assistant, is fed up with this situation but must acknowledge that “[t]here are legal limits to how much NSF can interfere with the contractors they hire” (Ant, 128). On top of his recent heartbreak, after his relationship with Val turns sour, this working environment forces him to look for other options. When working for scientists, or “beakers” (Ant, 61), proves similarly humiliating, X chooses an international but homosocial oil exploration group with flatter hierarchies. Led by Carlos, who was born in Antarctica as part of the Chilean “occupation program” (Ant, 214), this exploratory engineering program, as one of many such Southern Club initiatives, attests to the increasing law bending practices that go against the Treaty’s aim at prohibiting the exploitation of Antarctica’s natural resources. When Val, short for Valerie Kenning, tries to keep X from this decision, he reminds her that she is not on higher moral ground. As a tourist guide for reenactment tours, her activity is on similarly thin ice, legally speaking: “People have been breaking the Treaty for years [. . .]. Your Tour groups are breaking the Treaty as they used to interpret it” (Ant, 133). In analogy to X’s masculine comradery, Val later chooses to live as part of a group of neo-natives, known as “going feral” (Ant, 485). However, the ferals’ position regarding the Treaty is also highly controversial despite their matriarchal leader’s, Mai-lis, claims of “technical compliance with the Treaty” (Ant, 570). When a series of illegal activities befalls various local hotspots, the already slim legal bow tied around the continent threatens to come loose and requires help from the outside. The theft of a vehicle owned by the NSF catches the attention of the US Congress as the overseeing institution that decides over the US Antarctic Program’s budget. Senator Chase sends his aide, Wade Norton, to investigate what appears at first to be a local legal issue. The senator immediately recognizes Wade, who has “researched the Antarctic Treaty System (a complex of treaties, protocols and agreements)” as the “staff expert on Antarctica” (Ant, 38).

31 Leane, Antarctica in Fiction, 20.

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Initially, Wade’s aim is to “make a report” (Ant, 106) to help the senator with arguments to back the budget request of the NSF rather than further privatizing it. Soon enough, however, his interest merges into re-establishing the rule of law for Antarctica, both locally and globally. Wade’s journey, which turns out to be “transformative” for his character, specifically regarding his position in the team with Senator Chase, as much as for the local constellation of institutions and characters, as well as for the global players with an emphasis on Washington’s perspective, leads him from the U.S. capital via New Zealand to Antarctica. During the investigation, as he travels from McMurdo to the “Site of Special Scientific Interest” (Ant, 135), to the North Pole, to the oil exploration, to the secret home of the so-called ferals and back to McMurdo again, Wade becomes the senator’s “eyes and ears” (Ant, 47). Here, and in many moments in which Wade is, in fact, taken for the senator rather than a spokesperson, the text negotiates the relationship between politics and expert knowledge. As governing bodies rely on expertise, the senator relies on Wade. But this does not necessarily invert the power relations between them. The recognition of the similarity to Mr. Smith as spokesperson for the ecoteurs is what helps Wade reflect on his position regarding the senator. When observing Mr. Smith, the lawyer who represents the ecoteurs and of whose degree of involvement in the environmentalist movement he cannot be sure, Wade comes to question his own role: “The role of the spokesperson was an ambiguous one, as Wade very well knew, having just put words into Phil Chase’s mouth. Walking telephone or mastermind? There was no way to tell” (Ant, 545–546). Yet, Wade is repeatedly shown to be explicit about his position as a team player and does not seek to become the more powerful partner. Indeed, the novel is firm about the distinction between various types of expertise and does not favor any one of these, not even Wade’s. His quest for a pragmatic solution needs to accommodate different modes of knowledge: legal, political, scientific, mountaineer, even feng shui. Each of these knowledge fields have their own rules, even ‘laws’. We learn about “the laws of physics” (Ant, 462), the rules for relationships at MacMurdo (Ant, 199), for Antarctic travel (Ant, 302), and the mountain guide’s code (Ant, 186). Much in the same way as Wade connects Washington and Antarctica, he also becomes the nodal character in the complex constellation of characters and their interests on the continent. His main expertise is in creating a rapport between governing bodies and experts: Establishing the ground of understanding with experts who were explaining things to him was his responsibility; nod too often, and the expert was likely to give up entirely; but in the absence of any sign of response, some of them would begin to explain everything. (Ant, 162)

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He tries to intervene, or rather connect the conflicting interests, with the means of a legal and political expert. However, the resulting eight-point list with propositions to ensure legal framing for their diverse activities is not his report but the result of compromise. While he shows tendencies to become an actionist hero (hence the similarities with Crichton’s text), Wade needs consent, to refer back to Buell, for his propositions to become popular and legal. The success of Wade’s investigation depends on the aligning of his interests with those of other representatives of various institutions. Again, this need for compromise is reinforced through analogies between character trajectories. Like Wade, X learns the difficult job of grassroots politics and his plans to start a new coop-based service company for the NSF relies on the local expertise of former ASL workers. Both must persuade people in door-to-door campaigns: “Wade for his own part was working the town almost as hard as X was” (Ant, 582). Eventually, Wade leaves Antarctica but switches positions with Senator Chase: he becomes the expert in the field and his boss goes back to Washington to fulfil his role as politician. In analogy, X and Val, whose romantic plot Wade joins to complete a triangular structure symbolic of the choices the three characters need to make, are also assigned the right home in the end, one which is in line with these characters’ individual fields of expertise. While Val joins the ferals, X is finally allowed to settle in a “place” he can call his own, a little hut off the crowded McMurdo station, far enough to allow for a secluded study of social theory but close enough to help apply it to the station’s needs in a sociology-in-practice experiment (Ant, 643). This acknowledgment of different cultures of expertise is particularly visible in the encounters with scientists. In the course of his conversation with scientists, Wade observes scientific expertise as an outsider (or an expert in another field). He has to learn that a public understanding of science does not equip him to be on a par with Geoffrey Michelsen, “a British veteran of over forty years of Antarctic geology, who had taught in the States for almost that long” (Ant, 152), and his team of geologists, glaciologists, and paleobotanists. In the course of his conversations with them, Wade has to give up some of his ideas about science. He is appalled by estimations and disappointed in the absence of pure science, “shocked at the idea of that sort of approximation entering the pure realm of science” (Ant, 169). But he must learn that knowledge making in the sciences is not predicated on compromise in contrast to legal knowledge production where compromise is crucial. Most conflicts are at least temporarily resolved via legal means and a series of comprises manifested in the eight propositions for the renewal of the ratification of the Antarctic Treaty towards the end of the novel, but the re-introduction of a rule of law in Antarctica does not necessarily include a solution for the scientific conflict introduced in the plot. The “Sirius group controversy” between supporters of a dynamicist vs. a stabilist theory of the continent cannot be solved at the

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negotiating table. Just as the geologists seem to be the only ones unimpressed by the human history of the continent,32 they are similarly exempt from the debates aimed at producing a common protocol. This does not mean that scientists are not present at the negotiations but that they attend in different capacities: Sylvia Orloff represents the self-government of scientists in McMurdo, Carlos stands up for the Southern Club’s interests, and Mai-lis acts and speaks for the ferals. No matter how unnerving this may be for Wade and his goals, science remains incompatible with legal and political interests: “While politics whizzed on ever faster, science was slowing down; making the two match was like trying to catch neutrinos with the Earth” (Ant, 588). This is not cause for despair but an argument in favor of the acknowledgement of this difference. In addition, it also contradicts Carlos’ theory of scientists and technocrats as secret rulers of the world. After all, Wade as the senator’s spokesperson is not able to rely on scientists for a quick fix. This is striking in a novel which has been read as propagating science and scientific conduct as part of its utopian imagination,33 but ultimately shows that the text does not side with one character or one field of expertise, nor does it suggest a ‘one-size-fits-all solution’: science can hardly be read as the preferred solution in a kind of technocratic government because of its incompatibility with other discourses. In the end, the reader is presented with competing narratives as much as with competing knowledges. For one, there is Wade’s overview based on his research on the Antarctic Treaty, titled “Complications Attendant on the Non-Renewal of the Antarctic Treaty Overview” (Ant, 43), which we never get to read first-hand. Instead, we are presented with a literary alternative to Wade’s overview with added perspectives. Another narrative, which is alluded to but which the reader cannot access, consists of the reenactment tourist couple Jorge and Elspeth’s notes for an outdoor magazine article (Ant, 234; 522). In addition, the reader is shown the result of the negotiations under the pen of Sylvia Orloff in the form of the eight-point list of recommendations inserted towards the end of the novel. This report, also referred to as the “McMurdo Protocols” (Ant, 639), adds a local perspective to the Antarctic Treaty that compiles a series of such agreements as, for example, the Madrid Protocols. Finally, before leaving Antarctica, Wade watches and listens to Ta Shu’s vlog, arguably the only first-person account but one which, too, is folded into the narrative. He may share the status as a WOO (or Writer in Residence) with the author but the Chinese feng shui specialist’ 32 Cf. Anna Auguscik, “Spoiler Alert: Scott, Science, and Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Expedition Narratives,” Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 30.2 (2019): 47–64. 33 Cf. Leane, “Scientific Utopia,” 27–35; Vint and Bould, “Dead Penguins,” 257–273.

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generalizing propositions – “we are all true scientists” (Ant, 600) or “we are all poets” (Ant, 641) – hardly invite identification in a text which specifically chooses compromise that acknowledges particular, conflicted interests and dismisses simplifying universalisms. While the novel itself is a competing narrative to each of these, it is also a ‘better’ account in that it not only tells of all these other narratives but also shows Wade’s first-hand experience of Antarctica, alongside a prism of other perspectives (including even the anonymous ecoactivists). In my reading, then, the novel is more than the sum of its parts or, in other words, the center of the novel does not reside with any one particular character. Its focus on legal discourse and eventually on the incompatibility between the culture of governance and the culture of science emphasizes rather than undermines Antarctica’s stance on the plurality and indispensable relevance of expertise.

Paranoia and Authoritarian Expertise in Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004) Like Robinson’s novel, Michael Crichton’s State of Fear begins with a moment of illegal environmentalist activity and imagines the problem of climate change within a legal context. However, instead of voicing a need for legal regulation, as in the efforts put into the ratification of the Antarctic Treaty, Crichton’s text presents environmental litigation and the ecoterrorist plot as two sides of the same coin. The proposed solution, a single and corporate answer to scientific, legal, and societal problems such as, but not limited to, global warming, has resulted in much criticism of the novel. With the prominence of climate change, legal issues have received less attention in literary criticism discussing the novel so far. Yet, in analogy to the need that it created for scientist experts to respond to the representation of science and scientists, legal experts, too, were forced onto the defensive and reacted to its framing of (environmental) law. Lea B. Vaughn traces how the three lawyer protagonists – “Peter Evans, an associate at a Los Angeles law firm; Nicholas Drake, a former litigator now head of National Environmental Research Fund (NERF); and [John] Kenner, a man of action who holds both a J.D. and a Ph.D.”34 – are used to condemn lawyers and specifically “cause lawyering” in the novel.35 According to Vaughn, the novel

34 Lea B. Vaughn, “A Few Inconvenient Truths about Michael Crichton’s State of Fear: Lawyers, Causes and Science,” Seton Hall Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law 20.1 (2010): 49–84, 52. 35 Vaughn, “Lawyers, Causes and Science,” 49.

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errs in at least three propositions: first, “lawyers know nothing about science or the scientific method, nor are they inclined to learn anything about it”; secondly, “matters are pursued, regardless of its merit, for the sheer enjoyment [of] litigation rather than to promote the cause itself”; and thirdly, “lawyers, aided by politicians and the media, are complicit in creating the ‘state of fear,’” eponymous with the book’s title.36 The purpose of my reading of State of Fear is not to join in the defense but to argue that the novel’s dismissive use of the profession is programmatic for its stance on expertise. The text negates the specificity and plurality of expertise, ultimately succumbing to a vision in which the only alternative to an alleged conspiracy is to trust the authoritarian judgment of one individual, one company, or one ‘author’s message.’ While such a “damning critique of expertise” may not come as a surprise to those familiar with Crichton’s oeuvre,37 in State of Fear, this dismissal paired with a restrictive, one-sided, and paradoxically paranoid agenda not only results in contradictions with the novel’s performance as expert text but also presents problems to the text as a thriller. Focusing on Crichton’s novel as a thriller helps to position some of its choices in the narrative tradition of that genre as well as leads to the core of its problems. At first glance, the three lawyers perfectly match Jerry Palmer’s description of the triangular character constellation typical for a thriller: a professional hero, a bureaucrat villain, and an amateur citizen. John Kenner matches all “three characteristics” of a hero: “he is a professional, not an amateur or bureaucrat; he wins; and he always reacts to prior aggression.”38 Firstly, his credentials as MIT professor, with several degrees from Ivy league universities, paired with his work for a government agency, reveal him as a seldom example of a professional jack-of-alltrades. Secondly, he wins the fight against the ecoterrorist threat, as well as against Drake’s plan, and Evans’s demon – the young man’s belief in global warming. Thirdly, the ecoterrorists strike first: not just chronologically but also on the level of text. The reader first encounters the terrorists and their plotting, scheming, preparing, and killing of innocent if unnecessarily naïve scientists before we meet the hero. Even in a one-on-one fight, Kenner never opens fire, “They shot first.”39

36 Vaughn, “Lawyers, Causes and Science,” 52. 37 Michael Crowley, “Jurassic President: Michael Crichton’s Scariest Creation” (March 20, 2006), The New Republic (acc. 10 February 2021). 38 Jerry Palmer, “Thrillers,” in Popular Fiction and Social Change, ed. Christopher Pawling (London and Houndmills: Macmillan, 1984): 76–98: 87. 39 Michael Crichton, State of Fear (New York: HarperCollins, 2004): 357. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “SoF.”

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Nicholas Drake, “a highly successful litigator who had retired to become the director of the National Environmental Resource Fund” (SoF, 40), seems the perfect match for the category of “villains [as] bureaucrats.”40 He is “a solitary, ascetic man, who detested parties and noise” (SoF, 53). Finally, idealistic Peter Evans takes the place of the amateur, manifested “either in the form of an average citizen [. . .], or in the form of a woman who has an attachment to the hero.”41 Evans is characterized as the average, “well-informed person” (SoF, 82), frequently shown to be effeminate in the course of the plot. Though he becomes part of the hero’s “back-up team,” he is still in need of guidance.42 However, the constellation runs into problems because of the text’s obsession with its agenda. As if the reader was not going to pay attention, everything is repeated, spelled out, and laid bare. Characters are completely subsumed to the paranoid logic of the text. They must repeatedly comment on the temperature in order to remind the reader that global warming is not actually happening, perform similar plotlines for the sake of the morale of the story, and are hardly given any room to change or surprise. This restrictive handling of characters has consequences for the distribution of their roles as hero, villain, or amateur. John Kenner’s telling name as a knowit-all quickly reveals him as the novel’s sole professional, but his expertise lies more with Bond-style agent activity than with his science or law degrees. Indeed, we never see him doing science, but we see quite a lot of “driving straight at” (SoF, 341) and over ecoterrorists. He is all branches combined in one and, what is more, excels by outdoing any other expert in any of these fields. Not only is he the better scientist, Kenner is also the better lawyer as he helps the millionaire philanthropist George Morton with the legal phrasing of the withdrawal from NERF and later wins a legal standoff against a senior practitioner (SoF, 272). He is the more efficient “law-enforcement officer” (SoF, 259), knows more about military operations than the military (SoF, 255), spent more time on the southernmost continent than other Antarctica experts (SoF, 212), turns out to be more observant of the North American landscape than Native Americans (SoF, 406), and works for the only institution, the National Security Intelligence Agency (NSIA), which dares to combat ecoterrorism: “Domestic terrorism makes domestic agencies uncomfortable. They’re either too harsh or too lenient. Everyone in NSIA is specially trained” (SoF, 274). Yet, as he does not seem to need sleep, manages even to outrun a crocodile, and outsmarts everyone – verbally or in a

40 Palmer, “Thrillers,” 82. 41 Palmer, “Thrillers,” 81. 42 Palmer, “Thrillers,” 87.

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gunfight – it is difficult to perceive him as a human. Evans dislikes being lectured by Kenner, of course, but even Sarah, Morton’s assistant and Evans’ love interest, who is taken by the “so knowledgeable, so skilled” Kenner (SoF 323), seems fed up with his know-it-all attitude: “Is there anything you’re not good at?”, she asks exasperated (SoF, 286). This larger-than-life character, then, often comes across as a personification of the text. Indeed, it is when Kenner decides to present Evans with “references” that the footnotes set in (SoF, 193). When Kenner points to diegetic information material – “tapped the chart” (SoF, 190) – the first graph in the novel appears. Ultimately, Kenner, like other characters, becomes a means for pushing the ‘author’s message.’ Regarding the role of the villain, who ought to be on a par with the hero, there is no one whom either the text or Kenner would recognize as expert enough. Drake is dreadfully dry but rather than a mastermind to match Kenner, he is revealed as a marionette, duped by a PR specialist. Neither do any other potential opponents rise to the occasion. The militant ecoterrorists are only temporarily acknowledged as a worthy challenge but soon reduced again: “Eco-terrorists aren’t usually well educated” (SoF, 239). Kenner easily wins every argument against Peter but also against the two more seasoned alarmists, the unbearably dimwitted actor Ted Bradley and the verbose but ultimately hypocritical housewife Ann Garner. In line with Palmer’s genre characteristics, “in the interest of suspense”, we never see the “villain’s point-of-view,” which is usually “suppressed in order that we shall adopt the hero’s point of view.”43 In State of Fear, we only receive access to Drake’s evil plans once Evans – and the reader – are persuaded of NERF’s status as decidedly not “the good guys” (SoF, 464). But the suppression is not accomplished in favor of Kenner’s perspective either, who is far too knowledgeable. Instead, the suspense is created through the amateur and hero-to-be, Peter Evans. The choice for Evans as main focalizer is a necessity but proves precarious. We know more than Evans, not necessarily due to having more or different information, but because Evans does not act on the clues around him, though we suspect he should. For example, when he is obviously being followed, his conclusion is surprisingly trusting: “So. Perhaps he was not being followed after all” (SoF, 148). A few pages later, our suspicions are confirmed when we learn with Evans that someone is, in fact, tailing him. Like so many other characters before him, he is not paranoid enough. Yet, in order to win the reader, the text tries hard to make Evans the hero. In the constellation of two older men and the beautiful young women by their side – John Kenner and his niece Jennifer Haynes, the millionaire philanthropist George Morton, and his beautiful assistant

43 Palmer, “Thrillers,” 80.

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Sarah Jones – Evans is not only the fifth wheel to the group but also a rather improbable hero. At first, Evans seems to occupy a similar position to Wade’s political representation of the senator, with the difference that he works for a millionaire philanthropist. Evans’s goal also becomes to investigate extralegal activity but both the scope of these activities and the scope of his participation play out on entirely different levels. He assists Kenner in not only uncovering but downright preventing the terrorist organization, Environmental Liberation Front (ELF), from fabricating human-induced but natural-looking disasters all over the world. A wild journey against time brings Kenner, Evans, and Sarah (later joined by Kenner’s niece, and the two incorrigible environmentalists Bradley and Garner) from California to Chile, Antarctica, Arizona, the Solomon Island, and back to LA again. All the while, the novel’s interest is to educate Evans (and the reader) about the dangers of climate change, not in the sense of the effects of global warming but of its rhetoric and those who participate in militant, manipulative and humanendangering action with the intentions to persuade the populace of its existence. During the entire action, the young man is hardly an expert regarding these activities, as he is the first to acknowledge: “Evans had never fired a gun in his life. And until this moment, he was proud of it” (SoF, 320). Only when it suits the text’s needs is Evans allowed to be an expert. Otherwise, as he contests, “I’m an idiot” (SoF, 352). His situational insider knowledge of the law is needed in order to further criticize legal expertise. When the leading litigation lawyer, James Balder, complains about the difficulty of finding reliable experts for the witness stand, Evans’s perspective as a lawyer allows him to connect this to his experience, so that he can reliably, at least based on his credentials, and conveniently confirm: “One of the first things you learned in law school was that the law was not about truth. It was about dispute resolution. In the course of resolving a dispute, the truth might or might not emerge. Often it did not” (SoF, 93–94). In contrast to Wade, Evans’s plot-driving transformation from a climate change believer to a skeptic is also reduced to the needs of the text. This change is often marked by drawbacks when he – like an addict – keeps falling back on his former beliefs in climate change. In the end, Evans understands that he has been used by Kenner and Morton. His anger, however, lasts for no longer than half an hour. His severely limited perspective means that he proves useless as a stand-in hero – a character who hardly knows what he wants, cannot formulate his interests, and, in contrast to Wade, is not even allowed to make his own decision by the end of the novel. Concentrating all knowledge and all expertise in Kenner’s hands means that not only Evans but everyone in his orbit, including scientists, is reduced to the position of ‘damsels-in distress.’ Where Kenner overwhelms, other experts –

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especially naïve scientific experts who unknowingly help eco-terrorists and extremist environmental lawyers – underwhelm colossally. For a text that rings the alarm against alarmists, State of Fear is curiously bent on exposing characters who are not easily alarmed but all too trusting. The only characters more gullible than Evans are scientist characters. On the very first pages, the reader meets Jonathan Marshall, a graduate student in physics from London who studies wave patterns in Paris and very much enjoys to be told that what he does is “complicated,” repeatedly so (SoF, 6 f.). He is duped into disclosing his research to an ‘exotic’ looking French lady. Jonathan does not act upon his initial suspicions, a mistake which prepares the reader for Evans’s and other characters’ errors, and thus becomes the first to die at the hands of the ecoterrorists. Though not all scientists are as naïve as Jonathan, they all need to be rescued by Kenner. The Iceland expert Dr. Per Einarsson, for example, stands his ground against Drake but his power against the larger conspiracy is minimal. Kenner has to come to his and other scientists’ defense: “Now you know how legitimate scientists feel when their integrity is impugned” (SoF, 196). Kenner contradicts himself and the text by emphasizing that “[c]limate science simply isn’t there yet” (SoF, 249) but he and those who are on his side know “the truth” (SoF, 44). Both Antarctica and State of Fear put ‘science’ on a pedestal, but while, in Robinson’s novel, Wade must learn to question the purity of science as a public misconception, Crichton and Kenner view science as a harbinger of truth unless it is politicized (e.g., SoF, appendix 1). Eventually, not only Evans has to choose new allies and the right woman by his side but also science has to choose a new bedpartner and the novel is adamant that the old militaryindustrial complex is a better match than the new politico-legal-media complex. Instead of looking forward, then, as Kenner and the text propagate ought to be the highest goal, State of Fear actually moves backwards into nostalgia, which is bound to present further difficulties, both regarding collaborations with military and industry, as well as overstepping boundaries between fields of expertise. If science is deemed to be too enigmatic, more so risking an immoral relationship with the hidden PLM controversy, the elopement with the military promises hardly more transparency with Kenner and his side-kick Sanjong Thapa shown as frequently secretive themselves. The links to industry are similarly problematic. Millionaire philanthropists like George Morton, another ‘damsel in distress,’ need to learn that their money is better spent on a new company in line with Kenner’s vision, “Study the Problem and Fix It” (SoF, 564), rather than on projects such as proposed by NERF. With Morton’s private sector solution, which aims to revolutionize the way science is done and offer solutions for all problems from third world poverty to wilderness conservation by employing more scientists but only “one lawyer”

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(SoF, 564), the text suggests that expertise in the economic or financial sector is a natural entry to other fields such as politics or science. Yet, its hubris matches only that of the author, as one commentator writes, “Crichton’s discussion of these ideas as new and untried is one of many signs that three years of reading were insufficient to turn Crichton into an expert on science policy.”44 Putting the novel’s agenda before the characters and before its generic demands, on one hand, and the degree to which the reader must be persuaded of necessary paranoia, on the other, is striking in a text that cautions against those who incite fear in others, all the while claiming that “Everybody has an agenda. Except me” (SoF, 573). Kenner’s expertise, the novel concedes, is to be institutionalized in the form of the new company but only to the point when it, too, becomes part of the establishment. This fear of regulated expertise merges with a fear of bureaucracy, as one of Kenner’s most personal responses to the alleged atrocities committed by the conspiracy against the people is when he mentions his dread of being told what to do by bureaucrats from Washington or Brussels (SoF, 500). Curiously, while the novel keeps telling us that Drake is the “paranoid” character (SoF, 161), it is Kenner who is repeatedly shown to be paranoid. More so, the proposition of evading the entire establishment and solving the problem in the hands of one corporation (or throughout most of the plot, one man) is even more problematic as it comes down to an authoritarian vision in which a single entity knows everything and should therefore be given the right to do anything.

The Place of Popular Fiction in Law and Climate Change Debates Instead of reading these novels as either good or bad versions of ‘cli-fi,’ the aim of this juxtaposition was to examine their interest in climate and the law in the context of historically specific public discussions of expertise as well as the media-specific parameters of this debate. As contributions to the public discussion of expertise, Antarctica and State of Fear present different visions for the relationship between governance and expertise, with a consent-based rule of law versus a secretive, elitist group of self-professed experts in authoritarian trust-based regimes – a spectrum of scenarios that has much to say about

44 Alan Miller, “Bad Fiction, Worse Science,” Issues in Science and Technology 22.2 (2006) (acc. 03 February 2021).

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contemporary knowledge-based decisions. The legal profession has had their share of expert fatigue, and Vaughn’s reading of State of Fear can be understood as part of the effort to disrupt simplifying “tort tales” and salvage the reputation of lawyers in media representations.45 Paying attention to the texts’ siding with or against painstaking and at times toilsome negotiations adhering to both scientific and legal expertise adds not only to the arguments already made about their (mis)representation of science but also to their participation in a public and academic debate on expertise in general, one that has recently peaked in relation to climate change but also other issues such as Brexit or the current pandemic. In his reconstruction of the chronology of environmentalism and the law, Buell warns against overestimating the singular effect of 9/11,46 but Robinson’s and Crichton’s novels are very much situated in the shift from the 1990s to the 2000s. If Antarctica seems closer to the debate on expertise that would culminate in the 2000 presidential election with a bipartisan conflict personified by the two candidates, the environmentalist Al Gore versus the oil-industry backed George W. Bush, the solutions proposed in State of Fear are more reminiscent of the ticking-time-bomb scenario and the Jack Bauer-type protagonist of a series like 24 (2001–2010) against the background of the war on terror. As popular contributions to climate change fiction, Antarctica and State of Fear participate in the genre’s interest in questions of responsibility, frequently posed in terms of the relationship between experts and non-experts: What responsibilities can and should scientists take in shaping the public’s understanding of climate change and in putting pressure on media or governance? Popular fiction seems particularly pressed to expand this question to the role of legal expertise as part of a wider spectrum of knowledge cultures and deserves to participate in a discussion that seeks to bring climate change fiction into dialogue with environmental law but where it has not yet been included.47 Reading the novels as climate change fiction widens the temporal, thematic, and symbolic scope of the genre. Antarctica adds a utopian or “eutopian” vision to the genre,48 one in which action is possible and not within the possibilities of geoengineering, but through change via political consensus, economic justice and legal stability. With its diagnosis of

45 William Haltom and Michael McCann, Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2004): 5–6. 46 Buell, “Ecoterrorism,” 156. 47 See, for example, Nicole Rogers, Law, Fiction and Activism in a Time of Climate Change (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020). 48 Andrew Milner, “Guns Under the Table: Kim Stanley Robinson and the Transition to Utopia,” Utopian Studies 31 (2020): 388–397: 389.

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the problem coming from militant alarmists, State of Fear adds an unpopular and yet widespread perspective of “climate scepticism.”49 Where Antarctica presents a plurality of experts with a plurality of narratives, emphasizing the experimental nature of both the continent and the text, State of Fear reduces all expertise to one Kenner/Crichton, leaving no room for experiment. In his anticipatory, or paranoid, “author’s message,” he writes, “[a] novel such as State of Fear, in which so many divergent views are expressed, may lead the reader to wonder where, exactly, the author stands on these issues” (SoF, 569). While in Robinson’s case, critics have proposed different readings and found the author’s message symbolically embodied by different characters, the similarity of the bullet point list following this statement with Kenner’s lectures throughout the plot has led reviewers to unanimously identify Crichton with Kenner. Robinson invites conversation about possible solutions whereas Crichton’s solution remains within a ‘one-man-saves-all’ mode. Paradoxically, this makes not only experts but virtually any characters next to Kenner dispensable. But in order to fulfil its potential as a specific form of knowledge,50 the novel cannot function as a ‘one-man-show.’ In light of the contemporary Anthropocene debate, Robinson’s novel may not be on the right side of the “sustainability” vs. “habitability” question,51 as Vint and Bould note, but it provides a foundation for empathy-based narratives by postulating the need to acknowledge the expertise of “knowledge cultures” in the plural.52

49 See Handley, “Climate Scepticism,” 156. 50 See Antje Kley, “What Literature Knows: An Introduction,” in What Literature Knows: Forays into Literary Knowledge Production, eds. Antje Kley and Kai Merten (Berlin et al: Peter Lang, 2018): 9–25. 51 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category,” Critical Inquiry 46.1 (2009): 1–31, 17f. 52 Horatschek, “From Knowledge to Knowledges,” 10.

Markus Schmitz

The Fiction of Justice: Human Smuggling in European Law and Middle Eastern Refugee Narratives Abstract: This contribution is located at the intersections of forced migration studies and law and literature studies. It aims at charting two competing narrative regimes that convey and disseminate what happens on the escape-routes to Europe. Starting from the observation that the current legal discourse of forced migration is sustained by the over-generalizing symbolic representation of human smuggling as an act of crime, I juxtapose dominant European emplotments of human smuggling with selected Middle Eastern narratives of discrepant refugeeness. I argue that these works of literature have a particular capacity to challenge the language of the law and its strictures of narratability. Setting focus on stories and character types that complicate the dominant narrative of human trafficking, I identify symbolic figurations which, due to their self-reliant lack of rights, give evidence to what is usually overlooked in legal abstractions of illegitimacy. The Middle Eastern imaginaries of human smuggling traced in this contribution are interpreted as texts that creatively recast the meaning of smuggling and being smuggled and thus radically question the European border regime’s self-totalizing notion of justice. [W]e can encounter the idea of justice not as a formal universal, and not as an objective relation among things, but as a provisional dictate, an incomplete dictate, haunted always (Wai Chee Dimock, Residues of Justice) by what it fails to encompass.1 I am I and I don’t want to be made into a symbol.2 (Elias Khoury, Awlad al-ghittu. Ismi Adam)

Since at least 2015 the attempted and failed escape to Europe by refugees of predominantly Middle Eastern and African backgrounds has been at the core of public debates. Significantly increased numbers of individuals forced to leave their homes and flee as refugees led to what many have seen as a crisis of Europe’s infrastructural and administrative system. At the same time, the mass mediation of people seeking shelter in Europe and dying on their escape routes

1 Wai Chee Dimock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: U of California P, 1997): 8. 2 Elias Khoury, Awlad al-ghittu. Ismi Adam (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 2012), here qtd. from the English translation: Elias Khoury, Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam, trans. Humphrey Davies (New York: Archipelago Books, 2019): 142. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-010

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to Europe has triggered an intense questioning of our responsibility for human suffering in the Global South and for the “migrants knocking at Europe’s doors.”3 Although some politicians initially announced a compassionate commitment to unconditional solidarity (thereby responding to alarming reports by humanitarian NGO’s and numerous voices from within civil society), the short empathic stance towards the influx of Syrian refugees expressed in Germany’s open-door policy during the late summer 2015 quickly gave way to the long-established xenophobic rhetoric of anxiety and “securitization.”4 As the initial shock turned into the dull routine of egoistic ignorance, national supremacy, and Western exceptionalism, the European Union reacted by refining its already rigid fortification through measures ranging from the containment and processing of refugees in extraterritorial detention camps to tightened asylum procedures, reduction of material incentives for asylum seekers and accelerated deportation. Today’s refugee debate is characterized by a fetishistic double fixation on the refugee as both a passive victim and criminal perpetrator.5 Although the assumingly opposed images of the would-be immigrant first and foremost work on the psycho-symbolic levels of individual identification and public imagination, the fantastic and imaginary cannot at all be seen as unreal or irrelevant with a view to the world of power and politics. The ambiguity of refugee symbolization not only informs the creation and dissemination of European narratives of forced migration and thus guides our (mis-)understanding of and political (non-)response to the challenges that accelerated refugee mobility poses. It also resonates in the language of migration law. Psychic schemes of symbolization and narrative codes of public communication, in other words, seem to exist in a dialectical relation with legal texts. The ongoing re-classification of human smuggling as a crime before the crime – something from which refugees must be saved precisely because they are considered potentially guilty of that very crime – is a particularly striking example of the transfiguration of legal discourse in which the fetishistic double image of the refugee as victim/villain is recorded. As avenues for so-called legal immigration – that is immigration considered legitimate by Europe’s sovereign law – have become so restricted that, for the majority of migrants from the Global South, unregistered border-crossing and seeking asylum remain the only options of penetrating the fortress Europe successfully, an ever-growing number of refugees cannot but resort to the assistance of persons

3 Zygmunt Bauman, Strangers at Our Door (Malden, MA: Polity P, 2016): 5. 4 On the political neologism of securitization see Bauman, Strangers, 24–25. 5 See Markus Schmitz, “Das Begehren der ‘Flüchtlinge’. Überlegungen zur Psycho(patho)logie der deutschen Flüchtlingsdebatte nach dem Märchen grenzenloser Hilfsbereitschaft,” Das Argument – Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaften 58.5 (2016): 694–706.

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providing clandestine transport service to facilitate their migration. While the international protection of those who find themselves forced to escape from sustained or systemic denial of their fundamental human rights, as guaranteed in the 1951 Refugee Convention,6 has not yet been openly questioned for the past two decades, human smuggling has been the subject of controversial public debates. The trope of smuggling has been increasingly used to legitimate measures aimed at combating what is by now conventionally coined ‘illegal migration’ – that is, irregular immigration considered illegal by European law. Negotiating and adopting the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime as well as its two protocols on trafficking and smuggling, the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons and the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air,7 the European Union and its member states embark on an approach to transnational law enforcement and refugee protection, which is rich in contradiction. While the protocols distinguish between human smuggling and human trafficking by way of stressing the difference between consenting illegal migration and coerced illegal migration, individual migration strategies and circumstances often defy easy categorization. In practice, the abstract dichotomy defining the protection needs of refugees according to their original motives becomes more and more blurred. Since forced migration is an inherently risky process, violence, coercion, deception, and exploitation can and do occur within both the trafficking and smuggling process, within the formal and informal economy, within the legal and the illegalized migrant experience.8 As a consequence, both the smuggler and the smuggled refugee are increasingly identified as fellow criminals and threats to security. Hence, one cannot be surprised that the fight against smuggling has been identified as the key security task in European action plans, operations, and bilateral collaborations of the past years.9 The 2019

6 “The 1951 Refugee Convention,” website of the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR (acc. 15 January 2021). 7 For the Convention and its Protocols see “United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the Protocols Thereto,” website of the United Nations (acc. 15 January 2021). 8 See Jacqueline Bhabha and Monette Zard, “Smuggled or Trafficked?” Forced Migration Review 25.5 (2006): 6–8. 9 See the 2015 EU Action Plan Against Migrant Smuggling, website of the European Parliament (acc. 15 January 2021); the military operation EUNAVFOR MED launched in 2016 to tackle smuggling operations in cooperation with the Libyan coast guard as part of the so-called Operation Sophia, EU-website on Operation Sophia (acc. 15 January 2021); or the 2016 EU-Turkey deal on the prevention of refugee migration “EU-Turkey Statement & Action Plan,” website of the European

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European Agenda on Migration, instead of providing visions for the management of legal immigration, shows a clear focus on measures to rigorously prevent refugee migration across European Borders.10 The next long-term EU budget, 2021–2027, proposes to almost triple the funding for integrated border management. Accordingly, measures of “border protection [are] at the core of the new budget.”11 Against this background, it does not come as a surprise that Europe’s current refugee policy is essentially grounded in the successive denial of refugee rights through the Criminalization of Flight and Escape Aid.12 While the European Border and Coast Guard Agency for the protection of the EU’s frontières extérieures, called Frontex, has been developed into a super-agency of external migration management complicit in the illegal pushback of refugees, both on land and sea,13 even rescue boats operated by NGOs are increasingly suspected of cooperating with smuggler networks.14 In a (not all too) longue durée perspective, the considerable shift of meaning of the notion of escape facilitation, escape assistance, or escape aid signals an irritating forgetfulness with a view to the smuggling of people persecuted in Europe on the basis of race, political and religious affiliations, or sexual orientation during World War II. It may also surprise those who remember the legally endorsed escape services provided by so-called Fluchthelfer [literally ‘escape helpers’] to people fleeing from the German Democratic Republic to West-Germany. Today, European law treats humanitarian smuggling as an oxymoron. The image of the heroic helper has been turned into a shadow image of the criminal haler

Parliament, (acc. 15 January 2021). 10 For an overview on the 2019 European Agenda on Migration, see the website of the European Commission Migration and Home Affairs (acc. 15 January 2021). 11 “EU budget: Commission proposes major funding increase for stronger borders and migration,” website of the European Commission (acc. 15 January 2021). 12 Sara Bellezza, Tiziana Caladndrino and borderline-europe (eds.), Criminalization of Flight and Escape Aid (Hamburg: Tredition, 2017). 13 Hope Barke and Milena Zajović (eds.), Border Violence Monitoring Network, The Black Book of Pushbacks, vol. 1–2 (Brussels: GUE/NGL, 2020). 14 Eugenio Cusumano and Matteo Villa, “From ‘Angels’ to ‘Vice Smugglers’: The Criminalization of Sea Rescue NGOs in Italy,” European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research (2020) (acc. 15 January 2021).

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[Schlepper] or channeler [Schleuser].15 The new smuggler is represented as a threat to both the vulnerable refugee and the sovereign nation state that the refugee has chosen as their destination. It is this imaginary that legitimizes the harsh criminalization of human smuggling and the expansion of respective security measures. Not only can these measures undermine the actual humanitarian interests of refugees, but they also deflect attention from the fact that Europe’s unwillingness to provide save avenues for legal immigration is one of the main reasons for the refugee’s vulnerability in the present day. The growing concern with security thus conceals the fact that Europe is complicit in the very crime it claims to combat. The most recent implementations and revisions in European legislation, jurisdiction and border control show a strange mix between a neurotic ignorance regarding legitimate claims of refugees and an obsession with identifying refugees as culpable of being smuggled. While individuals classified as smugglers can be punished by criminal law, those who are classified as ‘smuggled’ ultimately risk being detained outside the boundaries of Europe’s sovereign law and removed back to the places of their departure. Being smuggled can thus be a very dangerous undertaking, not only with a view to the precarious and often life-threatening modes of transportation offered by smugglers. The smuggled refugee seized by European border guards, or the henchmen of non-European neighbor regimes collaborating with Europe, risks losing their supposedly inalienable rights as a human being. They run the risk of losing the very rights granted by an international law once lauded for replacing earlier conceptions of refugee rights based on nationality or country of origin. On these grounds, it hardly seems anachronistic to draw on Hannah Arendt’s classic essay on the outlawing of refugees during World War II. Today, refugees are again forced to expose themselves “to the fate of human beings, who unprotected by any specific law or political convention, are nothing but human beings.”16 Arendt’s reasonably pessimistic warning of naïve humanitarianist trust in the legal status of refugees as “nothing but human beings,” voiced in 1943, can indeed be re-read as a powerful reminder of the need for a diachronic evaluation of the condition of those who are currently driven from country to country, outside the conventional spaces of legal applicability: “I can hardly imagine an attitude more dangerous, since we actually live in a world in which human beings as such have ceased to exist for quite a while [. . .].”17 In such a moment, when a law that pretends to protect refugees in fact rejects them, its inherent symbolism takes 15 See Johannes Stiegler, “Helfer oder Halunken? Über den diskursiven Wandel vom ‘Fluchthelfer’ zum ‘Schleuser’,” Hinterland 27.4 (2014): 10–14. 16 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees” [1943], documenta 14 1.6 (2015): 135–144, 143. 17 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 143.

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on an important function. Imposing meaning upon certain individuals and groups so that jurisdiction sees them as illegitimate, the law and its universalizing rhetoric can become a site of what Pierre Bourdieu has called “symbolic violence.”18 Whether we regard the legal symbolization of smugglers first and foremost as the product of the psychological dynamics of repression of something incompatible with Europe’s self-conception as a democratic and humanitarian project or the result of juridical reasoning,19 the representation of smuggling needs to be interpreted both historically and symbolically. I suggest that the symbol of the smuggler is both an unconscious means of defense and a rhetorical vehicle that is used intentionally in specific relations of power. There is a variety of figures of speech in which this kind of symbolism is recorded. Of course, one can find them in the discourses of politics and mass media. But they also seem to be particularly densely at work in the language of the law. Given the fact that human smuggling is mostly a hidden practice, this might come as a surprise. As the Iraqi writer and filmmaker Hasan Blasim illustrates in his self-published short story “Al-arshif wa-l-waqiʻ” [literally “The Archive and the Event”], Europe’s legal archives basically record the stories “refugees [have to] tell to obtain the right to humanitarian asylum [. . .]. The real stories remain locked in the hearts of the refugees, for them to mull over in complete secrecy.”20 The symbolic representation of smuggling in law seems to serve a particular educational function. Filling the murky void created by the absence of verified data, shared ignorance, and psychic mechanisms of repression, it guides our ideological perception of the so-called refugee/ smuggling problem and of the appropriate means to deal with it. How can we then challenge the hegemonic exclusion of refugee rights in the over-generalizing criminalization of smuggling as an act of crime? Starting from the general observation that the current European discourse of forced migration and refugee policy is sustained by a narrative pattern which conceives of refugees as ignorant regarding their own political histories and stories, I evoke Jacques Derrida’s assumption that “[t]he law as such should never give rise to any story” as a hint to suspect Middle Eastern refugee narratives of the

18 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Force of Law: Towards a Sociology of the Juridical Field,” trans. Richard Terdiman, The Hastings Law Journal 38 (1987): 814–53, 816. 19 See Agnes Petocz, Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005): 36–55. 20 I quote from the English translation Hasan Blasim, “The Reality and the Record,” The Madman of Freedom Square, trans. Jonathan Wright (London: Comma P, 2016): 1–11, 1.

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capacity to pose precisely such a challenge for legal doctrine.21 I argue that the law’s intrinsic antipathy towards fictional narratives necessitates the obvious: literary readings of stories which cannot easily be tolerated because they threaten the dominant legal strictures of narratability. Drawing on Wai Chee Dimock’s by now classic critique of law’s descriptive language, I wish to demonstrate that the alternative language of Middle Eastern refugee imaginaries radically questions the very “’uneven primacy’ of justice” which legitimates Europe’s policy of rigidly blocking legal refugee immigration,22 while criminalizing any attempt to circumvent this very blockage. Revisiting the literary works of writers as diverse as Ameen Rihani, Ghassan Kanafani, Radwa Ashour, or Hakan Günday, this article aims at a juxtaposition of dominant emplotments of human smuggling with selected fictional Middle Eastern narratives. To explore the ways in which the circumvention of legal boundaries and geographic borders was and continues to be turned into narratives, it places a particular focus on stories and characters that complicate the limited plots and types that determine Europe’s legalistic discourse. In what follows, I do not claim to provide answers to the political questions which immediately arise (almost like a knee-jerk reaction) whenever the so-called refugee problem or the refugee crisis is addressed publicly. I rather try to imagine a transdisciplinary refugee studies conversation that appreciates the politics of refugees by embracing their refusal to be turned into a fixed symbol of illegal migration. I am concerned with both the sub-political nature of prevailing European fictions of “refugeeness” and the many contradictions and voids inherent in these fictions.23 I am searching for Middle Eastern writings that can contest the symbolic entextualization of human smuggling in Europe’s legal(istic) discourse. By charting alternative imaginaries of smugglers, I wish to contribute to the broadening of our understanding of the transition between what happens on the escape-routes to Europe and the competing narrative regimes which convey and disseminate these events. By doing so, I hope to strengthen the role of cross-linguistic and relational approaches in projects located at the intersections of forced migration studies and law and literature studies.24 21 Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, trans. Avital Ronell and Christine Roulton (London: Routledge, 1992): 183–220, 191. 22 Dimock, Residues of Justice, 8. 23 Directly linked to the condition of homelessness the notion of refugeeness stresses the impossibility of fixing the meaning of refugee. On the use of this intentionally ambiguous concept see Peter Nyers, Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency (New York and London: Routledge, 2006): xv. 24 The ideas and case studies presented in this is essay are directly related to my ongoing work on a book-length comparative study revolving around Middle Eastern and African refugee imaginaries.

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The Resistance-Hero On the appointed day, Saad and his companions would guide all those who wanted to leave through untrodden mountain passes, like silent phantoms feeling their way under the protection of darkness, as the hearts of the nocturnal travelers pounded in their chests, without a murmur, a song, or a chant. And when the specter of the shore loomed before them, the children grew wild with excitement and jumped for joy, and the grownups moved eagerly to load their children and their possessions onto the ships. Their eyes shone with the hope of salvation, and then became clouded by the memory of an olive tree they left behind and basil stalks they’ll never lay at the graves of their fathers. They climbed aboard and are rocked by the small boats that will take them out to the big ships (Radwa Ashour, Thulathiyat Ghanata) that will take them far away.25

This is an excerpt from the first part of Radwa Ashour’s Thulathiyat Ghanata [The Granada Trilogy], a novel which is rich in dislocations and disorientations. What seems at first glance to be the script of a familiar shot from a critically engaged documentary on the East Mediterranean refugee-smuggling network, to be screened on the proto-humanitarian European television channel Arte “[a] s part of a series on Great World Suffering,”26 is in fact set in the aftermath of the Castilian takeover of Islamic al-Andalus [Andalucia] in 1492. Saad belongs to the extended family of Abu Jaafar, a bookbinder and respected member of the Muslim community of Albaicín, which is grappling with the painful consequences of this military takeover. What is remembered in Roman Catholic Europe as the triumphed Reconquista of Spain is experienced by the members of Aba Jaafar’s family as a series of catastrophes. First published in Arabic in 1994, Granada tells the story of those who, after the defeat of the last Muslim dynasty and the expulsion of the city’s Jewish inhabitants, remain to struggle – each character in their own way – with various forms of oppression, ranging from forced conversion to Christianity and the prohibition to speak Arabic, to dispossession and the violent terror of the Inquisition. Saad, who is married to Abu Jaafar’s granddaughter Saleema, decides to leave the city and join the armed resistance. He not only supports attacks against the occupiers’ army, by way of carrying supplies across “the rugged and unpaved mountain roads the Castilian didn’t know about,” but also helps “in expediting the safe arrival to the coast

25 Radwa Ashour, Thulathiyat Ghanata (Beirut: Al-Muassassa al arabiyya lil-dirarsat wa alnashr, 1994/5); only the first part of the Trilogy, Granada, has thus far been translated into English. Here and in the following I quote from this translation: Radwa Ashour, Granada: A Novel, trans. William Granara (New York: Syracuse UP, 2003): 153–154. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “Granada.” 26 Bualem Sansal, Harraga [orig. French 2013], trans. Frank Wynne (London and Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2014): 188.

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areas of villagers who chose to emigrate” (Granada, 153). Saad and the other smuggler characters in this novel of collective defeat and individual resistance are certainly no villains. They are depicted as “freedom fighters” (Granada, 153), acting in solidarity with their people and struggling against the oppression of the Castilian rulers and the totalitarian regime of the church. Set during the time of this historical defeat, Granada narrates the act of human smuggling as an inescapable act of helping fellow humans to flee from a situation which has become unbearable. These men do not decide to smuggle humans for some egoistic economic reason. They do so because they feel obliged to assist them in escaping from a traumatic cycle of defeat and loss: “Pray with me that this nightmare ends and the need for our work no longer exists” (Granada, 158), as Saad puts it in a secret nocturnal conversation with his brother-in-law, Hasan. The many descriptions of surveillance and censorship and the various images of military coercion and torture have a disturbing resonance that goes beyond the narrative’s primary spatial and temporal setting. Hence, one cannot be surprised that the “humiliating pressures of occupation” (Granada, 110) of which Granada speaks have been interpreted by several Arab reviewers as literary allegories of the current situation in Arab countries like Palestine, Syria, Iraq or Egypt, where people are forced to leave their homes, due to the daily oppression of occupation and totalitarian military regimes.27 The distanced, yet empathic narrator accompanies the narrative’s complex characters in their struggle to make the right decision under the conditions of oppression and forced flight, without ever judging their resolve. But it is not only due to these almost transhistorical conditions that this novel makes the reader realize how close we are to 1492. Granada is a radically skeptical piece of metafiction about the general relationship between history and the present. The narrative opening, in which Abu Jaafar sees the poignant figure of a traumatized refugee, quite explicitly evokes Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,”28 thus inviting the reader, from the outset, to interrupt the continuum of history: “a naked women walking down the hill” with “jet black hair cascaded over her shoulders” and a facial expression of sadness that “made her wide eyes seem even wider on her intensely gaunt, pallid face”; a woman who “could neither see no hear him” and who “walked on slowly” with “her jingling gold spangles that wrapped around her ankles caked with the mud of a road her two feet had been treading” (Granada, 1). The literary figuration of Ashour’s angelic proto-refugee

27 María Constanza Guzmán, “Granada: A Novel by Radwa ‘Ashour,” The Arab Studies Journal 13/14. 2/1 (2005/2006): 129–132, 132. 28 Walter Benjamin. “On the Concept of History” [orig. German 1940], in Selected Writings, vol. 4, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006): 389–400, 392.

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has a prophetic dimension within and beyond the narrative’s diegetic level. Its appearance not only warns Abu Jaafar with a view to his family’s and his people’s dispossession. At the same time, as a trans-historic symbol of refugeeness, it prefigures other catastrophes of human history to come. Seen through a historical materialist lens, the novel “teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live,” constantly announced in today’s over-use of the crisis-trope, is not an exception but “the rule.”29 Read in the tradition of a radical criticism developed in the face of the worst horrors of totalitarian persecution and closed escape routes, the literary representation of heroic smuggling quoted above could indeed be considered a quasi-monadic crystal through which we can revisit the human smuggling in an unresolved here-and-now – in its not yet legally codified form.30 The current refugee debate would definitely benefit from the alternative temporal consciousness offered in the reading experience of such involuntary memory. Exploding the imaginary of linear progress and flashing up the now-time of histories that have been forgotten, silenced, or deleted, such literary memory can build intimate links between past and present refugee struggles. Ashour’s novel also reminds us that human trafficking – the thingification31 and trade of human beings – was invented on a grand scale by Europe during the emergence of global capitalist modernity. When Saleema, the narrative’s main heroine, attends a parade displaying gold, objects of every-day life, plants, and animals brought to Spain by Christopher Columbus from what he labeled ‘The New World,’ her initial cheer is replaced by deep sorrow and melancholy in the face of handcuffed captives, presented to the amazed crowd as human attractions (Granada, 26–30). The image of enslaved native Americans paraded through the streets of Granada in the historical moment of the cross-Mediterranean exodus of the city’s Muslim community lays bare that the “Black Mediterranean”32 of today’s

29 This is according to Benjamin’s thesis VIII what we can learn from the “tradition of the oppressed” (Benjamin, “Concept of History,” 392). 30 On the reading of literature as a kind of monad see Corey McCall and Nathan Ross, “Introduction,” in Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature, eds. Corey McCall and Nathan Ross (New York and London: Routledge, 2018): 1–15, 2. 31 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism [orig. French 1955], trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review P, 2000): 42. 32 The derivate-concept was first used by Alessandra Di Maio in a public lecture given on 7 May 2012 at UCLA to interpretively grasp the liminal space of Mediterranean migrations as a space of continuing racial subordination and oppression: “The Black Mediterranean: Migration and Revolution in the Global Millenium.” See also SA Smythe, “The Black Mediterranean and the Politics of the Imagination,” Middle East Report: Suffering and Limits of Relief 286.1 (2018), < https://merip.org/2018/10/the-black-mediterranean-and-the-politics-of-the-imagination/> (acc. 15 January 2021).

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refugee routs cannot be strictly separated from the history of the Black Atlantic,33 but must be seen as a late consequence (and in many ways a continuation) of Europe’s violent encounter with the Global South. The general link between the theme of historical haunting and narrative impetus that guides most of Ashour’s writing becomes very explicit in Granada. The novel illuminates the convoluted time constellation between two supposedly disparate experiences of oppression and forced migration. Drawing our attention to the legitimizing function of legal discourse during the Conquista of the Americas and the Reconquista of Spain, it shows that the early imperial encounter marked the birth of a decisively hypocritical human rights discourse in “colonialism’s first language”:34 the language of international law. Between the lines, Granada seems to argue that the erasure of history, at work in both the prevalent criminalization of refugee migration and the generous gestures of humanitarian hospitality, constitutes a crime in itself.35 If we understand storytelling as a literary mode of redemption, reading can become a conversation with the victims of history. Yet, literary fiction has also the capacity to relate past struggles for justice to the struggles of our own time. It can do so in ways legal narratives simply cannot. In the context of my discussion, I suggest re-reading the literary emplotment of human smuggling offered in Ashour’s novel as a literary flashing-up of the ongoing drama of forced migration. Forcing us to remember our own forgetfulness, it works as a very timely allegory and critical comment on current attempts to illegalize individuals who help people escape from war, occupation, persecution, poverty, or other unbearable living conditions. Read across time, the narrative fragment sensitizes for the fact that the currently prevalent conception of smuggling as a criminal act might show a significant residuum with a view to those acts of rescue aid that can be justified as resistive acts, although they may not be legitimate.

33 See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 34 Gary Boire, “Symbolic Violence: Law, Literature, Interpretation – An Afterword,” Ariel 35. 1–2 (2004): 231–245, 231. 35 Ida Danewid, “White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History,” Third World Quarterly 38.7 (2017): 1674–1689.

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The Man without Power ʻThen why do you smuggle?’ ‘Me? Smuggle?’36

(Ghassan Kanafani, Rijal fi-l-Shams)

The human smuggler of Ghassan Kanafani’s 1962 novella Rijal fi-l-Shams (Men in the Sun) is a former freedom fighter who lost his home and manhood while fighting for his occupied country, and who now makes a living as a truck driver in Iraq. Abul Khaizuran does not fit easily into the prototypical cast and sweeping generalizations permeating Europe’s legal narratives of human smuggling and human trafficking.37 He is not a member of those organized crime groups of which the language of the law speaks, although it rarely specifies them in detail. The character of this decisively non-heroic story of human smuggling does not consider himself a smuggler. He rather wishes to be perceived as someone who rescues three fellow-exiles “from the claws of the fat man” (Men, 56), an Iraqi smuggler whose business is trafficking people from Basra to Kuwait City and who, according to Abul Khaizuran, “is a well-known thief” (Men, 38). The three Palestinian refugees Abu Qais, Marwan, and Assad have been smuggled already from Jordan to Iraq and hence cannot afford the fixed price of fifteen dinars on which the Basran smuggler insists. When the 16-year-old Marwan threatens to denounce the smuggler to the police, the man hits the young refugee and informs him that the “pimps” (Men, 37) of the local police are actually his business partners. Left with finger marks on his face and broken dreams of migration to Kuwait in his heart, Marwan finds himself a stranger in a city crowded with people, who pass by without paying him any attention. At precisely this moment the hand of a very tall and thin man grasps his shoulder:38 “I can smuggle you to Kuwait.” “How?” “That’s my affair. You want to go to Kuwait, don’t you? Here is someone who can take you there. What more do you want?” “How much do you want from me?” “That’s not really important.” “It is.” [. . .]

36 Ghassan Kanafani, Rijal fi-l-Shams [1962] (Beirut: Dar at-Tali’ah, 1972). Here and in the following, qtd. from the English translation: Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun, trans. Hilary Kilpatrick (London: Lynnie Riennner, 1999): 56. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “Men.” 37 See Erin O’ Brian, Challenging the Human Trafficking Narrative: Victims, Villains, and Heroes (London and New York: Routledge, 2019): 73–95. 38 The Arabic word “Khaizuran” translates as cane or bamboo cane.

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“I’ll be quite honest with you. I have got to go to Kuwait, and I said to myself: why not earn a little money and take someone with you who wants to go there? How much can you pay?” Five dinars.” “Is that all?” I haven’t any more.” “Very well. I accept.” (Men, 41)

The two men agree on payment upon arrival, under the condition that Marwan brings at least one more person to make the journey. He convinces his companion Assad to join in. Abul Khaizuran has already been in touch with Abu Quais, who comes from the Palestinian town where he used to live himself. He, who presents himself as a sneak-smuggler, laughs: “’I’m glad you are going to Kuwait, because you will learn many things there. The first thing you will learn is: money comes first, and then morals’” (Men, 42). Abul Khazuran’s uncanny post-moralistic honesty starts to become threatening when the three refugees realize his exact plan: he, who had lived the isolated humiliation of political and physical impotence for more than ten years, offers to rescue the three men from their desperate situations by hiding them inside the empty water tank of his truck, licensed to cross the frontier. Although the refugees clearly see the dangers of such a desert passage, given the extremely high temperatures, and Assad openly suspects Abul Khaizuran of being professionally involved in the human smuggling business, they set off for their risky truck journey on the desert road. Since the heat of the sun is intense – “The lorry traveled on over the burning earth” (Men, 63) – the empty water tank quickly heats up. A short six-minute stop-over at the first customs station almost kills the three refugees caught inside the tank. As they continue their way, the narrative focus switches from one character’s thoughts, memories, and hopes to another’s. The three refugees remember the despair that forced them to leave their homes and seek a better future elsewhere. Abul Khaizuran remembers “the terrible pain plunging between his thighs” when, as a resistance fighter, he trod on a landmine and the “shame” he felt afterwards for being “incapable of sleeping with a woman” (Men, 64). Finally, he decides to leave all these painful memories behind and focus on the only ambition left to get rid of his feelings of sorrow and misery: “I only want money now, more money” (Men, 64). The second stop at the border post of Mutlaa culminates in tragedy. Bored from the bureaucratic routine of their administrative jobs, the border officials pass the time by harassing Abul Khaizuran. The humiliating procedure of interviewing him on the very private reasons for his belated border-crossing while rejecting to sign the required documents takes more than twenty minutes. When he finally gets the permission to leave the air-conditioned office and continue the journey, “there is nothing in his mind but terror” (Men, 70). Having stopped the truck in the desert not far

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from the border post, Abul Khaizuran hardly manages to open the hot metal disk on the roof of the tank. When he finally opens the tank, he has a “shocking sensation” (Men, 71): his three stowaways are dead. Not knowing whether the “salty drops [. . .] running from his burning forehead” (Men, 72) are tears or sweat, he first intends to throw the corpses into the desert, but then changes his mind because “he didn’t like to think that his companions’ bodies should be lost in the desert, at the mercy of beasts of prey” (Men, 72). It is already dark when Abul Khaizuran ultimately dumps the dead bodies at a nearby rubbish site of the municipality, so “that they would be discovered in the morning and buried under official auspices” (Men, 73). After he takes their money and other valuables and gets back into his truck, a resounding question almost bursts the smuggler’s head: “’Why didn’t they knock on the sides of the tank?’” (Men, 74) Abu Khaizuran is not the archetypal villain smuggler who enables a direct and simple attribution of blame. However, the novella does not let him get away with blaming the victims for not having sufficiently intervened in the involuntary extension of the border-crossing either. When the truck driver and human smuggler shouts at the corpses of the three refugees in the final scene, the desert suddenly begins to send back the echo of his words: “‘Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you say anything? Why?”’ (Men, 74). It is important to note that this echo is not only sent back to the diegetic level, where the smuggler character is struggling with multiple feelings of shame. Due to its allegorical quality, it also invites the reader to raise questions beyond Abu Khaizuran’s individual lack of morality. For an Arab reader, this certainly involves the failed Palestinian resistance or the pro-Palestinian lip service of Arab regimes. But the enduring echo also addresses the responsibility of an international community that almost unconditionally accepts both a politics of dispossession with its blatant violation of international law and the fate of those dispossessed. Due to its wide circulation and enormous reputation as a key text of what in Arabic is called al-adab al-muqawama [resistance literature],39 and thanks to its filmic adaptation,40 the story of Palestinian exiles suffocating to death during a failed passage inside an empty water-tank advanced to a paradigmatic inter-text. Men in the Sun is a forced migration and smuggling narrative with a lasting impact, not only with a view to Middle Eastern literary history. In the context of my discussion, the most important legacy of the novella and the many fictional writings produced in its wake is the implicit critique of the international walls of ignorance regarding 39 The notion of resistance literature was coined by Kanafani himself. See Ghassan Kanafani, “Study from Palestine: Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine,” Afro-Asian Writings 1.2–3 (1968): 65–79. 40 Al-Makhdu’un [The Dupes], dir. Taufiq Saleh, Syria, 1972.

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the real conditions of human smuggling in the past and present. To this day, the novella’s echoing “call for purposeful resistance that brings life into death” has not been sufficiently reciprocated by Europe’s refugee legislation and policy.41 The tragic border death narrated in Rijal fi-l-Shams still resonates in both Arab refugee and smuggling literature and the realities of forced migration from the Middle East. Hasan Blasim’s 2009 short story, “The Truck to Berlin,”42 not only evokes the increasingly agglomerating police and media reports of refugees suffocating in the backs of smuggler trucks on their way to/through Europe.43 Sending a group of young Middle Eastern refugees, crammed inside the successively evacuating cargo space of a smuggler truck, on the so-called Balkan route from Turkey to Germany, it seems indeed to re-imagine one of the “thousands of stories [. . .] of men who became like dogs as they looked for one drop of water to moisten their cracked tongues with” that Abul Khaizuran could tell.44 When Serbian policemen open the back door of the truck, left locked by the smugglers for several days at the end of Blasim’s cruel narrative journey, the only survivor jumps down from inside and transforms into a wolf: “I tell you for the thousandth time. As soon as the man reached the forest he started to run on all fours, then turned into a grey wolf, before he vanished . . .”45 In Hakan Günday’s 2013 novel Daha,46 Abul Khaizuran’s water tank has been transferred to a small Turkish village somewhere close to the shores of the Aegean Sea. It is inside an empty water reservoir, installed to shelter up to two hundred transitrefugees from various Middle Eastern countries before they board smugglingboats to Europe, that Gaza, the novel’s first-person narrator, discovers his own monstrosity. Forced to labor in the illegal immigrant transportation industry at the age of nine by a callous man who claims to be his father, he successively learns to hate the smuggled persons he calls “the goods” (More, 13) as much as he hates the “freak” (More, 50) that he is in the eyes of those people. Instead of running away, Gaza turns into the very “dreadful monster” (More, 55) that he is

41 Muhsin Jassim al-Musawi, The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003): 123. 42 Hasan Blasim, “The Truck to Berlin,” in Hasan Blasim, The Madman of Freedom Square, trans. Jonathan Wright (London: Comma P, 2016): 67–73. 43 See for example Bethany Bell and Nick Thorpe, “Austria’s Migrant Disaster: Why Did 71 Die?” (August 24, 2016), BBC News (acc. 15 January 2021). 44 Kanafani, Men in the Sun, 55. 45 Blasim, “The Truck to Berlin,” 73. 46 Hakan Günday, Daha (Istanbul: Doğan Kitap, 2013). In the following, I quote from the English translation: Hakan Günday, More, trans. Zeynep Beler (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2018). Further references in the text, abbreviated as “More.”

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already perceived as by the refugees and in the imagination of most readers. Within less than five years, the boy who considers himself a coward becomes a cruel child worker who decides “to fuck away with all the humanity that was in the reservoir” (More, 52). He sells water instead of giving it away for free; he rapes, tortures, exploits, and denigrates the temporary inmates of his private prison with all means at hand. It is only in the course of this almost apathetically distanced auto-narrative of the unbearable banality of a modern crime, “which had become indistinguishable from slave trade” (More, 69), that we can fully grasp the genesis of the smuggling anti-hero’s deeply injured psyche. Through flashbacks, we learn about Gaza’s own traumatic experiences as a son who grew up believing that his mother, after giving birth, wanted to kill him; as a terrified kid, punished by being forced to travel in the back of a smuggling truck together with the corpse of a refugee who had suffocated because Gaza forgot to turn on the conditioner; as a boy who was raped by one of the reservoir’s male inmates . . . Even when he turns the reservoir into a human laboratory for his pseudo-scientific behavioral experiments on crisis as a source of totalitarian power (More, 117–157), Gaza does not overcome the pathological condition of his own powerlessness. After the accidental death of his would-be father, he finally escapes from the human smuggling business to travel the world as a narcotized psychopath, joining “complete strangers in the lynching of a complete stranger” (More, 322). At some point he learns about the location of his mother’s secret grave. Digging in search for some deeper truth, he discovers a male skeleton buried beside his mother. For the first time, Gaza considers a horrifically self-evident possibility: that this skeleton is the skeleton of his real father; that his real parents were refugees on their escape route to Europe; that his parents were killed by the man who pretended to be his father, in order to exploit him as a child worker in his expanding human smuggling business (More, 307–316).

The Refugee as Auto-Smuggler (we beg the critic’s pardon; for, being foreigners ourselves, we ought to be permitted to stretch this term, smuggle, to cover an Arabic metaphor, or to smuggle into it a foreign meaning), these two Syrians, we say, became, in their capacity of merchants, smugglers (Ameen Rihani, The Book of Khalid) of the most ingenious and most evasive type.47

47 Ameen Rihani, The Book of Khalid [1911] (New York: Melville House, 2012): 265. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “Khalid.”

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The narrator who stresses the importance of the trope of smuggling for the story that he tells without explaining the Arabic etymology of this very metaphorical hint is the fictional editor-narrator of Ameen Rihani’s The Book of Khalid. First published in 1911, the novel is considered the first Arabic novel in English. Presenting itself to the reader as a composition of dubious Arabic and French sources in translation, it tells the turn-of-the century story of two young Arab men, Khalid and his friend, Shakib. The two flee from the familial and political oppression in Greater Syria (ruled by the Ottoman Empire) to immigrate to New York City, where Khalid makes his life as a peddler, selling trinkets like crosses, prayer beads, or scapulars claimed to be relics from the Holy Land. Having tried, with little success, the professional roles of the self-educating, anti-capitalist student, the womanizing bohemian, the hyper-moral assistant lawyer, and the public Tammany orator, the immigrant returns to the Arab world with a vision of revolutionary prophecy. There, with equally little success, he tries to liberate his people from imperial occupation and sectarian oppression.48 For my particular re-reading here, it does not matter so much that Khalid and Shakib are smuggled out of their country through the assistance of many others – of course, “the boatmen and officials of the Ottoman Empire can better read a gold piece than a passport” (Khalid, 29), and certainly there are various “brokers,” “dealer[s]” and other “rapacious bats” (Khalid, 32) involved in their long sea voyage across the Mediterranean to Marseille and across the Atlantic to America. More importantly, these Lebanese refugees of this early literary imaginary of forced migration “smuggled themselves into the city of New York” (Khalid, 42). Khalid, at the time of his arrival in the US, suffers from a serious case of trachoma. As a consequence, he is first detained in a hospital of the immigration board and then threatened to be deported back to Lebanon. It is only thanks to an intrigue of bribery by his friend Shakib that he manages to escape, and the two can start their peddler business with the counterfeited contraband of imaginary Holy Land relics. Although legal narratives tend to construct a strict binary between refugees as passive victims and smugglers as powerful intentional agents, it has been frequently reported that alleged smugglers were themselves refugees and asylum seekers.49 When the editor-narrator of Rihani’s novel deliberately sidesteps the explanation of the Arabic notion of smuggling, he seems to hint at an 48 For an in-depth relational diasporic reading of Rihani’s novel see Markus Schmitz, Transgressive Truth and Flattering Lies: The Poetics and Ethics of Anglophone Arab Representations (Bielefeld: transcript, 2020): 49–136. 49 Bellezza, Criminalization, 72.

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almost inescapable nexus between refugee migration and human smuggling that no cross-lingual translation can fully grasp: the Arabic term tahrib [smuggling] is derived from the verbal form haraba [to escape or flee, or to desert]. The transitive verb harraba can be translated as both “to break free” or “free someone” and “to smuggle [something].” Hence, a muharrib is at the same time a refugee or emigrant and a smuggler. I draw on this half-concealed etymological hint provided in The Book of Khalid to stress that refugees in Middle Eastern fiction are not simply carried across borders by smugglers. Rather, refugee characters such as Khalid and Shakib must carry themselves across illegally – whether or not they want to do so. To escape the drastic sanctions envisaged in Western immigration law, refugee migrants like them cannot but try turning the illegalized act of smuggling into a semi-autonomous emancipative migratory project. They become, in other words, smugglers in their own right.

Just Stories? Imaginaries of Lost Justice and the Question of Response Although Europe’s sovereign powers maintain what they call the ‘refugee crisis’ as a permanent state of exception, trying to pretend that under the condition of ever-expanding border zones in the age of global flows “there is nothing outside the law,”50 the majority of the world population live their lives outside European law. I have argued that the discursive realm of narrative fiction can provide a language which disrupts the bureaucratic hegemony of legal discourse and resists being fully subjected by controlled exclusion. In the context of my discussion, Middle Eastern refugee imaginaries have provided particularly intriguing examples of this “strange institution which allows one [. . .] to break out of prohibitions [. . .] in every field where law can lay down the law.”51 Rather than illustrating a refugee crisis, these imaginaries attest the crisis of a law that pushes the borders of its enforceability further and further outwards, while disavowing the constitutive absence of any a priori authority.52

50 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000): 15. 51 Derek Attridge, “The Strange Institution Called Literature,” an Interview with Jaques Derrida, trans. Geofrey Bennigton and Rachel Bowlby, in Derek Attridge, Acts of Literature (London: Routledge, 1992): 30–75, 36. 52 See David Farrier, Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013): 34–36.

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As a legal abstraction, justice is almost dispensed within the different modes of narrative evidence at work in these these stories. It is registered as a loss or a lost dream in the densities and textures of imagined human lives. Sometimes it is completely lost in nightmare. But it can also take the form of an eloquent dissent from the canon of normative law by showing how the language of justice simply fails within a specific story’s semantics. Such loss or dissent is traceable in the fate of specific characters, who are not forced to bear witness to the legitimacy of their claims. While the hegemonic European narrative of the refugee crisis does not allow any savior but the governments of the Global North, these stories show other heroes and anti-heroes who are broadening our learned typology of human smugglers. The individual characters do not claim to represent a collective experience, nor do they have to care for any receiver or host (an interviewer, a judge, a journalist, or a reader for that matter), who has the power to find them credible or incredible witnesses. They are in the midst of the stories they are telling. They have the narrative agency to tell their own stories against the selective power of legal ethics. In these stories, the presentations of persons and events do not have to be synchronized into one linear narrative process. The delineation between lived and narrated life, so important in legal hearings, is suspended or at least more undecidable than a strict adherence to generic boundaries would permit. These fictions are neither mimetic representations of refugee reality, nor do they offer themselves as records of that reality. However, they recast the meaning of smuggling and being smuggled and thus unsettle the prevailing perception of these practices. They reserve their generic right to operate outside the limits of both humanitarian and legal discourse and do not hesitate to disrupt our learned sureties regarding the character and characters of human smuggling. While government statements and legal texts are narratives taken from the perspective of problem solving – namely to end the facilitation of illegal migration – there is no easy solution offered in Middle Eastern refugee narratives. The smugglers in these stories are rarely the agents whose actions fully drive the plot of crimes committed. They are rarely blameless, but they cannot be blamed for being the cause of the refugee migration. In some cases, they are presented as vulnerable characters upon whom crimes were or are inflicted. Even if they commit monstrous forms of violence against the refugees they smuggle, their complex stories are not told in the legal form of linearly causal stories, which allow strictly “blaming [only] some for the harms suffered by others.”53 The smugglers in these stories do not symbolize the original cause of refugee suffering.

53 Erin O’ Brian, Challenging the Human Trafficking Narrative: Victims, Villains, and Heroes (London and New York: Routledge, 2019): 73.

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If one accepts for a moment that what is codified in Europe’s dominant narrative framework of criminalizing and combating the smuggling of refugees is not merely based on empirically proved data regarding individual refugee migrations but decisively informed by legal texts containing a good measure of political imagination and depending on the replication of ready-made formulae of good versus evil, one might understand the particularly critical importance of fictional refugee stories as a testing ground no one can afford to ignore. It seems that instead of writing a particular (hi)story, the fictions discussed in this essay analyze stories of smuggling which have never been written in the books of law.54 It is precisely due to the blatant reluctance of many Middle Eastern literary fictions to textualize the individual or collective experience made by Middle Eastern refugees directly that these writings have the ability to convey the diversity of refugee experiences. Rather than narrating before the law what happened, they tell stories prior to their disciplining codification by the law.55 Instead of transferring a lived life or specific socio-political situation directly from reality to the printed page, the discussed imaginaries seem to rework competing modes of symbolically perceiving or neglecting human suffering, to give the fundamental human right to escape from such suffering a more profound – maybe an even more universal – meaning. However, the literary fictions of smuggling discussed here can neither stand as fact-based correctives to legal and political prepositions that blandly denounce human smuggling as a criminal act, nor can they be used to disavow any form of discrimination, violence, or exploitation imposed upon refugees by so-called human traffickers on both sides of the migratory divide. The practice of human smuggling and the practice of law by lawyers and judges, as well as the practice of policymakers based on that law, have different effects on individual refugee lives than the writing or reading of a novel. The act of reading and interpretation, then, is at best a second-order mode of resisting the sovereign power of the refugee regime. Given the existential material conditions of today’s dispossessed people, the reading of literary texts such as those discussed 54 I have borrowed this notion of literary writing as analyzing unwritten stories from Adam Dannoun, the main narrator of Elias Khoury’s 2012 novel Awlad al-ghittu. Adam is a Palestinian falafel seller living in New York City and the reluctant investigator of his personal history – a history that successively turns out to be a story made up of a conglomerate of lost memories at the heart of his own traumatic experience of forced migration. For the notion of writing as analyzing unwritten stories see Khoury, Children of the Ghetto, 44. 55 Here, I draw on Derrida’s 1982 reading of Kafka’s Vor dem Gesetz as a literature of radical liberation that allegorically brings itself before the law: Jaques Derrida, “Before the Law” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, trans. Avital Ronell and Christine Roulton (London: Routledge, 1992): 183–220.

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here not only provokes rethinking our notions of responsibility and hospitality but also demands new political actions of reception and response. If it is true that the language of justice codified in refugee law “speaks not of discharged responsibility but the end of infinite responsibility,”56 then the urgency of making responsible decisions in the face of constantly growing numbers of border deaths cannot be restricted to the symbolic question of illegality or the interpretation of literary sign-systems. Middle Eastern refugee narratives should not be regarded as mere counternarratives to the official European emplotment of human smuggling. Sure, the images produced in these literary works do resist being read as affirmations of legal tropes and classifications that rest on the static coincidence between a particular symbolic representation of human smuggling and the complex realities of refugeeness. But the various symbolic figurations of those who facilitate the crossing of borders through the circumvention of border control offered in these narratives are hardly capable of binding European governments, the Council of Europe’s statutory organs, or the European Court of Human Rights. Giving evidence to what is usually overlooked in legal abstractions of illegitimacy and demonstrating that the abstractions of legalistic codification, political discourse, and mass mediation do violence to what they abstract, these stories first and foremost have the ability to transgress the dominant discourse’s oppressive notion of symbolic totality.

56 Farrier, Postcolonial Asylum, 145.

Franziska Quabeck

In Defense of Mr Micawber: Symbolic Equity in Dickens Abstract: Charles Dickens is a usual suspect in law and literature studies. Many of his novels engage in an overt critique of the Victorian legal system and many of his characters represent its negative power. While this systematic critique is often attributed to the late, the ‘dark’ Dickens, I will try to show in this article that the middle Dickens already includes characters that are symbolic of different aspects of the law. This article focuses on the middle Dickens, especially David Copperfield and Bleak House. I argue that while the critique of the law seems particularly strong in Bleak House, David Copperfield already constitutes a turning-point in Dickens’s career from the perspective of law and literature, for the central villain of the novel is a representative of the law. While Uriah Heep’s villainy is indisputable, the character’s symbolic representation of the negative force of the law is often overlooked. I will show that Uriah is more than David’s nemesis by especially focusing on the fact that the villain is not overcome by the hero himself but by a seemingly minor character, who is in fact a symbolic embodiment of equity itself: Mr Micawber.

Dickens, Law and Literature In Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–1839), the famous Artful Dodger is eventually brought to trial for his crimes as a pickpocket. As he has no right to counsel, he can speak in defense of himself, a common practice during the first half of the nineteenth century. However, the Dodger chooses not to: ‘Do you mean to say anything, you young shaver?’ ‘No,’ replied the Dodger, ‘not here, for this ain’t the shop for justice; besides which, my attorney is a breakfasting this morning with the Wice President of the House of Commons, but I shall have something to say elsewhere, and so will he, and so will a wery numerous and respectable circle of acquaintance as’ll make them beaks wish they’d never been born, or that they’d got their footman to hang ’em up to their own hat-pegs afore they let ’em come out this morning to try it on upon me. I’ll –’ ‘There, he’s fully committed!’ interposed the clerk. ‘Take him away.’1

1 Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (London: Penguin, 2021): 423. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “OT.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-011

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The Dodger’s diagnosis is astute: justice lies elsewhere, and where that is would be a question Dickens pursued through all of his works, until the end of his career. Where is justice, if the legal system does not distribute it? Many of Dickens’s major works deal with institutional failure and the complex, yet faulty, Victorian legal system, which fails to provide justice for the people. Consequently, Dickens shows a special interest in equity as a corrective for institutional justice, which is why the Court of Chancery moves into the particular spotlight of the middle Dickens in Bleak House (1852–1853). As a court within the legal system that is specifically devoted to equity, its failings seem to Dickens more gruesome than those of the legal system as a whole. As Kieran Dolin has pointed out, Dickens struggles with the paradox that opens up between the ideal and the institutional sense of equity.2 In this article, I would like to focus on this paradox and the characters who represent the stark division between equity and the law. In particular, I will focus on Mr Micawber as an unlikely representative of equity and Uriah Heep as a representative of the law. It has often been said that David Copperfield, written from 1849 to 1850, constitutes a turning point in Dickens’s works. The farcical nature of the earlier works gradually disappears with his most personal novel, and the tone changes towards what many critics refer to as the ‘dark’ Dickens, who has been the focus of scholarly interest in recent years. From the perspective of law and literature this turning point does not seem quite so obvious, as David Copperfield has also often been described as one of Dickens’s least political or most domestic novels.3 Dickens’s critique of the law, so harsh in a text like Bleak House, seems virtually absent from the novel and many critics have attested Dickens’s expression of his particular dislike for the legal system and its representatives as explicit only in the novels following David Copperfield. Within existing law and literature scholarship, Dickens plays a major role for obvious reasons, yet David Copperfield is not typically part of this discussion. The novel is usually overshadowed by later works that make their critique of the law a major topic; to the extent that Dickens’s alleged ‘disgust’ for the law has become almost proverbial, and a critical investigation into the matter rarely dispenses with quoting the most famous epithet about the Court of Chancery that introduces the main theme of Bleak House: “Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come

2 Kieran Dolin, Fiction and the Law: Legal Discourse in Victorian and Modernist Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999): 78. 3 See John O. Jordan, “The Social Sub-text of David Copperfield,” Dickens Studies Annual 14 (1985): 61–92, 61.

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here!”4 Critics are mostly unanimous in their diagnosis of Dickens’s antipathy towards the law. J. Hillis Miller is quite explicit in defining what he regards as Dickens’s unequivocal condemnation of the subject: Dickens detests lawyers, the legal system, and most legally operative speech acts. He has no confidence in the benign power of the written word in its official, public, legalized form. Lawyers’ performatives are, for him, the most infelicitous felicities that could be imagined. They are a pollution of the body politic.5

From Pickwick v. Bardell in the Pickwick Papers (1836–1837) to the Artful Dodger’s ‘shop for justice’ in Oliver Twist; from Sampson Brass in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841) to Mr Vholes in Bleak House; from the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit (1855–1857) to the Old Bailey in Great Expectations; Dickens seems to have nothing positive to say about lawsuits, lawyers, institutions or the law in and of itself. The epitome of all these horrific aspects of ‘the law’ in its most general terms is, of course, Bleak House. The novel’s main theme is the destructive, even lethal, force of the law, its system and its representatives. Characters involved in the lawsuit at the novel’s center die in abundance – either at their own hands, driven to despair by the fatality of it all or slowly wasting away, eaten up by the powers that be. In this novel, Dickens accuses the system for its failures but extends his criticism towards those individuals who use the system to absolve themselves from the responsibility of their own actions: Its criticisms centre on three main areas: the failure of the courts, enmeshed in procedural rules which fail to provide an even playing field and threaten to obscure judicial decisionmaking; the failure of the legal profession, whose representatives are at best ineffectual windbags and at worst parlous villains; and a broader social failing, which is responsible for pervasive poverty and widespread misery.6

‘The law’ or, to be more specific, Chancery, creates an arc for the novel that twists and turns not only each single plotline but also almost every single character’s fate. Legal enforcement by institutions as well as people is given a power in the novel which seems threateningly omnipotent, and most critics have noted a similar consuming power of the law in many of Dickens’s representations. Usually, one cannot help but note at this point that Dickens himself experienced the legal system as such a negatively connoted power, so much so that

4 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1993): 4. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “BH.” 5 J. Hillis Miller, “Moments of Decision in Bleak House,” in The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. John O. Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001): 49–63, 56. 6 James E. Boasberg, “Chancery as Megalosaurus: Lawyers, Courts, and Society in Bleak House,” University of Hartford Studies in Literature 21 (1989): 38–60, 38f.

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“Chancery was for Dickens a symptom of ubiquitous corruption in the legal profession.”7 As has often been mentioned, he made his own experience with a lawsuit in Chancery, while attempting to secure his copyright for A Christmas Carol (1843). Most scholars presume that it was this personal experience that ruined his belief in the system and thus generated the famous epithet quoted above.8 Historically speaking, Dickens certainly had a point: by the early nineteenth century, the English legal system that had once prided itself on the division of courts for different forms of justice could no longer proclaim any efficiency in its equity court. Due to lengthy proceedings and the need to document all movements in even the most banal Chancery suit, the Court had long become famous for its bureaucratic horror: By the eighteenth century [. . .] most of the advantages had been lost by abuse. Chancery pleadings had become verbose and complex, and the use of minutely drafted interrogatories served only to hinder proceedings. The documentation produced by most Chancery suits was elephantine.9

Thus, even the domineering Jarndyce and Jarndyce consumes itself in worthless documentation: [G]reat bundles of paper began to be carried out – bundles in bags, bundles too large to be got into any bags, immense masses of papers of all shapes and no shapes, which the bearers staggered under, and threw down for the time being, anyhow, on the Hall pavement, while they went back to bring out more. (BH, 730)

J. Hillis Miller has contributed one of the most important readings of Bleak House, arguing that the crucial question of the novel is that of interpretation itself and thus this excessive documentation is, in the end, not funny but another social threat: “The villain is the act of interpretation itself.”10 At the same time, Dickens certainly aspires to being historically accurate in describing the hells of Chancery bureaucracy, but whether or not he achieves this goal has often been a point of discussion.

7 Dieter Paul Polloczek, Literature and Legal Discourse: Equity and Ethics from Sterne to Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999). 8 See Paul Schlicke (ed.), The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999): 71. 9 J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, second ed. (London: Butterworths, 1979): 97. 10 J. Hillis Miller, “Interpretation in Bleak House,” in Bleak House: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Jeremy Tambling (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998): 29–53, 39.

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Equity and the Law The Court of Chancery, a court whose function was to resolve more civil matters, such as questions of guardianship, wills, land rights etc., practiced on the basis of equity as a supplement to the common law. The principle of equity originates with Aristotle as a form of justice that is more flexible than positive law, which is supposed to be absolute. Aristotle defines equity as “a ‘correction of law where it is defective owing to its universality.’”11 Unlike the common law court, therefore, which acts and judges according to positive laws and precedents, the Court of Chancery issued equity on individual cases by the individual decision of the Chancellor. Or so it did in the beginning. Lord Ellesmere explained Chancery in 1615 as follows: “The office of the chancellor is to correct men’s consciences for fraud, breaches of trust, wrongs and oppressions of what nature soever they be, and to soften and mollify the extremity of the law.”12 In that sense, the Court of Chancery was an institution that dealt with the particularity of individual cases, and judgment was pronounced on the basis of the chancellor’s conscience. As J. H. Baker puts it, “Chancery was not a court of law but a court of conscience.”13 By the nineteenth century, however, this complementary legal system had lost all of its efficiency: “Chancery pleadings had become verbose and complex, and the use of minutely drafted interrogatories served only to hinder proceedings.”14 Bureaucracy had destroyed equity, Chancery was not more just than the Common Law Court, and the individual before the law was once again overlooked. The inefficiency of the Court of Chancery and the vast amount of legal costs expecting its plaintiffs and defendants soon gave rise to the infamous equity debate of the nineteenth century. For decades, legal theorists and politicians argued over the importance of equity as a principle and Chancery as an institution. To make matters worse, the original meaning of equity as corrective to law’s universality was increasingly corrupted: During the early part of the nineteenth century the technical significations of the word equity that distinguished its use in legal discourse came to dominate and obscure the original meaning of the word as synonymous with natural justice.15

11 Aristotle qtd. in Baker, Legal History, 90. 12 Aristotle qtd. in Baker, Legal History, 90. 13 Baker, Legal History, 90. 14 Baker, Legal History, 89. 15 Simon Petch, “Law, Equity, and Conscience in Victorian England,” Victorian Literature and Culture 25.1 (1997): 123–139, 124.

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The uncertainty as to the meaning of equity also influenced the debate on the necessity of Chancery – a debate that, according to Simon Petch, was not just “a matter of administrative reform, but central to Victorian culture.”16 However, the importance of equity was not only relevant in an institutional but also in a moral sense. The Court of Chancery was commonly understood as a court of conscience because, along with good faith and honesty, those were the principles the Chancellor acted on as a representative of the King or Queen. This system suggests that the judgements made in the Court of Chancery are conscionable judgements, issuing equity and not withholding justice due to inflexible laws. The fact that Chancery was a court of conscience thus suggests that these were deeply ethical proceedings that were significantly intertwined with the individual’s sense of responsibility. Equity and conscience are inextricably linked, a fact which points to the real problem Dickens has with the law. I propose that Dickens’s true critique is of a lack of conscience in those involved in the law. He seems to plead for a revision of Chancery for the sake of a revision of conscience. And in order to do so, he creates different characters that represent law and equity respectively. Many critics have assumed that Bleak House resonates with Victorian feelings about the legal system and that this is the point of the novel. As J. Hillis Miller puts it, “Dickens wanted Bleak House to persuade its readers to detest the Court of Chancery and to work to reform or abolish it.”17 However, the many years of common complaints against the Court of Chancery led to the Chancery Amendment Act, which was passed in 1852, so, in the end, quite punctual for Dickens’s Bleak House. It therefore cannot be argued that the novel contributed in any way to the long-awaited reform, even if Dickens himself might have wanted to think so. In fact, early reviews already indicate that the public was somewhat bored with the ins and outs of the Court, and the legal critique Dickens used for the novel’s narrative structure was no longer considered timely, as George Brimley wrote in The Spectator: This great suit is lugged in by the head and shoulders and kept prominently before the reader, solely to give Mr Dickens the opportunity of indulging in stale and commonplace satire upon the length and expense of Chancery proceedings, and exercises absolutely no influence on the characters and destinies of any one person concerned in it. The centre of the arch has nothing to do in keeping the arch together.18

16 Petch, “Law, Equity, and Conscience,” 136. 17 J. Hillis Miller, “Moments of Decision in Bleak House,” in The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. John O. Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001): 49–63, 59. 18 Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971): 283.

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Brimley anticipates a common twentieth-century criticism of the novel as lacking a coherent narrative structure – a criticism that has been countered too well to deserve much commentary here.19 More to the point is the fact that Dickens’s critique of the legal system seemed already stale even to his contemporaries. Reforms were desired by all and well under way by the time he began the instalments of Bleak House in 1852. It seems too easy, therefore, to attribute Dickens’s long-standing interest in the law and its resulting portrayal in so many of the novels to his general reputation as a reformer. One need not dispute that Dickens was extraordinarily committed to improving the conditions of his society, but whether legal reform takes the same place among his other interests or not may be a legitimate question. Certainly, the lack of romance in the law and the modern systematic oppression of certain groups it represents make for a fruitful fictional background, as JanMelissa Schramm has argued: “It suits Dickens’s agenda for the moral aggrandizement of fiction to argue that the law is inattentive to the ‘romance of life,’ and this is a critique that he sustains throughout his fiction.”20 The legal system, the Court of Chancery and all their representatives can easily be employed as personified villains and an overpowering evil, on account of which one can create heroes and heroines: “Because Chancery fails to serve its presumed purpose, that of deciding lawsuits, it appears to have a will of its own, like the cruel, creeping, anthropomorphized fog to which it is initially compared.”21 Victorious are only those who shy decidedly away from getting involved in this corruption and shine as moral superiors to others, such as Esther Summerson, one of his brightest examples of incorruptibility. In his seminal work, Dolin astutely identifies a crucial distinction: Dickens looks not only to the system but to the individual.22 While systematic justice may be a contemporary impossibility, individual responsibility can and should be taken. In many of his novels, the heroes and heroines are those who deliberately undermine a system that seems to relieve them from their own social responsibility for others, and so their personal actions defeat a systemic apathy. Such characters are symbols of equity: they act according to their conscience and in defiance of the system.

19 See above all Robert A. Donovan, “Structure and Idea in Bleak House,” ELH 29.2 (1962): 175–201. 20 Jan-Melissa Schramm, “Dickens and the Law,” in A Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. David Paroissien (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011): 277–293, 281. 21 Suzanne Daly, “Belligerent Instruments: The Documentary Violence of Bleak House,” Studies in the Novel 47.1 (2015): 20–42, 28. 22 Dolin, Fiction and the Law, 87.

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Legal Characters or the Character of the Law Characters that stand for the law in Dickens are most often also representatives of the legal profession and characterizations of the lawyer as a type are indeed no insubstantial part of Dickens’s ‘stage society.’ The lawyer seems personified systematic failure, for his belief in the law necessarily conditions a disinterest towards the human in Dickens’s world: To the lawyer the law is intellectual, abstract, and beautiful, like a game of chess, and it is just here that the fundamental ground of Dickens’ quarrel with him lies. Justice for Dickens was generally open and palpable. He couldn’t understand why man’s natural emotional response to injustice wasn’t sufficient impetus to lead him to correct it if he could.23

When Dickens writes in Bleak House that “[t]he one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself” (BH, 466), he does so, of course, in reference to Vholes, who squeezes Richard Carstone dry, in a hopeless cause, merely for his own gain. In this sense, Vholes is a representative of the oppressive power of the law. The same is true for Tulkinghorn and Jaggers, Guppy and Serjeant Buzfuz. In the early works, the lawyers seem to be caricatures of systemic representatives, in later works they seem simply villains, who are embodiments of the evil the English law is capable of inflicting on its subjects. As Robert Garis wrote in 1965, “[i]n Mr. Tulkinghorn’s business-like tone, ‘like a machine’, we hear the accents of System itself. In his patient explication of his thinking, as he tries to arrive at a ‘decision,’ we hear the true action of System in process.”24 Or as Brenda Welch has written much more recently, Tulkinghorn is the embodiment of English law making business for itself; he is the embodiment of those in the legal profession who are the cause of the unrest – the overreaching, self-indulgent, self-serving and abusive lawyers.25

Given that all lawyers are minor characters, it is not unreasonable to presume that they simply stand for something else, that they are pawns in an overarching political message in which Dickens generalizes all those who have dealings in or with the law. In his particular focus on Bleak House, Gary Watt has therefore argued that, in his emphasis on equity, Dickens makes all characters symbols of the legal conflict:

23 Donovan, “Structure and Idea,” 179. 24 Robert Garis, The Dickens Theatre: A Reassessment of the Novels (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1965): 137. 25 Brenda Welch, “Tulkinghorn and Professional Responsibility in Bleak House,” Dickens Quarterly 35.1 (2018): 47–62, 59.

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Dickens’ [. . .] technique of personification is to embody abstract vices and virtues in human form. Tulkinghorn is an embodiment of the vice of all-consuming legalism and formality. Esther Summerson is equity personified.26

However, it is impossible not to see that Dickens’s critique in the novel is not only of the system and possibly its representatives, but also of the denial of human responsibility. He draws attention to those individuals, such as Skimpole, for instance, who rely on the system to relieve them of their personal obligation of ethical behavior towards others. In other words, Dickensian representatives of the law are villains when they shy away from personal responsibility, and this is blatantly reproached in the narrative of Bleak House, as Joseph Fradin has noted: “Chancery practice presents us with a paradigm of the ways in which civilized men are responsible for one another, and fail in that responsibility.”27 The great evil of the system therefore lies in the fact that it enables what Bruce Robbins has called “organized, legitimated irresponsibility”: “It is by means of their profession that the Chancery lawyers evade the responsibility for their actions, that they shoot their daily arrows in the air without being obliged to consider on whom the arrows are falling.”28 In that sense, legal representatives in and beyond Bleak House are villains, but it is not possible to view them as one homogenous sub-group of Dickens’s evil minor characters. They may be minor, but they cannot be made to fit a single coherent image. The stereotyping of legal representatives is a ubiquitous source of comedy, as Dolin has emphasized: “[T]he law becomes an object of entertainment through the mimicry of stereotypes.”29 However, in contrast to such stereotypes, Dickens infuses chosen characters with more life, which lets them withstand the all-consuming nature of the law. He counters the stale stereotypes, such as sinister lawyer figures or apathetic judges, with characters as symbols of both the law as a negative force and equity as a positive corrective. It is important to make this distinction, in order to be able to see that Dickens’s critique of the law is neither as consistent nor as homogeneous as it might seem at first sight and that even his minor characters are quite important in the legal context. As Alex Woloch has argued in his seminal work on the significance of minor characters, “the literary character itself is divided, always emerging at

26 Gary Watt, Equity Stirring: The Story of Justice Beyond Law (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Hart, 2009): 167. 27 Joseph I. Fradin, “Will and Society in Bleak House,” PMLA 81.1 (1966): 95–109, 98. 28 Bruce Robbins, “Telescopic Philanthropy: Professionalism and Responsibility in Bleak House,” in Bleak House: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Jeremy Tambling (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998): 139–162, 143f. 29 Dolin, Fiction and the Law, 72.

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the juncture between structure and reference.”30 Dickens invests the creation of his characters with a highly symbolic meaning in reference to both the law and equity. While systematic justice may be in a contemporary crisis, individual responsibility can be and should be taken. In many of his novels, the heroes and heroines are those who deliberately undermine a system that seems to relieve them from their own social responsibilities for others, and so their personal actions defeat the overwhelming systemic apathy.

Legal Villainy I would like to show in the following that Dickens’s emphasis on the discrepancy between equity and the law precedes Bleak House. His concern that human beings are becoming more and more unconscionable is already a central topic in David Copperfield. It is true that David Copperfield seems to be a mostly domestic novel, but it bears much greater significance for Dickens’s treatment of law and equity than has hitherto been thought. In this novel, Dickens contrasts the symbolic dimension of two minor characters as representatives of law and equity respectively. Uriah Heep is a villain representative of the law; Mr Micawber acts according to the principles of equity. The often-observed conflict between the law and equity in Dickens, which seems to be introduced as an elaborate theme in Bleak House, in fact takes it beginnings in David Copperfield. While Uriah Heep is the prototype of the evil lawyer, Micawber is equity personified. The juxtaposition of the two exemplifies Dickens’s deeply ambiguous feelings towards the law, his identification with its representatives and the principal difference between the law and equity, which is crucial for many of his subsequent novels. Strictly speaking, Uriah is, of course, a lawyer’s clerk, and the fact that his employer, Mr Wickfield, is essentially a good man, shows how Dickens approaches the subject from a variety of viewpoints. The most complicated perspective the text offers us towards Uriah is that of David’s nemesis, a figure he proclaims to hate and yet cannot help identify with, for reasons that are not always self-evident. Therefore, Uriah Heep has long been recognized as David Copperfield’s Double, to whom he is attracted in repulsion because the protagonist recognizes his own abject desires in the villain and antagonist. Uriah represents for David both his repressed wishes and his repressed fears, and his first-person narrative is crucially influenced by the need to control Uriah as an opposed power within it.

30 Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2003): 17.

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Uriah is therefore a paradigmatic character who gets away from the author and develops a life of his own, due to his strong repercussions with David’s subconscious. Uriah is also a necessary plot element, a trigger for David’s fall of fortune, his need to prove himself in times of crisis; the villain he can triumph over in the end; and the needed rival that brings about his sexual desire for Agnes, which turns her from sister to wife and thereby allows the hero’s heterosexual happy ending: “Uriah Heep is a Doppelgänger [. . .] in whom the aggressive and sexual demands of the hero are strangely absorbed and whose criminal doings, as eventually exposed, clear the hero of blame.”31 The narrator presents Uriah as a despicable creature because he represents a lower-class background that David feels self-conscious about. In his definitive reading of the novel, John O. Jordan has shown that Uriah Heep represents for David “the class entanglement he most strongly seeks to avoid.”32 Due to his class complex, having barely avoided dropping from a respectable middle-class upbringing to an existence as a street-child, David also needs Uriah to cover up his own designs on upward mobility. Uriah’s scheme to replace Wickfield in the business, through embezzlement and the ‘acquisition’ of the lawyer’s daughter, is constructed as clearly unethical to delude from the fact that David’s intentions towards Dora Spenlow are almost exactly the same. The narrator thus needs his doppelganger to divert the reader’s attention away from his own questionable motives: “the whole conception of Uriah Heep as the ‘umble’ hypocrite shadows darkly Copperfield’s rise in the world through earnestness and hard work.”33 The parallel Dickens creates between his narrator and the antagonistic villain is too obvious to be overlooked, yet this stance towards the novel also belittles Uriah as a flat character who merely serves a function. In fact, a closer look at Uriah Heep reveals that he is symbolic of the negative forces of the law. From the beginning, the ‘material’ conception of the character employs motifs that will recur in creatures such as Tulkinghorn, Vholes or Jaggers. Uriah is, of course, uncommonly ugly, “high-shouldered and bony” and dressed “in decent black, with a white wisp of a neckcloth,” as becomes a future lawyer (DC, 246). More importantly, Uriah makes those around him extraordinarily uncomfortable through the fact that it seems impossible to hide from his eyes: Though his face was towards me, I thought, for some time, the writing being between us, that he could not see me; but looking that way more attentively, it made me uncomfortable

31 Alexander Welsh, From Copyright to Copperfield: The Identity of Dickens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987): 143. 32 Jordan, “Social Sub-Text,” 63. 33 Welsh, Copyright to Copperfield, 144.

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to observe that, every now and then, his sleepless eyes would come below the writing, like two red suns, and stealthily stare at me for I dare say a whole minute at a time, during which his pen went, or pretended to go, as cleverly as ever. I made several attempts to get out of their way [. . .] but they always attracted me back again; and whenever I looked towards those two red suns, I was sure to find them, either just rising or just setting. (DC, 248f.)

Uriah’s eyes penetrate David’s conscience, for he has a secret to hide after all. It is vital for him that Uriah not find out that the social distance between them is much vaguer than the lawyer’s clerk presumes. Consequently, David feels observed by Uriah at all times, dreams of his threatening eyes and wishes to destroy him. In this sense, Uriah the villain is in fact a representative of the law’s surveillance, and his panoptical observation confronts the narrator with the uncomfortable truths he has to hide. Uriah simply comes to embody everything that David fears, hides and desires, a powerful Id in constant negotiation with his super-ego. Hence, Uriah lives in a close, almost symbiotic relationship with his mother, a union David both desires and despises, which becomes clear when he chooses as first wife a woman who is exactly like his mother. In their union, Uriah and his mother become particularly dangerous for David, for he feels most vulnerable when confronted with the love between mother and son, which he has lost. One should not overlook, however, that what he describes in his first encounter with them is that he does not feel caught as a jealous son but as a criminal. His description of their cross-examination of him over dinner resembles a trial in court: They did just what they liked with me; and wormed things out of me that I had no desire to tell, with a certainty I blush to think of; [. . .] I found myself perpetually letting out something or other that I had no business to let out. (DC, 287f.)

David’s ‘recollection’ of his inferiority and bewildering helplessness in the face of Uriah’s interrogation very clearly repeats itself when Pip describes his evenings with Jaggers. Uriah’s powerful eyes recur in Mr Tulkinghorn’s, which are pinned uncomfortably on Lady Dedlock; and Uriah’s ‘cadaverous’ appearance will be re-enacted by Vholes. David never forgets to mention that Uriah is both symbolically and symbiotically intertwined with the law. Upon first being made acquainted with the fact that Uriah is “going through Tidd’s Practice,” David asks three questions, much like the three prophecies for Macbeth: “I suppose you are quite a great lawyer?”; “you’ll be a regular lawyer, I suppose?” and “[p]erhaps you’ll be a partner in Mr Wickfield’s business” (DC, 262f.). In other words, David clearly foresees what he will come to fear the most: that Uriah will advance to an even social footing and in that triumph of evil, becoming a lawyer is synonymous with claiming Agnes as

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his rightful property. Uriah’s potential progress is therefore inextricably linked to his career as a lawyer and his triumph over David, which the latter almost masochistically anticipates in this moment, could be achieved on the ladder the law provides. The clerk can seize the business when he has become a ‘regular’ lawyer, and, as a partner in the business, he can then ‘seize’ just as easily the business partner’s daughter. So, while Uriah is David’s nemesis, it is the law David has most reason to fear, since it is the prerequisite for all of Uriah’s criminal achievements. Uriah is a source of evil and the law is his accessory – when David pretends to ask innocently, “I suppose you are quite a great lawyer?” he therefore anticipates the climax of the central struggle in the novel. David’s personal achievements and misfortunes twist and turn with Uriah’s dubious professional accomplishments. The narrator observes that the law enables Uriah to achieve everything David wishes for himself, yet he comes to equate Uriah’s progress with immoral behavior. Heep’s villainy is considerably increased by the fact that he is a lawyer, for the legal knowledge conditions his professional position, and this position allows him to exercise the power over others that haunts the novel. He infiltrates and transgresses into houses, professions, trusts and minds. He violates every sphere of living, but his most important power is that over the minds of other characters, most importantly Mr Wickfield and David himself. He is an “appropriator of persons,” gradually coming to own his employer and seeking to own the latter’s daughter.34 Uriah’s increasing competence in the law allows him to press Mr Wickfield into the shape of a ventriloquist’s puppet and to appropriate the business, as well as advance in social station. In a sense, he is a classic villain, as David Thiele has argued, especially in reference to the threat he poses for Agnes, who is entrapped by him both literally and metaphorically: In order to claim his female prize and crush the spirit of his favored rival, he must employ the kinds of methods (short of rape and murder) which Gothic villains always employ – subterfuge, captivity, torture, and invasion.35

In Uriah’s case, these methods derive from his legal qualification: his competence allows him to ensnare Mr Wickfield and coerce him into thinking that he has lost control of the business. The promotion to partner allows him to invade not only the professional but also the domestic sphere, which in turn enables him to unfold a veil of possession over Agnes.

34 Terence Wright, “Caresses that Comfort, Blows that Bind – Sex, Sentiment and the Sense of Touch in David Copperfield,” English 48.190 (1999): 1–16, 5. 35 David Thiele, “The ‘transcendent and immortal . . . HEEP!’: Class Consciousness, Narrative Authority, and the Gothic in David Copperfield,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 42.3 (2000): 201–222, 211.

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It is easy to overlook David’s involuntary alliance with Uriah because the narrator commonly casts himself in the role of victim, especially in view of Uriah’s inquisitiveness. The need to know everything and the skill to worm it out of everybody is Uriah’s most dangerous asset, which is a characteristic Dickens would use in the creation of his more paradigmatic lawyer characters in later works. Uriah is, of course, a hypocrite and his hypocrisy is inextricably linked to his profession, which evokes the stereotype the character himself comments on: “‘Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield,’ he replied, with a dry grin, ‘I mean, just at present, what I say’” (DC, 679). David considers himself to be a victim of Uriah’s, which makes him a victim of the law, for it is the professional sphere that endows Uriah with all his power. The greater the danger the character represents for David and those he loves, the more the narrator brings Uriah’s role as a lawyer into focus. Shortly before the whole extent of his villainy is finally revealed, the narrator reminds us once again of his profession. Asked about the amount of business he has managed to make for himself, he answers “[n]ot so much so, as I could wish. But lawyers, sharks, and leeches, are not easily satisfied, you know!” (DC, 834). It seems as if the statement was included to remind both David and his reader of the fact that Uriah’s unethical career has been enabled by his progress in the law. Overtly, David’s dislike of Uriah is maybe not exactly idiosyncratic but, through the narrative perspective, certainly very subjective, and it has been noted that the extent to which Uriah is an object of hatred might seem remarkable on the surface: “[T]here is something excessive in the abuse that he receives from David and the others.”36 The chapter in which Uriah openly and sarcastically refers to himself as a lawyer of the worst kind, however, provides the reader with the whole truth about his embezzlement and truly criminal behavior. Thus, shortly before David is proved right in his excessive hatred of his antagonist, one finds an emphasis on the law as a breeding ground for depravity.

‘The Monitor Within’ David Copperfield is the first text that truly elaborates on the power of the legal profession to bring forth immorality. While earlier texts such as The Pickwick Papers and The Old Curiosity Shop make use of the stereotype of the despicable lawyer, its significance within those novels barely punctures the surface. Uriah Heep far exceeds the flatness of these stereotypes through his transgressive 36 Jordan, “Social Sub-Text,” 79.

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presence in David’s narrative. It is most interesting, therefore, that David never overcomes his antagonist. Whether or not he is the hero of his own story should therefore not be measured in his power to defeat the enemy, because he never does. In fact, Uriah’s most dangerous enemy comes from within the law, too, but in contrast uses the legal ground for the triumph of conscience, the triumph of equity. Micawber is an unlikely hero – he is clearly written more in the vein of funny ne’er-do-wells such as Dick Swiveller or Tip Dorrit. He bears a striking resemblance to Mr Skimpole but lacks the sinister aspects of his nature. Micawber is a melodramatic man who serves a great amount of the novel’s comedy through his “manic plunges from elation to despair and back again”: In him, the emotions, rather than being mingled, are laid out linearly, one after another, and, as often happens, the ‘mechanisation’ of a complex experience makes the business comic. It is allied also to the fact that Micawber enjoys, indeed revels in, his own despair, even to the extent of threatening self-violence by ‘making motions at himself with the razor’ from an upstairs window for the benefit of a pressing creditor in the street below.37

Micawber’s entries and exits are usually timed for comic relief, although he has the air of causing trouble and David never conceals his fear that he or others may be drawn into Micawber’s pecuniary difficulties. Micawber is clearly a minor and, in many ways, a flat character, endowed by his creator with very distinct physical and discursive markings, and the vignettes he livens up seem to follow a simple pattern: entry, mirth, misery (or misery, then mirth), exit and epistle. Almost all of his occurrences in the novel can be broken down into these particular elements, which make him easily recognizable and stereotypically funny. To paraphrase Maria DiBattista, to know Mr Micawber at all is to know him well.38 However, adhering to Natalie McKnight’s caveat that to rely on such stereotypes in Dickens makes one easily ignorant of their subversive potential,39 one must take a closer look at Micawber, for his temporary alliance with Uriah and hence with the law is significant. At the same time, it is important to note that Micawber’s appearances are not merely included for comic relief but are, in fact, more often than not, moments of rescue. And thirdly, it is Micawber’s conscience and his understanding of equity as opposed to the law that saves the day and brings down Uriah Heep. Understanding Micawber as a merely funny, flat and minor character is to grossly underestimate him. In fact, Micawber functions as an embodiment of conscience, thereby symbolizing equity itself.

37 Wright, “Caresses that Comfort,” 13. 38 Maria DiBattista, Novel Characters: A Genealogy (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010): 12. 39 Natalie McKnight, “Dickens and Gender,” in A Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. David Paroissien (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011): 186–198, 197.

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It is easy to underestimate Micawber, not only due to the comic construction of the character but also because David necessarily pushes him towards the margins of his narrative. After all, Micawber is too closely related to David’s existence as a street-child. He not only reminds David of his most shameful experience in life, but he also bears the very real threat of relating the hero’s temporary fall in life to those who shall be kept ignorant. The fact that this is not an illusion on David’s part becomes clear when Uriah confronts David with his knowledge of the time he most wishes to forget. The narrator has a considerable interest in keeping Micawber at bay and the character’s often surprising entries are therefore not presented as happy occasions, which clouds the fact that Micawber is at the same time an equally important source of rescue and relief. After David has quite forgotten about his acquaintance when trying to build a life for himself in Canterbury, Micawber surprisingly reappears under significant circumstances: he rescues David from the cross-examination of the Heeps. As David begins to feel highly uncomfortable in this mock trial scene under the penetrating eyes of both Uriah and his mother, it is Micawber who rescues him by entering the scene: I had begun to feel a little uncomfortable, and to wish myself well out of the visit, when a figure coming down the street passed the door – it stood open to air the room, which was warm, the weather being close for the time of year – came back again, looked in, and walked in, exclaiming loudly, ‘Copperfield! Is it possible!’ (DC, 288)

Micawber appears like a deus ex machina at exactly the right moment of David’s increasing discomfort, but David’s fear of his revealing the truth of their connection diverts the reader from recognizing this as a moment of rescue: “I cannot say – I really cannot say – that I was glad to see Mr Micawber there” (DC, 288f.). However, the moment clearly foreshadows Micawber’s eventual rescue of all the characters, when he stands up against Heep. David’s need to avoid Micawber reduces him to a seemingly minor character who answers to a familiar Dickensian type. The melodramatic dynamic that shapes his life creates comedy but reveals, at the same time, that Micawber constructs an existence for himself that relieves him of other obligations. Consequently, he typically refers to himself in the third person, as if his personal business were in fact someone else’s. Thus, Micawber represents a growing interest in the theme of responsibility or, more precisely, the avoidance thereof – a theme common to many male characters in Dickens. He has Micawber seek forever for his good fortune, but presents him as most comfortably himself, when he has been able to declare that all is lost. David’s narrative presents a pattern between Micawber’s epistles announcing various forms of demise and his subsequent appearances that always end on a high note, for once he has admitted to the world that he has failed, Micawber can enjoy his fate free of responsibility:

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I was so shocked by the contents of this heart-rending letter, that I ran off directly towards the little hotel [. . .], [b]ut, half-way there, I met the London coach with Mr and Mrs Micawber up behind; Mr Micawber, the very picture of tranquil enjoyment, smiling at Mrs Micawber’s conversation, eating walnuts out of a paper bag, with a bottle sticking out of his breast pocket. (DC, 297)

Micawber’s most distinct characteristic as a figure in the novel therefore does not lie in his verbosity or baldness but, rather, in his carefree existence on the brink of ruin, always relying on the hope that something will ‘turn up’: The compromise represented by Micawber encompasses nearly abject obeisance to fate and defiance of fate at the same time. The behaviour of the man is truly passive, his expression everlastingly hopeful. We have to credit more than words alone in this man of words, for he sees the world in such ineluctable colors of despair that hope itself is heroic.40

No one familiar with the later Dickens can therefore be at all surprised that Micawber temporarily ends up in the law – after all, it is one of Dickens’s major points of critique that those in the law shirk their personal responsibilities for the systemic relief provided by the profession. Significantly, Micawber notes that the language of the law presses him into a rigid framework, devoid of alternatives: To a man possessed of the higher imaginative powers, the objection to legal studies is the amount of detail which they involve. Even in our professional correspondence [. . .] the mind is not at liberty to soar to any exalted form of expression. (DC, 630f.)

Micawber’s position as Uriah’s legal clerk also changes his character towards a hitherto unimaginable professionalism, which first turns him into a model of discretion. This is entirely out of character, as David insists throughout his narrative that Micawber proves his amiability as a character because of his indiscretion: he and his wife share both their pecuniary and conjugal happiness or misery so freely that David frequently implies embarrassment at their lack of discretion: I never can quite understand whether my precocious self-dependence confused Mrs Micawber in reference to my age, or whether she was so full of the subject that she would have talked about it to the very twins if there had been nobody else to communicate with, but this was the strain in which she began, and she went on accordingly all the time I knew her. (DC, 179)

When Micawber learns discretion in the hands of the law, therefore, this is not a good sign, as David intends for the reader to understand when he observes “an uneasy change” upon Micawber’s announcement of his new professionalism:

40 Welsh, Copyright to Copperfield, 151.

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I am here, in a capacity of confidence. I am here, in a position of trust. The discussion of some topics, even with Mrs Micawber herself [. . .], is, I am led to consider, incompatible with the functions now devolving on me. (DC, 631f.)

Even though David frequently expresses embarrassment at the openness of Mr Micawber, it is indubitably one of his most amiable characteristics, and the turn towards secrecy forebodes trouble. Micawber finds himself on the brink of corruption, and it is his conscience that will seal his fate. Ironically, Micawber ends up in the law to avoid responsibility, but his conscience lets him turn against the law and its representative. His presence in the novel is therefore inextricably linked to Uriah, and the juxtaposition of the two revolves around the covert discourse of the opposition between the law and equity. While Micawber’s affinity for the law is often an element of comedy, such as in his frequent epistles, whose language echoes a particularly hyperbolic legalese, his position in it quickly becomes more serious. On the one hand, Micawber’s ending up in the law is an anticipation of a theme frequently recurring in the later Dickens: the law as the logical, ultimate end for ne’er-do-wells. If they prove unfit for everything else, they might still try the law, like Tip Dorrit: Tip tired of everything. [. . .] [Amy] got him into a warehouse, into a market garden, into the hop trade, into the law again, into an auctioneer’s, into a brewery, into a stockbroker’s, into the law again, into a coach office, into a waggon office, into the law again, into a general dealer’s, into a distillery, into the law again, into a wool house, into a dry goods house, into the Billingsgate trade, into the foreign fruit trade, and into the docks. But whatever Tip went into, he came out of tired, announcing that he had cut it.41

Placing Micawber, who is melodramatically thrown out of and into professions, out and into debt and out and into different accommodations, in the position as Uriah’s legal clerk seems to be an anticipation of this theme: if he cannot succeed anywhere, he might still find a place in the law. On the other hand, Micawber is quickly confronted with the choice between giving in to Uriah’s attempt to corrupt him and the unwanted option of finally taking responsibility in defiance of the passivity the system of the law enables. This choice drastically increases the complexity of the character, for he is confronted with a moral dilemma that is quite out of keeping with the cheerful carelessness inscribed into his appearances in the novel up to this point. In fact, this flat and minor character’s ethical progress coincides well with David’s own bildungsroman-maturation, for Micawber learns to take responsibility. As an involuntary ally in Uriah Heep’s embezzlement, legally possibly even liable as an accessory after the fact, Micawber cunningly subverts the system in favor of his integrity. He is posited as a counterpoint to Uriah’s 41 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (London: Penguin, 2012): 91.

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moral depravity: not quite the knight in shining armor, but nevertheless the representative of conscience and the embodiment of justice that causes the downfall of the villain. It is highly significant, therefore, that Dickens presents Micawber’s moral victory as the result of a struggle with his own conscience: My object, when the contest within myself between stipend and no stipend, baker and no baker, existence and non-existence, ceased, was to take advantage of my opportunities to discover and expose the major malpractices committed, to [Mr Wickfield’s] grievous wrong and injury, by – HEEP. Stimulated by the silent monitor within, and by a no less touching and appealing monitor without [. . .] I entered on a not unlaborious task of clandestine investigation, protracted now, to the best of my knowledge, information, and belief, over a period exceeding twelve calendar months. (DC, 841)

The humor caused by Micawber in the whole narrative sequence that ends in the defeat of Uriah aside, one can clearly see that Micawber functions as a representative of conscience against the law, as a symbol of equity. The choice between his own personal profit, conditioned on Uriah’s patronage, and the morally right thing to do is the defining moment of this otherwise flat and funny character. He represents everything that Uriah is not. In this sense, Micawber becomes an unexpected moral signpost for David himself – having formerly expressed his bemusement quite openly, David finally has to admit that Micawber’s moral integrity overshadows the shame he feels in knowing him: “I felt devoutly thankful for the miseries of my younger days which had brought me to the knowledge of Mr Micawber” (DC, 851). Micawber proves invulnerable towards the corruptive forces of the law – “the silent monitor within” cannot be suppressed by the language of the law – even when it comes in the powerful figure of Uriah Heep. Through adhering to his own conscience, the individual defies the system and points to its corruptive force. As Micawber overcomes Heep, the individual triumphs over the system by taking responsibility for his own actions. Micawber’s actions are therefore symbolic of what Dickens would emphasize as the most grievous shortcomings of the law in his later works. It is at this turning-point of his career that he still has a hopeful note for equity, which saves the day in David Copperfield.

Camilo Peralta

Tolkien’s Dragons: Sources, Symbols, and Significance Abstract: Tolkien’s dragons are well-known to readers of The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, and scholars have long been interested in the influences he drew upon in creating Smaug and his kindred. However, most attention has focused on sources from the literary traditions of Old English and Old Norse, especially the dragons mentioned in Beowulf and in the Prose and Poetic Edda of medieval Iceland. In this article, I examine some of the more neglected sources that may have inspired Tolkien’s conception of these creatures, focusing on classical mythology, the Bible, and medieval English literature. My main interest is in how the symbolic roles of dragons within these traditions may have influenced their counterparts in Middle-earth. It is clear that, in making use of dragons as symbols of evil or tests of courage, Tolkien owes much to these ancient sources. At the same time, he clearly adapts them to serve new ends that reflect his concerns as a Catholic living in England during the twentieth century. I believe that a greater understanding of how Tolkien’s dragons function as symbols can help to clarify certain postlapsarian themes and the importance of eucatastrophe within the legendarium as a whole. In an oft-quoted passage from “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien describes the delight he felt as a young child in encountering stories that were based more on imagination and belief than reality. What he loved best, he explains, were those involving foreign or invented languages, wizards and knights on horseback, and, out of all things, dragons. For it was in those powerful, fire-breathing creatures that he saw the clearest evidence of a far-off world, “richer and more beautiful” than his own: I never imagined that the dragon was of the same order as the horse. And that was not solely because I saw horses daily, but never even the footprint of a worm. The dragon had the trademark Of Faërie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie. I desired dragons with a profound desire.1

1 J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966): 63–64. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-012

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Given this attitude, it is not surprising that Tolkien would include dragons in so many of his own creative works. The fearsome Smaug serves as the primary antagonist of The Hobbit (1937), of course, and though there are limited references to them in The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), dragons play a prominent role throughout The Silmarillion (1977), with Glaurung and Ancalagon both portrayed as some of the most powerful creatures in Middle-earth. Even Farmer Giles is forced to square off against the “wicked” Chrysophylax in the comical story that bears his name.2 At least two major influences for Tolkien’s conception of dragons can be readily identified: Fáfnir, from the thirteenth-century Völsunga Saga, and the unnamed dragon in the Old English epic poem, Beowulf. Tolkien acknowledges the significance of the former in “On Fairy Stories,” calling him “prince of all dragons,”3 and was a recognized expert on Beowulf, penning an essay on it that has been hailed as “the single most influential article ever written on Beowulf in the poem’s 200-year critical history.”4 But as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, then Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton, as well as a devout Roman Catholic,5 Tolkien would have been familiar with the literary and mythological history of dragons stretching back over 2000 years, through the Old and New Testaments, to antiquity. Most of the scholarship on Tolkien’s dragons, however, focuses on the well-known sources from Old Norse and Old English. Aside from the brief discussion of dragons in Tom Shippey’s Author of the Century,6 Anne C. Petty devotes an entire chapter to Tolkien in her extensive look at the Dragons of Fantasy. Her discussion of dragons and proto-dragons featured in “myths and legends around the world” is also worth consulting.7 Jonathan Evans has offered a pair of well-researched essays on the “Dragon-Lore of Middle-earth,” and wrote the entry on “Dragons” for Michael D. C. Drout’s Tolkien Encyclopedia. In the first of Evans’ articles, published in 1998, he offers a detailed

2 J. R. R. Tolkien, “Farmer Giles,” in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966): 126. 3 Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” 63. 4 Michael D. C. Drout, “‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ Seventy-Five Years Later,” Mythlore 30.1/2 (2011): 6. 5 Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000): 118. 6 Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002): 81. 7 Anne C. Petty, Dragons of Fantasy: The Scaly Villains & Heroes of Tolkien, Rowling, McCaffrey, Pratchett & Other Fantasy Greats! (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring P, 2004): 34–61, 213–274.

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analysis of some of the individual dragons featured in Tolkien’s legendarium;8 the second article, published in 2000, is an expanded version of the earlier essay, and contains an excellent discussion of Tolkien’s selective use of sources, including the importance of the “St. George motive,” as represented, especially, by Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1596).9 Like Evans, Ármann Jakobsson is mainly interested in Tolkien’s interest in Old Norse mythology; he focuses on the psychological implications of the confrontation between Bilbo and Smaug in The Hobbit.10 The following exploration of sources from ancient mythology, the Bible, and medieval literature is intended to complement their work, and highlight the symbolic significance of Tolkien’s dragons. In his use of these creatures as symbols of chaos, evil, or tests of courage, Tolkien borrowed much from the literary traditions that inspired him. He also synthesized and adapted them to serve new ends, in the process making new symbols out of old ones. I begin with a brief look at his major dragons, focusing on those featured in the canonical works published during Tolkien’s lifetime.

Glaurung, Ancalagon, and Smaug In contrast to some other writers of High Fantasy, such as Ursula K. Le Guin or George R. R. Martin, Tolkien makes only sparing use of these powerful creatures in his works.11 Their first appearance in Middle-earth, as described in The Silmarillion, proves somewhat anticlimactic. Two hundred years after the defeat of Morgoth at the end of the First Age, Glaurung, “first of the Urulóki, the firedrakes of the North,” issues forth from the pits of Angband – only to be easily defeated by a host of Elves. Glaurung is but “young and scarce half-grown,” nowhere near the prime of his power, and Morgoth is displeased that he has chosen to reveal himself prematurely.12 By “fire-drake,” Tolkien seems to have in mind a kind of wingless dragon; indeed, he later calls Glaurung “the Great

8 Jonathan Evans, “Medieval Dragon Lore in Middle-earth,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 9.3 (1998): 176–178. 9 Jonathan Evans, “Dragon-lore of Middle-earth: Tolkien and Old English and Old Norse Tradition,” in J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth, eds. George Clark and Daniel Timmons (Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 2000): 28. 10 Ármann Jakobsson, “Talk to the Dragons: Tolkien as Translator,” Tolkien Studies 6 (2009): 27–39. 11 Sandra Unerman, “Dragons in Twentieth-Century Fiction,” Folklore 113.1 (2002): 97–98. 12 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977): 15–17; further references in the text, abbreviated as “SIL.”

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Worm,” and describes him crawling over the dwarf-lord Azaghâl after striking the latter down during the Battle of Unnumbered Tears (SIL, 192–193). Glaurung features prominently in the tale of Túrin Turambar, by which time he has grown into his full strength. In addition to his physical prowess and fiery breath, Glaurung is a skilled magic user, with formidable hypnotic and telepathic abilities. After sacking the Elvish kingdom of Nargothrond and sending Túrin away on a hopeless search for his family, Glaurung destroys the only bridge leading into the realm. “[A]nd being thus secure,” Tolkien writes, “he gathered all the hoard and riches of Felagund and heaped them, and lay upon them in the innermost hall, and rested a while” (SIL, 213–215). Most of Tolkien’s dragons seem to be wingless, like Glaurung. The Silmarillion features only a brief, though memorable, appearance by ones capable of flight. Having been urged by Eärendil to succor the peoples of Middle-earth, the Valar (powerful angelic beings) finally agree to leave their stronghold in the west and face Morgoth in battle. With the combined might of the Elves, they are victorious, destroying most of the Balrogs and slaughtering “uncounted legions” of Orcs (SIL, 251). In desperation, Morgoth sends forth his last and greatest weapon: and out of the pits of Angband there issued the winged dragons, that had not before been seen; and so sudden and ruinous was the onset of that dreadful fleet, that the host of the Valar was driven back, for the coming of the dragons was with great thunder, and lightning, and a tempest of fire. (SIL, 251–252)

They are led by Ancalagon the Black, “mightiest of the dragon-host” (SIL, 252), but his moment of glory is a brief one, for Eärendil arrives shortly after, leading a flock of eagles. Ancalagon is slain and thrown down upon the towers of Thangorodrim; the other dragons are scattered or destroyed. Thus, their power in Middle-earth is broken for many generations. By far, the best-known of Tolkien’s dragons is Smaug, the primary antagonist of The Hobbit. His story is told early in the novel, as Thorin recalls the sad history of his family. Led by his grandfather, Thrór, the Dwarves built a great and wealthy kingdom in the halls of the Lonely Mountain, trading with the Men of Dale and Lake-town and the Elves of nearby Mirkwood. Their fame spreads far and wide, eventually attracting the notice of “a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm called Smaug.”13 His arrival is as swift and terrible as a thunderclap: hundreds, if not thousands, of Dwarves and Men are slain, as Smaug clears the mountain and surrounding valleys of their inhabitants and begins to gather all of their wealth for himself. “Probably, for that is the dragons’ way,” 13 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001): 27; further references in the text, abbreviated as “HOB.”

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concludes Thorin, “he has piled it all up in a great heap far inside, and sleeps on it for a bed” (HOB, 28). Over time, all the land around the mountain becomes empty and drear: The Desolation of Smaug. Content with his gold, the dragon sleeps for many ages, and eventually passes into legend. Indeed, by the time of Bilbo’s adventure, some of the younger people of Lake-town have even begun to doubt his existence, laughing at the “greybeards and gammers” who can recall his arrival in Dale (HOB, 212). When Bilbo finally comes face-to-face with Smaug, we learn that all of the tales about him are true. “There he lay,” writes Tolkien, “a vast red-golden dragon [. . .] with wings folded like an immeasurable bat, turned partly on one side, so that the hobbit could see his underparts and his long pale belly crusted with gems and fragments of gold” (HOB, 233). In addition to his scales, Smaug has a protective crust covering (nearly) his entire underbelly; it is worth recalling that his predecessor, Glaurung, had been felled by a stab through the stomach (SIL, 222). Smaug possesses an incredible memory, at least when it comes to his own hoard of treasure. Bilbo only takes a single goblet from the many piles of gold lying about the chamber, and yet the dragon is immediately aware of the theft. He exacts his revenge upon the people of Dale, destroying the town and slaughtering at least one quarter of its inhabitants, in a dazzling display that the wingless Glaurung could never hope to match: Fire leaped from the dragon’s jaws. He circled for a while high in the air above them lighting all the lake; the trees by the shores shone like copper and like blood with leaping shadows of dense black at their feet. Then down he swooped straight through the arrowstorm, reckless in his rage, taking no heed to turn his scaly sides towards his foes, seeking only to set their town ablaze. (HOB, 268)

Finally, he is brought down by a lucky arrow fired by Bard, an heir of Girion, the last Lord of Dale, who eventually succeeds to that title himself. Of Tolkien’s three greatest dragons, then, two are destroyed by what can only be described as luck, or extraordinary means. In the following pages, I explore dragon symbolism in some of the literary traditions that inspired Tolkien, starting with Greek and Roman mythology. It is clear that he borrowed more than superficial details from these sources; indeed, his dragons often symbolize many of the same themes and ideas as their predecessors.

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Dragon Symbolism in Classical, Biblical, and Medieval literature Tolkien’s professed interest in Old English and Norse mythology may have led, inadvertently, to critical neglect of other mythological traditions as possible influences on his work. There are about a dozen references to Homer or Vergil scattered throughout Drout’s Encyclopedia; only a few others have devoted even article-length studies to the influence of Greek and Roman authors on Tolkien in recent years. Alexander M. Bruce, for instance, has attempted to link the Fall of Gondolin to that of Troy,14 while Robert Tindall and Susana Bustos have examined the presence of “shamanistic motifs” from Homer in The Lord of the Rings.15 But Tolkien was more than just familiar with the literary traditions of ancient Greece and Rome; in one letter, he refers to a desire to replicate the kind of “large-scale work of art [. . .] founded on an earlier matter which is put to new uses,” like the epics of antiquity.16 In another, he discusses his early interest in pagan literature, revealing that it was not Spenser or Milton who first caught his eye, but Homer and Vergil: “I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.”17 Classical mythology furnishes a number of dragons whose symbolic functions are shared or adapted by Tolkien’s. Hesiod’s Theogony, written in dactylic hexameters during the eighth or seventh century B.C., features a number of dragon-like beings, including Typhoeus and the Lernaean Hydra.18 The former is involved in a terrible battle with Zeus near the end of the poem, after which Zeus is finally able to establish himself as ruler of the cosmos. Hesiod describes the beast as having multiple heads and breathing fire, both of which are characteristic of dragons in many different cultures. Curiously, the poet seems fixated by the “phantasmagoria of unspeakable sound” that issues from Typhoeus’ many heads:

14 Alexander M. Bruce, “The Fall of Gondolin and the Fall of Troy: Tolkien and Book II of ‘The Aeneid,’” Mythlore 30.117/118 (2012): 103–115. 15 Robert Tindall and Susana Bustos, The Shamanic Odyssey: Homer, Tolkien, and the Visionary Experience (Rochester, VT: Park Street P, 2012). 16 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000): 201. 17 Tolkien, Letters, 172. 18 Bruce Whiteman, “The Muses Taught Me Song Beyond Divine,” Hudson Review 72.2 (2018): 343–351.

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Sometimes sounds that the gods understood, sometimes The sound of a spirited bull, bellowing and snorting, Or the uninhibited, shameless roar of a lion, Or just like puppies yapping, an uncanny noise, Or a whistle hissing through long ridges and hills.19

The emphasis on sound here may reflect, as William Brockliss observes, an overriding concern for the role of music in bringing order to chaos: “Such a chaotic mixture contrasts markedly with the more orderly aspects of the cosmos, which in the latter portions of the poem are associated with Zeus’ rulership.”20 For Hesiod and many of the writers he influenced, one of the things that dragons symbolize is disorder. Tolkien, too, often uses them in this way: their arrival tends to signal a sharp break between periods of relative peace and war, stability and chaos. Such is the case, for instance, with Glaurung’s arrival in Nargothrond, and Smaug’s in Dale. One is also reminded of Tolkien’s creation myth, which begins with the harmonious “Music of the Ainur” that is marred by the discordant notes of Morgoth, rather than a dragon (SIL, 15–17). Conceivably, his close association with dragons and their mutual status as symbols of disorder were suggested by the description of Typhoeus in the Theogony. In many classical myths, dragons symbolize a dangerous trial that must be overcome by would-be heroes in order to prove their mettle. These dragons are often tied to, and serve as guardians of, a specific locale: e.g., the Lernaean Hydra is tasked with protecting the sacred groves of Zeus, and the Colchian dragon defends the Golden Fleece coveted by Jason. In the Metamorphoses (8 A.D.), Ovid describes a great “snake” or “serpent” that watches over an ancient forest dear to Ares.21 This dragon seems to have the same sort of stinking, poisonous breath emitted by Glaurung (SIL, 52–53). The guardian tradition is represented in Tolkien by Glaurung and Smaug, who both spend time watching over a hard-earned pile of gold. They are opposed, and eventually overcome by, heroes whose defeat of the dragon serves as the ultimate test of their courage. In the case of Glaurung, that hero is Túrin Turambar, who slays him almost singlehandedly. Thorin, Bard of Dale, and Bilbo are all presented with the opportunity to test themselves against Smaug, but only the latter two succeed in rising to the occasion. Although he does not kill Smaug, Bilbo is, after Bard, the

19 Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1993): 837–842. 20 William Brockliss, “Olympian Sound in the Theology and the Catalogue of Women: Sweet Music and Disorderly Noise,” Classical Journal 113.2 (2017): 141. 21 Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008): 52.

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person most responsible for his death. He certainly demonstrates great courage in twice daring, alone, to visit the dragon in his lair. During the Middle Ages, dragons often served as symbols of “impending doom,”22 but their use as such dates back much further than that. It is evident, for instance, in the work of the Roman poet Statius, who expands upon the myth of the Inachan dragon in his first century A. D. Thebaid. This unnamed dragon is responsible for killing the infant Archemorus, thereby setting off a round of funeral games that delays the arrival of the Argives, and is another one of those wingless, worm-like beasts that crawls upon the ground, smothering and crushing anything that gets in his way: “and whichever way he turned / his scalding breath, fields died and pastures withered.”23 Eventually, the great serpent is slain by Capaneus, though not before dodging a boulder thrown by his comrade, Hippomedon. Christine Rauer reminds us that the Thebaid was an important source for the Beowulf poet, and points to several parallels between the encounters with dragons in both works.24 Some of these may be observed in Tolkien as well. For Hippomedon and Capaneus, the death of the dragon is but a momentary triumph before the great disaster that is about to befall them and their men at Thebes. Likewise, both Beowulf and Túrin Turambar will be dead within minutes of their respective victories. Even the death of Smaug hardly proves a cause for celebration, since it immediately triggers a full-scale war among the surviving Elves, Dwarves, and Men eager to divide his spoils. Tolkien does not only use dragons as symbols of chaos, trial, or doom. His conception of them was also shaped by his faith, which has long been recognized as an important influence on his life and work.25 He remained a practicing Catholic throughout his life, and believed that his religious beliefs shone through quite clearly in his writings.26 He would surely have been familiar with the Book of Revelation, which features one of the clearest and most consistently rendered references to a dragon in all of Scripture. Most translators, following the example of Jerome, accept the Greek ὁράκων (“python or serpent”) as an accurate translation of the more obscure expression used in the original.27 After the opening of the 22 Michael D. J. Bentley and Thomas J. T. Williams (eds.), Representing Beasts in Medieval England and Scandinavia (Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: The Boydell P, 2015): 9. 23 Statius, The Thebaid, trans. Charles Stanley Ross (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004): V, 527–528. 24 Christine Rauer, Beowulf and the Dragon: Parallels and Analogues (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000): 46. 25 Carpenter, Tolkien, 133. 26 Tolkien, Letters, 288. 27 Nicolas K. Kiessling, “Antecedents of the Medieval Dragon in Sacred History,” Journal of Biblical Literature 89.2 (1970): 169.

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seals and the blowing of the trumpets, John describes seeing a “great” but mysterious sign in heaven: a pregnant woman, opposed by a red dragon with “seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.”28 This dragon, symbolizing Satan, and, more generally, all evil, has several monstrous subordinates, who worship him and convince many humans to do the same. Eventually, he is cast down to a “bottomless pit,” in which he is to lie chained for a period of one thousand years. After being released, he will lead his followers in a final, desperate war against God, which will mark the beginning of the end times.29 Echoes of the Revelation dragon abound in Tolkien’s own eschatology, especially concerning the fate of Morgoth. After the final battle in the War of Wrath – featuring the first appearance of his flying dragons – Morgoth is overthrown and bound with a great chain, Angainor. He is then “thrust through the Door of Night beyond the Walls of the World, into the Timeless Void [. . .]” (SIL, 254–255). In one version of the story preserved in the posthumous History of Middle Earth (1987), however, Morgoth escapes in time to participate in a final, apocalyptic battle like the one described in Revelation: “When the world is old and the Powers grow weary, then Morgoth, seeing that the guard sleepeth, shall come back through the Door of Night out of the Timeless Void.”30 As strong as the influence of Old Norse and Old English may have been on Tolkien’s eschatology, the chaining of Morgoth, the description of his beastly associates, and the depiction of a last, great battle all recall, clearly, the treatment of the dragon in the Book of Revelation. Once again, his close association with dragons is reinforced by their mutual use as symbols of evil. Tolkien does not often discuss his reading of the Bible in his letters, but Evans speculates that he may have used either the Douay or Authorized King James Versions.31 Dragons are mentioned frequently in both, usually in reference to the Hebrew tannîn (pl.: tannîm), which is variously understood to signify an enormous beast. “It appears to be equivalent to ‘leviathan’ or ‘crocodile’ in several passages, and in others stands for monstrous serpents of any sort.”32 Tannîm are named and described in several verses, resulting in a composite image of a Biblical dragon that would be familiar to any reader of Tolkien. Naturally, they are powerful creatures: Isaiah imagines that God will need a “sore

28 King James Version, Revelation 12:1–4. 29 Revelation, 20–22. 30 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lost Road and Other Writings, vol. 5 of The History of Middle-earth, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002): vi, 333. 31 Evans, “Dragons,” 63. 32 Henry Chichester Hart, The Animals Mentioned in the Bible (London: Aeterna P, 2015): 39.

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and great and strong” sword to slay one and achieve the final redemption of Israel.33 Moses describes them as poisonous, which accords with the depictions of Fáfnir and Glaurung.34 Tannîm are frequently invoked as symbols of doom against rebellious cities. The prophet Jeremiah warns, “I will make Jerusalem heaps, and a den of dragons; and I will make the cities of Judah desolate, without an inhabitant.”35 The “desolation” described here sounds very similar to that which invariably follows the arrivals of dragons in Tolkien’s work, and which he may, perhaps, allude to in his name for the realm, or “Desolation,” of Smaug. Numerous creation myths feature a primeval battle between the demiurge and a sea serpent or dragon, who represent good and evil, respectively. The Bible frequently alludes to God’s battles with such creatures, which are referred to variously as “Leviathan,” “whale,” or “dragon.”36 As Nicolas K. Kiessling observes, “The most fearsome dragons of the OT [. . .] are horrible but vague incarnations of evil, darkly outlined opponents of both God and man.”37 In the Old Testament, dragons also serve as symbols of the Israelites’ mortal enemies. In the Book of Ezekiel, the prophet is urged to “raise a lamentation” over the Pharaoh of Egypt, and responds by denouncing him as a tannîn. His words may call to mind an image of Glaurung lying in wait for Túrin: “Thou art like a young lion of the nations, and thou art as a whale [tannîn] in the seas: and thou camest forth with thy rivers, and troubledst the waters with thy feet, and fouledst their rivers.”38 Ezekiel goes on to describe a scene of “bloodshed and carnage” that will be inflicted upon the Pharaoh, in language that probably reflects the influence of Assyrian creation myths.39 In any case, long before the nameless bards of England or Scandinavia ever imagined them flying and hoarding gold, dragons were being used as symbols of great destructive power by Biblical scribes. Tolkien’s dragons clearly owe much of their symbolic resonance to their predecessors in the classical and Biblical traditions. By suggesting that these powerful manifestations of evil can and must be defeated by ordinary men, women, and hobbits, however, Tolkien also looks beyond these sources, to the

33 King James Version, Isaiah 27:1. 34 King James Version, Deuteronomy 32:3. 35 King James Version, Jeremiah 9:11. 36 Job 41:1–34; Psalms 74:13–14; Isa. 27:1; all taken from the King James Version. 37 Kiessling, “Antecedents of the Medieval Dragon,” 167. 38 King James Version, Ezekiel 32:2. 39 Brian Neil Peterson, Ezekiel in Context: Ezekiel’s Message Understood in Its Historical Setting of Covenant Curses and Ancient Near Eastern Mythological Motifs (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012): 29–30.

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great dragon slayers of medieval literature. After Sigurd (who kills Fáfnir) and Beowulf, the most prominent figure in this tradition was probably St. George, whose adventures proved especially popular in England.40 An early account of his battle with the dragon can be found in The Golden Legend, an “extremely popular” collection of saints’ lives compiled by Jacobus de Voragine during the thirteenth century.41 It bears certain similarities to other encounters with dragons in myth and Scripture. For example, as in the Völsunga Saga, the Bible, and some of Tolkien’s works, St. George’s dragon is depicted as possessing “noxious breath,” which he uses to terrorize the inhabitants of a city in Libya.42 This dragon symbolizes evil in the Christian sense of that term – i.e., it represents the antithesis or absence of good. Only after the locals have agreed to be baptized does St. George promise to slay it. Afterwards, the author writes, over 20,000 people were brought into the Christian faith, “not counting women and children.”43 A very different version of St. George’s battle with the dragon is presented in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, parts of which were first published in England in 1590. Given its unique blend of native mythology, English nationalism, and religious moralizing, Spenser’s poem likely served as an attractive source for Tolkien. Indeed, Romuald I. Lakowski has written about Spenser’s probable influence on Tolkien in a pair of recent articles, focusing on the dragons in Tolkien’s early children’s book, Roverandom (1998), “Farmer Giles of Ham” (1949), and The Silmarillion. In Spenser’s allegory, everything functions as a symbol pointing to some deeper meaning hidden behind the text; that includes the dragon, of course, which represents the “final conflict against all kinds of sin,” and serves as “a potent symbol of how religious zeal leads to necessary warfare.”44 The dragon confronted by Redcrosse / St. George therefore achieves a kind of universal significance as a symbol of the sin against which every Christian must struggle using force literal or metaphorical. After all, not everyone is capable of wielding a lance in battle. Like Bilbo facing off against Smaug, in the battle

40 Petty, Dragons of Fantasy, 251. 41 Courtney E. Rydel, “A Discovery of the Only Middle English Version of the Legenda Aurea Prologue in The Assembly of Gods,” Notes and Queries 60.4 (2013): 508. 42 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. Christopher Stace (London: Penguin Books, 1998): 116. 43 De Voragine, Golden Legend, 117. 44 Kenneth Hodges, “Reformed Dragons: ‘Bevis of Hampton,’ Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘Le Morte Darthur,’ and Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene,’” Texas Studies in Literature & Language 54.1 (2012): 111.

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against sin, one must make use of whatever talents one possesses. Tolkien also offers a more traditional example of the dragon-slayer, in the form of Túrin Turambar. A few similarities between the respective missions of Redcrosse and Bilbo are worth noting, since they further highlight the symbolic roles of the dragons they encounter. Both heroes, at times, express doubt about their ability to successfully complete their missions. Bilbo has hardly set off before he already starts to miss home, and think with longing of the comforts that await him there – “Not for the last time!” as Tolkien relates (HOB, 52). At a similar stage in his journey, Redcrosse encounters Fradubio, whose warnings about the dangers he will soon face leave him “Full of sad feare and ghastly dreriment.”45 In addition, both are accompanied by Dwarves; one may even see something of the quarrelsome and pusillanimous nature of Bilbo’s companions in Redcrosse’s “fearfull Dwarfe.”46 Finally, both heroes are servants of a higher power, which direct them towards unseen ends that have the potential to drastically alter the world around them. Bilbo is despatched by the wizard Gandalf, who is really a Maia, one of the spiritual “servants and helpers” of the Valar (SIL, 30). Unwittingly, he discovers a ring that is connected to some of the most significant events and figures in the history of Middle-earth. Redcrosse, likewise, acts at the behest of the Queen of Elfland (or “Faerie Queene”), an allegorical representation of the reigning monarch and head of the Church of England, Elizabeth I.47 Despite being featured only in the first book, and mentioned briefly in two others, he plays a key role in defining the poem’s overall symbolic structure. Romuald Lakowski points to the “curious parallels” between the time frame of Beowulf’s and Redcrosse’s fights with their dragons and Túrin Turambar’s final encounter with Glaurung. In early versions of the story, their fight was intended to last three days, though Tolkien eventually compressed it all into “a single moonlit night,” as in the published form of The Silmarillion.48 In its original form, Túrin’s victory over Glaurung was probably meant to evoke the passion of Christ, which ended with his dying on the cross and rising three days later. At least one other parallel between Redcrosse and Túrin may be noted,

45 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene. Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, eds. Hugh Maclean and Anne Lake Prescott (New York: Norton, 1992): I.ii.391. 46 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I.i.117. 47 John D. Staines, “Elizabeth, Mercilla, and the Rhetoric of Propaganda in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.2 (2001): 298–299. 48 Romuald I. Lakowski, “Horror and Anguish: The Slaying of Glaurung and Medieval Dragon Lore,” in The Mirror Crack’d: Fear and Horror in JRR Tolkien’s Major Works, ed. Lynn ForestHill (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008): 159.

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which ties into a larger tradition involving dragons from classical and medieval literature. In most, if not all, versions of the story, Túrin’s victory over Glaurung proves short-lived; his own death follows immediately after, and even those who survive the encounter with the dragon are made to endure further suffering. Una’s mistaken belief that Redcrosse has perished in battle is mirrored with tragic consequences by Níniel, who leaps to her death at Cabed-en-Aras after realizing that she has married her own brother (SIL, 223). The various accounts of her suicide are a little ambivalent: Tolkien does not clarify whether she kills herself because she is distraught over her incestuous relationship with Túrin, or because she believes him to be dead. In either case, the death of a dragon only serves as a prelude to further sorrows.

Tolkien’s Dragons and Eucatastrophe As interesting and fruitful as an investigation of potential sources may be, Tolkien reminds us that the process is never an easy one, and is almost impossible to finish, due to the “cauldron-like” manner by which myths are created and promulgated. Anyway, there may be more important and questions to ask: But when we have done all that research – collection and comparison of the tales of many lands – can do; when we have explained many of the elements commonly found embedded in fairy tales [. . .] there remains still a point too often forgotten: that is the effect produced now by these old things in the stories as they are. (OFS, 55–56)

One cannot help but wonder, then, about the new effects Tolkien, himself, produced in using these old things. What else do his dragons symbolize, aside from the themes and ideas inherited from their predecessors? What, in particular, do they reveal about the symbolic structure of the legendarium as a whole? First, as has been frequently noted, Middle-earth is in perpetual decline: from one age to the next there is a perceptible loss of strength, greatness, and wisdom. “[T]he motifs of decline, irreversible loss, and the withdrawal of past glory” can be seen not only in the vanished glory of Aragorn’s forefathers, but in the falls of the great Elvish kingdoms that dominate the central narrative of The Silmarillion.49 Perhaps it is no coincidence that dragons are most active dur-

49 John J. Davenport, “Happy Endings and Religious Hope: The Lord of the Rings as an Epic Fairy Tale,” in The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All, eds. Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson (Chicago: Open Court, 2004): 205.

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ing the early ages of Middle-earth, which are dominated by Elves. Elves make far better warriors than Men, whom Tolkien describes as “more easily slain by weapon or mischance, and less easily healed” (SIL, 48–49). As the Age of Elves gives way to that of Men, it makes sense that the latter would face monsters who are less dangerous than dragons, and provide a better match for their lower strength. It is not that Morgoth, or Sauron after him, purposely restrains the dragons from issuing forth as in the past; but even the strongest enemy is subject to the will of a higher power. In this case, Tolkien makes the point a moot one by specifying that “well-nigh all the dragons were destroyed” in the War of Wrath (SIL, 252). Clearly, he did not intend for the story of Men to be like that of Beowulf and the Elves, who grapple with dragons. Their relative scarcity after Morgoth’s overthrow serves as a potent symbol of the ongoing decline of Middleearth, itself an echo of the postlapsarian theme familiar to every Christian. Finally, there is the obvious connection with eucatastrophe suggested by the above point. In “On Fairy Tales,” Tolkien writes of the “good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’” which is characteristic of all good fairy stories. This eucatastrophe represents “a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur” (OFS, 86). In the past few decades, eucatastrophe has come to be recognized as a “critical dimension” of fantasy literature, informing the works of everyone from Tolkien’s contemporary, C. S. Lewis, to the author of the best-selling Harry Potter franchise, J. K. Rowling.50 It has always been acknowledged as an important element of Tolkien’s own work, and is plainly evident in the lastminute victories achieved at the Battle of Five Armies in The Hobbit and the destruction of the Ring in The Lord of the Rings. The sudden, almost miraculous, deaths of Tolkien’s dragons may be interpreted as minor variations on the theme of enduring hope and sacrifice that underlines the promise of a eucatastrophe. But to be effective, such an event can only happen once in a long while, and preferably at the end of the story. Dragons cannot be defeated over and over again, any more than Morgoth or Sauron can be repeatedly overthrown. After the death of Smaug, there is little mention of them again in Middle-earth. Yet the evil they

50 Susan Johnston, “Harry Potter, Eucatastrophe, and Christian Hope,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought & Culture 14.1 (2011): 68. Johnston argues that an awareness of eucatastrophe can lead the reader to seek “Christ-figures” in Harry Potter or “thematic or moral resonances of the Christian story in Harry’s friendships and choices.” Eucatastrophe also helps to clarify the miraculous resurrection of Aslan near the end of the first volume of Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia (1950). For Tolkien’s considerable influence on Lewis, see Bradley J. Birzer, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2002): 6–8, 32–33.

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symbolized remains, as Tolkien reminds us: “For the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come. A Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world.”51 Like Beowulf, the men and women of Middle-earth must learn how to recognize the new symbols by which ancient evils are expressed – a task that remains as vital as ever for their modern-day descendants.

51 J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983): 72.

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Suspending the Assemblage: Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995) and the Return of the Self Abstract: This essay seeks to offer an analysis of Todd Haynes’ film Safe (1995) in light of the ripened theories of networking and assemblage one frequently finds in contemporary discourses of new materialism. By attending to both the thematic and cinematographic aspects of the film, I argue that Haynes offers a curious rendition on the dexterous capacity of the mind that allows us to freely associate with and dissociate from various kinds of surroundings. As the film progresses, one witnesses a transformation taking place in the mind of the protagonist Carol, as the exhaustion caused by external objects becomes mediated and reduced when she starts to regain the lost subjectivity. What the film celebrates is a Jamesian flexibility and freedom of mind, a human capacity that has been diminished and worn out by the consumerist and networking culture. Out of everything he sees, hears, experiences he instinctively collects together his sum: he is a principle of selection, he rejects much. He is always in his company, whether he traffics with books, people or landscapes: he does honour when he chooses, when he admits, when he trusts.1

In his 1995 film Safe, Todd Haynes issues a challenge to the celebrations of networking and assemblage one frequently finds in contemporary discourses of new materialism – two decades before these theories ripened. He accomplishes this through the masterful telling of the story of a woman, Carol White (Julianne Moore), and her painful search for a cure for her nameless illness. As the story develops, our assumptions about the causes of her sporadic vertigo and nausea − either stressful family relations or urban pollution − are challenged and ultimately debunked when the syndromes remain unchanged even after she moves away to the cultish and utopian community of Wrenwood. The film invites the audience to reflect upon the optimal relationship between humans and nature in our time and, perhaps more importantly, the place of (inter-)subjectivity in our mind. A seeming solution appears only near the very end of the film, when Carol begins to mindfully detach herself from exhausting relations and material objects

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 2004): 11 [original emphases]. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-013

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and focus on her true inner self, with feeble yet assertive whispers of “I love you,”2 signaling Carol’s tentative regaining of self. As Nietzsche arrived at a place of awareness of his subjective freedom to act upon and affect the outside, as indicated in the epigraph above − a view on both physical and psychological health that Nietzsche developed after suffering serious illness at the age of thirty-six3 − Carol’s journey of self-recovery and her search for a mode of life at peace with consumerist modernity also involves a process of overcoming vulnerability in both her body and mind. Haynes’ unconventional cinematic storytelling − an approach that employs the key strategies of what scholars now call slow cinema (long takes, mid/long shots, deadpan performance, etc.) − illustrates precisely how one comes to regain the subjectivity repressed and displaced by the plethora of material objects and personal relations. Through a series of skillful explorations of medium to long shots that, interestingly, do not seem to faithfully correspond to either the compact urban or distanced desert environments, Haynes offers a curious take on the meaning of utopia: it is not an infinitely and permanently conjunctive locale in the Heideggerian sense but primarily a dexterous capacity of the mind that allows us to freely associate with and dissociate from various kinds of surroundings. In other words, one witnesses the transformation taking place in Carol’s mind, as she starts to regain her lost subjectivity: the exhaustion caused by external objects is mediated and reduced, and she grows in her ability to distance herself from the distracting environment. The illustration of this transformation in Carol is more relevant today than at the time of the film’s release, as our tendency to establish connections and expand networks has only expanded, becoming perhaps overly celebrated − an empiricist mode of thought that Deleuzians and Latourians have put forth. Carol’s journey to reconnect with objects and the environment begins only after the reawakening of her lost self in a materialist and interpersonal world. This mental flexibility of one’s free association with and, more importantly, disassociation from the outside world echoes the concept of radical empiricism proposed by William James. In his Essays in Radical Empiricism, he clearly demonstrates his stance on ontological belief: a radical empiricism that homogenizes the primal forms of every material being as “stuff” that contains no specification or individualization, while, at the same time, rendering all nonentities as functions. Our engagement with the flux of experience depends on the function of

2 Safe, dir. Todd Haynes (New York: Criterion Collection, Inc., 1995): 1:54:45–1:55:31; further references in the text, abbreviated as “S.” 3 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 10.

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consciousness, which helps us recognize the meaning of particular objects in the flow and thereby become at one with it. James also emphasizes that one needs to be aware of the negative signs and learn to move away from danger. At the center of the Jamesian formulation is a flexibility and freedom of mind that Carol finally acquires, a human capacity that has been diminished and worn out by the consumerist and networking culture. This essay starts by giving a brief account of the theories of assemblage and the ANT (Actor-Network-Theory) proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour, with an emphasis on their over-celebration of the tendency to join and expand material flows and human networks. Even though both authors propose a mechanism that allows one to be plugged into and removed from the relational networks, such a mechanism at the same time privileges external nonhumans over the subject, and thereby limits the freedom of the subject and creates leeway for capitalist exploration. The second section seeks to show how Safe serves as a direct counterpoint to such a tendency, in that it depicts precisely the effect of sickening caused by the toxic overabundance of matter and the loss of subjectivity that results from immersion in such an environment. The analysis proceeds along two avenues: First, I examine the extensive use of medium long shots, which aptly portray both the suffocating force of material reality and the relationship that gradually worsens Carol’s illness. As I suggest, this visual storytelling technique runs counter to the contemporary Hollywood style, which strives for more visual effects through realist digitalization and intensified editing. The second, more thematic line of thought addresses the necessity of a flexibility of mind that helps steer agency and enable one to adapt to the exhausting and fast-moving flow. At the heart of such psychological flexibility, I argue, is a consciousness of the self − a consciousness that enables the subject to turn inward and become attentive to her own needs. I do not intend to encourage a revival of selfishness or homocentrism, as such dispositions are fundamentally at odds with the Heideggerian formulation of the human-nonhuman world introduced earlier. Rather, I wish to draw attention to the ignored subjectivity and recalibrate the valences between oneself and the overly connected networks outside, so as to stay, as Carol strives to be “healthy.” In the last section, I point out similarities between Carol’s experience and James’ formulation of radical empiricism to show that Haynes has crafted, through cinematic images, the utopian state of mind that James proposed a century ago. An ideal state of mind emerges precisely at the moment when one steps away from the clusters of material flows and networks and starts to regain a sense of freedom in oneself by saying and thinking “I” out loud.

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Only Connect? In his lecture “Building Dwelling Thinking” (“Bauen Wohnen Denken”), delivered on August 5, 1951, Martin Heidegger redefined the cohabitant relations between the human and nonhuman world. Decades later, his views on this subject sparked a novel theoretical trend, new materialism, that continues to expand and thrive. In that lecture, Heidegger challenged the dominant and (previously) mostly unquestioned position on how we live on the earth in relation to the material environment. He encouraged us to rethink the homocentric stance, so as to allow a certain freedom in matter itself − inseparable from us as it is − to be. To arrive at such an ontological blueprint, Heidegger sought to break down the category borders that keep humans within a bubble and erect barriers between the human and the nonhuman. Heidegger reminded us that our fourfold surroundings − earth, sky, divinities, and mortals − are always already present in the form of a holistic “oneness,” and that our mode of thought regarding the poetic dwelling on the earth needs to undergo some change: “This simple oneness of the four we call the fourfold. Mortals are in the fourfold by dwelling. But the basic character of dwelling is safeguarding. Mortals dwell in the way they safeguard the fourfold in its essential unfolding.”4 Thus, Heidegger seems to ascribe to humans another task, one in addition to the simple act of being in the world: safeguarding the relations among the components. Given the intertwined relations between the four ontological elements, humans should take on the cautious work of maintaining and protecting such relations − a task that would seem to involve an epistemological process of understanding the relations in the first place. Curiously, Heidegger invoked this new activity and function of thought not by a resolute, wholesale abandonment of the notion of human; quite to the contrary, he aimed to modify and render precisely the entangled relations between (among) mortals and the other three essential components. Heidegger suggested that we do not traverse their mode of existence, describing instead the gathering essence of the bridge: “To be sure, the bridge is a thing of its own kind; for it gathers the fourfold in such a way that it allows a site for it.”5 However, in recent decades, this phenomenological stance has gradually morphed into a question of the extent to which we should loosen control over the relations we hold with nonhuman but self-organizing inert matter. Heidegger’s notion of dwelling is based

4 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper, 2008): 352. 5 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 355.

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on the ecological writing of German physiologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll,6 and the world in which humans dwell, in Heidegger’s sense, undergoes modifications that better suit the philosophical efforts to undo and erase the trace of man in philosophical thinking. New materialism − a theoretical discourse that has gained prominence in the past decade due to the work of thinkers like Graham Harman, Manuel Delanda, and Karen Barad − has been devised to vigorously contest and negotiate the presence of homocentrism in human epistemology and practical activity. This is especially vital work given the arrival of the Anthropocene era, and it advocates an all-encompassing and egalitarian worldview that ensures the freedom of ways of being for the nonorganic. Hence, we somehow arrive at a compromised and revised notion of the Heideggerian world, such that nonhumans demand to be enclosed as essential segments of the world, and, concomitantly, demand that human worlds stay open and even expand. Timothy Morton aptly characterizes such a revisionist turn: We can get there by appropriating and modifying Heidegger’s concept of “world.” Having a world needn’t mean living in a vacuum-sealed bubble, cut off from others. World needn’t be a special thing that humans construct [. . .]. We will disarm Heidegger from within. It’s not that there is no such thing as world, but that world is always and necessarily incomplete.7

What is novel about new materialist thinking is the shift from emphasizing the category differences that divide and separate to focusing on commonalities and relations operating between species in a way that seeks to formulate an everexpanding openness and non-hierarchical inclusiveness − an inclusiveness that brings into the picture not only the kinds homogeneous to the human but also the heterogeneous and the inorganic. Two chief lines of thought have helped to generate momentum within new materialism: the theory of assemblage, first 6 Jakob von Üexkull, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010). In this popular and influential writing, von Uexküll proposes a dualistic theory of the environment on the perceptive and the productive levels. According to him, the concept of environment need not be generic and all-inclusive; rather, we may recognize an environment if it contains two processive “worlds” with respect to both sensation and action, “for everything a subject perceives belongs to its perception world [Merkwelt], and everything it proceeds, to its effect world [Wirkwelt]. These two worlds, of perception and production of effects, form one closed unit, the environment” (42). The affective dynamism that necessarily involves a passive reception of affects − physical or intellectual − from the outside and the reciprocal and affective actions generated towards the outside respectively serve as the foundations of the two worlds. Their unity constitutes a minimal nuclear environment whose collective combination would form a comprehensive picture of the vitalistic network. 7 Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (London: Verso, 2017): 37.

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formulated by Deleuze and Félix Guattari and further developed by Manuel DeLanda, and actor-network theory (ANT), developed by Latour in the past two decades. Despite the divergences in their formulations, both theories share the Heideggerian spirit by asking us to extend the affective nexus beyond the human sphere and thereby partake of the material flow and establish ever-enlarging alliances with both people and objects. A comprehensive account of the mechanism and logic of assemblage appears in Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative work, A Thousand Plateaus;8 however, Deleuze had already introduced the term ‘assemblage’ during his dialogue with Claire Parnet in 1977. Assemblage is a heterogeneous and complex way of arranging objects, expressions, and concepts, so as to formulate new functions of collective bodies. According to Deleuze, the term denotes the dynamic composition of entities in various forms, initiated by the incessant desire that establishes relations and hence alters the cartography of the state of things in time: What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind.9

8 One of the chief reasons the concept of assemblage (agencement in French) troubles many Deleuze scholars and readers is that it is, strictly speaking, untranslatable. The English word ‘assemblage’ does not render the exact meaning the French agencement seeks to convey. As Ronald Bogue points out, “Agencement denotes an arrangement resulting from a combination of elements, as well as the action or manner of assembling or combining elements, and may be assimilated to the concepts of both organization and organism” (Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari [London: Routledge, 1989]: 174). Inspired by the empiricist philosophical tradition, however, Deleuze and Guattari further distinguish agencement from assemblage (a word in French as well) by adding that agencement by no means suggests – as ‘assemblage’ does – the finality of the gathering; but rather, it implies an ongoing effort that keeps forming an open system where heterogeneous elements and relations could join or come apart. More recently, scholars such as Paulo de Assis have brought to light the possible connotation of agencement as an alternative mode of thought that could replace the Freudian notion of a complex or the Lacanian exploration of set theory (Paulo De Assis, Experimental Affinities in Music [Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2016]: 77). However, those psychoanalytical meanings are not directly related to the cultural dimension this essay seeks to address and will not be explored further here. In the present article, assemblage is understood as a heterogeneous multiplicity taken out of semiotic and materials flows (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987]: 22−23). 9 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II [1977], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia UP, 2007): 69.

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For Deleuze, therefore, a contagious force that denotes a similarity in the function of two heterogeneous parties would naturally form a tendency to connect with each other and form a unit of assemblage; subsequently, such a minute nucleus would explore further the conjunctive force to build connections with the force of other materials, eventually forming a ceaselessly moving material flow whose only component becomes imperceptible particles, thus rendering it impossible to discern any particular objects. In their collaborative work AntiOedipus, Deleuze and Guattari explain such an affective force or desire that drives one to keep building connections with the heterogeneous other to generate flow: “Every ‘object’ presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow, the fragmentation of the object.”10 Flow is the original and ideal status of the world. It is the process of production, which is not based on the Freudian or Lacanian principle that identifies desire as essentially a lack: Desire is not bolstered by needs, but rather the contrary; needs are derived from desire: they are counterproducts within the real that desire produces. Lack is a countereffect of desire; it is deposited, distributed, vacuolized within a real that is natural and social.11

Desire, in Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis, always reveals itself as excess in search of an exit. Every machine has a specific name based on what it is, but at the same time all machines share one and the same name: desiring-machine. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is the fuel of the machines that makes possible the processes of producing flows and interruptions. Within the desiring-machines, there is an inherent tendency to connect, and such a tendency drives a machine to cut a functioning flow and link itself to other flows. Thus, they write, “there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow [. . .]. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows.”12 Implied in such a description is perhaps their characterization of the flow-powered assemblage in a ceaseless continuum, with an affective force that draws in organic and concrete entities, so as to disassemble and reorganize them as new aggregations. Deleuzian assemblages are formed, therefore, precisely due to the incessant processes of desiring production, evident especially in the age of late capitalism, such that we unconsciously move away from the limitations of our own subjectivity − almost in the fashion of an obligation − to extend to and fit with the external material flow, together making or unmaking territories. As Graham 10 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983): 6. 11 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 27. 12 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 5.

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Livesey nicely clarifies, “The assemblage is destined to produce a new reality, by making numerous, often unexpected, connections.”13 The guidance from the discourse on assemblage seems to always push for a larger and more inclusive one, be it at an ontological or social level. In line with the Deleuzo-Guattarian stance, DeLanda’s monograph on assemblage characterizes one of its major traits: “Assemblages can become component parts of larger assemblages. Communities can form alliances or coalitions and become a larger assemblage.”14 Even if most assemblage theorists acknowledge the reciprocal dynamism within each assemblage − the tendency to break with the flow − an involuntary force persists in reconnecting and attaching itself to the conjunctive and ever-expanding assemblages. Under such a theoretical framework, one becomes obliged to open up her interiority and to be at one with the ongoing external material flow. Assemblage theory, therefore, seeks to advance the Heideggerian notion of the world and offers a perspective from which every component obtains a type of agency. Thomas Nail helpfully explains a feature of assemblage in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the “personae” in their last collaborative work, What Is Philosophy: on Nail’s account, a vital force or third-person persona is immanent in the assemblage and grounds its operation by inhibiting the utterance of “I”: “No one is subject to themselves alone; they are part of a larger third-person assemblage that arranges the conditioning relations and concrete elements in which the world of the agent is meaning.”15 Originating from science and technology studies and sharing an empirical and practical purpose,16 the ANT proposed by Latour signifies both a continuation and an expansion of the concept of assemblage, in that ANT, like assemblage theory, stresses the ontological connectivity between heterogeneous entities. At the same time, unlike assemblage theory, it implies a more radical topological change through the multidimensional essence of the connective relations, no longer merely encompassing strict categorical differences at an ontological level, but also recognizing other qualities of the entangled and symbiotic existence of entities in modern societies: the qualities of being “fibrous, thread-like, wiry, stringy,

13 Graham Livesey, “Assemblage,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010): 18–19, 19. 14 Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016): 24. 15 Thomas Nail, “What is an Assemblage?” SubStance 46.142 (2017): 21−37, 28. 16 Martin Müller, “Assemblages and Actor-Networks: Rethinking Socio-Material Power, Politics and Space,” Geography Compass 9.1 (2015): 27–41, 28.

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ropy, capillary.”17 Based on his ethnographic observations of modern laboratory life and identifying the primary function of scientific research as mediating or representing Nature as opposed to altering or transforming it, Latour challenges such philosophical binaries as subject/object and society/nature by pointing to the possibility of reconciliations through efforts of mediation. Specifically, he reminds us that there is a long history of technical artefacts having been devised and employed as a means of extending social relations to nonhumans – understood as social “actants” just like humans − in order to form collectives or networks.18 For Latour, relations bear even more primacy in our analysis of network ontology and social theory because of these newly described forms of social fabric; this represents a step beyond the theoretical narrative presented in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari. Latour further remarks: Put too simply, ANT is a change of metaphors to describe essences: instead of surfaces one gets filaments (or rhyzomes in Deleuze’s parlance [Deleuze/Guattari 1980]). More precisely it is a change of topology. Instead of thinking in terms of surfaces − two dimensions − or spheres − three dimensions − one is asked to think in terms of nodes that have as many dimensions as they have connections.19

Latour’s explications of the multifarious fashions of association between heterogeneous entities in an expansive network somewhat further dissolve the subjective agency of individuals. As Martin Müller interprets the contribution of ANT, “[t]here is nothing outside associations, and to become capable of action, entities need to form aggregates and find allies to produce an actor-network.”20 To say that we are nothing but a composite of relations, deeply intertwined in the networks, is also to say that we are pushed to lose agency and become entrapped in the endless motions of the flow. Here Latour has met Deleuze and Guattari half-way, in that his network theory also strives to move away from particular components in society and, as a result, to the mediated relations between all actors, such that an expanding and evolving network would come to fruition. As Jeff Kochan rightly characterizes Latour’s cosmic and relationist disposition, “Latour has developed an account of mediation that he hopes to expand into a generalized relational theory of nothing less than the operations of the world in its entirety.”21 17 Bruno Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications,” Soziale Welt 47.4 (1996): 369–381, 370. 18 Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation − Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy,” Common Knowledge 3.2 (1994): 29−64, 53. 19 Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory,” 370. 20 Müller, “Assemblages and Actor-Networks,” 30–31. 21 Jeff Kochan, “Latour’s Heidegger,” Social Studies of Science 40.4 (2010): 579−598, 583.

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Latour’s methodology offers a much-needed and dynamic view of the social life, by bringing the largely ignored nonhumans into traditional philosophical discourses and ascribing to the mediating actors in the social network their due agency, thereby formulating an inter-objective political and moral theory and asking us to rethink the position of the human.22 For Latour, however, ANT serves as a necessary condition from which one cannot escape; in other words, all humans, as well as nonhumans, are inevitably attached cohesively to the relational outside, and all actions are therefore compromised: in Latour’s framework, actions mean nothing more than switching from one attachment to another. In his stimulating interpretations of Quino’s comic strip, Latour derives a further characterization of the mode of social life of us actors: “We can substitute one attachment for another, but we cannot move from a statement of attachment to that of unattachment.”23 Our affects, activities, and passions, in this line of thought, are passive and mechanistic responses to external stimuli, and subjectivity is therefore an illusion, if it survives the efficacious force of the actor network. As assemblage theory and the ANT tend to draw us closer to inorganic and nonhuman entities, we are very much impacted and burdened by the obligation to extend relations and associations outward and give up the capabilities to act and think. In what sense, one must ask, is such a captive state of being desirable? Is it ideal for living?

Things Sicken In his famous essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Fredric Jameson laments the excessive explorations of some key traits of postmodernism − “the transformation of reality into images, the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents” − by consumer capitalism, such that the exhausting, overabundant information flow constantly defines the long or immediate pasts as negative and oppositional and thereby erases our sense of history.24 Jameson’s diagnosis appears almost concomitantly with the assemblage theory and ANT, which invite and to some extent require people to open up and embrace the

22 Edwin Sayes, “Actor-Network Theory and Methodology: Just What Does it Mean to Say That Nonhumans Have Agency?” Social Studies of Science 44.1 (2014): 134−149, 135. 23 Bruno Latour, “Factures/Fractures: From the Concept of Network to the Concept of Attachment,” trans. Monique Girard Stark, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 (1999): 20−31, 27. 24 Fredric Jameson, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay P, 1983): 111−125, 125.

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flows of heterogeneous entities. To put it more directly, the theoretical stances of Deleuze, Guattari, and Latour seem to operate compatibly with the logic of consumer capitalism in that they encourage the cultivated desire to be perceptively and physically occupied with object relations; such network relations can be easily engineered and multiplied. As a result, not only do we (as Latour suggests) become further attached to social networks and thereby unconsciously have our subjectivity dissolved in the process of mediation, but we also find ourselves manipulated on a psychological level by what Byung-Chul Han insightfully terms “smart power”: “A significantly more efficient technology of power makes sure that people subordinate themselves to power relations on their own.”25 This sort of capitalist and psycho-political power is understood as smart, precisely because of the mendacious mask it dons to appear friendly and positive, so that one becomes prone to immersing and losing oneself in tangible and intangible relations. As a result, Han adds, the freedom of the subject is at stake: “Free choice (Wahl) is eliminated to make way for a free selection (Auswahl) from among the items on offer.”26 Han’s exposition of the function of smart power operating in the contemporary consumerist landscape parallels Latour’s argument in the previous section, such that in the actor network, we can choose our relational attachments but not whether to attach or not. In his work Connected, cultural critic Steven Shaviro brilliantly describes how one is enclosed and subsequently exhausted and sickened in the network society both externally and internally, as a result of the opening/giving up of the self: The network is the great Outside that always surrounds and envelops me. But it is also the Inside: its alien circuitry is what I find when I look deeply within myself. The network is impersonal, universal, without a center, but it is also perturbingly intimate, uncannily close at hand.27

The effect of the network is precisely the viral contagion such encompassing capitalist smart power excites, such that the personal is violently replaced with the universal, regardless of the pathological perils engendered in the process of exploring the methods of assemblage and ANT. Todd Haynes’ Carol White should thus be understood as a victim. The upper-middle-class housewife living in the San Fernando Valley experiences her health deteriorating rapidly by means of an agonistic disease: any minute sensory stimulus − noise, smell, hugging − attacks

25 Byung-Chul Han, Psycho-Politics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler (London: Verso, 2017): 14. 26 Han, Psycho-Politics, 15. 27 Steven Shaviro, Connected: Or What it Means to Live in the Network Society (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003): 30.

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her immune system and triggers intense reactions of nausea, nosebleeds, and seizures. However, the real toxin remains an enigma, as the expertise of Dr. Hubbard (Steven Gilborn) is constantly challenged and even ridiculed, leaving Carol and the audience to try to fathom an answer. Haynes does not explicitly reveal his intention, but rather gives a vague and open explanation at an interview, indicating that the illness may come from either physical or mental causes: Her [Carol’s] body tells her that something’s terribly wrong with her life and her world. Whether it’s a material problem or a larger symbolic problem, it’s something that everything in her life has been encouraging her not to look at.28

The illness, for Haynes, implies a dual sense, referring to both the overabundance of materiality that drowns and exhausts Carol, as well as the symbolic social relations that suffocate and drown her agency. Haynes uses the nameless illness Carol suffers in the film to disclose the dark side of network: a magnetic tension that constantly pulls one back to the material flow, thereby causing sickness and suffocation along with the loss of the sense of direction and action. Carol’s experience in the film, therefore, contradicts the film’s title (Safe), showing precisely the life-threatening precariousness hidden within the network and assemblage of matter and people. As Roddey Reid nicely explains, the film highlights the danger of the tendency to immerse oneself blindly in material and interpersonal relations: “Safe repeatedly confronts viewers with the very ‘thereness’ of things and social relations that shapes White’s world, and invites, almost dares us to find our way through the thicket of their materiality.”29 As I attempt to argue in this section, the film functions in one way as a cinematic experiment, endeavoring to generate a counterforce to the attraction of network and assemblage: this is done in order to awaken the protagonist as well as the audience from the dangerous dream of heterogeneous flow. Haynes’ use of the melodramatic traits one typically finds in the style of slow cinema works in two ways: first, it distances the viewers from the intensified cinema of attraction in contemporary Hollywood’s mode of production; second, through the extensive use of long takes and long shots, it displays how the self becomes torn apart by the multifarious means of association through which Carol engages with materials and people. The confusion regarding the source of the illness (that is, whether it is environmental or symbolic) occurs to Haynes precisely because the film touches on both through the playful craft of the mise-en-scène: the excess of

28 Todd Haynes, Interviews, ed. Julia Leyda (Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2014): 51. 29 Roddey Reid, “UnSafe at Any Distance: Todd Haynes’ Visual Culture of Health and Risk. For Steven Shaviro,” Film Quarterly 51.3 (1998): 32–44, 35.

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objects in the first half of the film is in direct contrast with the barren land of Wrenwood. But neither environment ameliorates the illness, and thus doubt is cast on the idea that it has an environmental or material cause. This initiates a transformation from the physical to the mental, and at the very end of the film, Carol reexamines her life and seeks to regain her lost identity. The title sequence at the beginning of the film − seen from a view of a car − proceeds in an extensive long take that pans through the street to Carol’s house. We later become aware that Carol lives in a decent neighborhood in a wealthy region of California, but the opening shot seems to convey the exact opposite sense. With a dark, bluish, cold hue, insufficient lighting sources, and relatively empty street, the cinematography and mise-en-scène cultivate the depressing and grim suburb Carol becomes determined to escape (S, 0:00:29–0:02:01). The opening’s long take, which fixes viewers’ attention on the unpleasant environment, foregrounds a causal connection between Carol’s imminent illness and her living situation. Overall, the cinematography does not intend to celebrate the luxurious and heavily consumerist suburb, but instead consistently contradicts it through cold tones on the color palette. To reinforce Carol’s struggle with the suburban lifestyle, overladen with things and people, and to foster momentum for her to scratch a way out, the carefully arranged cinematography and mise-en-scène take over the role of main storyteller. The morning after Carol and her husband, Greg, have returned home, we see a medium long shot introducing the palatial mansion where they dwell, with Carol working in the garden and seeing him off. The shot composition, however, poses a stark visual conflict between the foreground and the middleground. Our view of the mansion − occupying the majority of the middleground − is sporadically blocked by untrimmed trunks and twigs. The orderly and geometric shape of the building becomes scattered by the shadow cast on the wall and thereby has its assumed aesthetic quality and magnificence negated and turned into fragmented pieces (S, 0:04:10–0:04:25). The thoughtfully designed cinematography and mise-en-scène fit well with Haynes’ anti-realist cinematic style, such that the task of the narrative does not − as classical Hollywood film generally does − heavily depend on change along the character arc. What is particularly enigmatic and thus attractive in Haynes’ film is the inward and intricate sense expressed through the images. Very early in his career, Haynes stood out for not being a faithful disciple of the art film tradition, his open rejection of realism − what he calls the “faux documentary

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style”30 − serving as the guiding principle for his mode of film practice. He states in an interview with American Cinematographer: Films aren’t real; they’re completely constructed. All forms of film language are a choice, and none of it is the truth [. . .]. We’re not using today’s conventions to portray what’s ‘real.’ What’s real is our emotions when we’re in the theater.31

The cinematic techniques explored in Safe, therefore, are devised to stimulate real and immediate feelings of sickness and discomfort in the audience. An imbalance of information occurs through the long take that pans over the décor inside Carol’s house, with the awkward and compact overlay of objects − though remaining quite restricted to the protagonist’s consciousness − becoming ever clearer to the audience. A sense of visual repulsion mounts as we observe the multitude of objects. The shot of the living room contradicts the sense of spaciousness we gathered while viewing the building from afar. In addition to the consistent cold color palette and lack of lighting, the low ceiling and the heaviness shown in the wood pillars and beams create a sense of repression. Indeed, in the right zone of action in the shot, Carol herself is squeezed between two walls. The curiously adjusted camera angle and the adept alignment of objects bear the function of the narrator and disclose the incompatibility between Carol and her home (S, 0:08:31–0:09:48). The visual strategies tell a horror story about the network of things, an extreme case in which someone is inundated with the excessive flow of objects. In another medium long shot, Carol stands in the middle of the living room, trapped by the surrounding sofas, chairs, and tables, which together block her way out and subsequently keep her confined in the “assemblage” (S, 0:50:28–0:51:15). Such images invite us to reconsider the function of relation that, according to Deleuze and Latour’s theories, is supposed to bring out an ideal composite with heterogeneous matter. Ironically, Haynes shows the exact opposite: the nauseating and precarious feeling we have when we are forced to extend relations to matter and thus become sickened and afflicted to such an extent that life is put on the line. Haynes’ deep skepticism not only points to the human–nonhuman relation, but also reveals the inauthentic human relationships we engage in, and uses the wall as an essential barrier to connections, subsequently signaling it as the toxin causing Carol’s sickness. While retelling her experience at the doctor’s office, we notice how the thick bathroom wall separates Carol and the housemaid

30 Haynes, Interviews, 5. 31 Haynes, Interviews, 124.

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Fulvia (Martha Velez) from Greg White (Xander Berkeley) and her stepson Rory (Chauncey Leopardi) (S, 0:25:18–0:26:07). It is precisely this tension − Carol has to situate herself within the assemblage − and the aloofness of her family members that engender the discomfort. In a scene toward the middle of the film, Carol attends a birthday party. This represents a turning point in the film, as she suffers a seizure at the party and is sent to the hospital − but prior to this, a wall appears in the living room in the middle of the scene and completely divides the screen into two halves, splitting Carol and her friend during a conversation (S, 0:40: 35–0:41:02). The wall again has dual significance, disclosing the ingenuity of the human network and mocking the awareness when one is pushed to be a part. By means of long takes and long shots, Safe reminds us of the unsafe components that come along with seemingly benign material and social relations, thereby debunking the optimistic mythologies that assemblage and ANT later fabricate. The camerawork and cinematography help to establish a distance that prevents the audience from being overly engrossed by digital effects and fast editing for the sake of attention manipulation, as in much of contemporary Hollywood cinema. Though writing with sympathy for what she terms spectacular digital effects, Kristen Whissel informs us of the function of new visual strategies of CGI, motion capture, digital animation, etc.: Digital tools and proprietary software have changed production and postproduction practices, and have made possible the creation of referent-less photorealistic images in a computer with a degree of image manipulation that was impossible with celluloid.32

Such effects enhance the degree to which cinematic images would appeal to the senses of the audience and thereby reinforce the relations that film, as a cultural artefact, bears with the audience to form a material network. The tactical avoidance of fast cutting and close-ups in Safe give the audience (unlike Carol) the opportunity to contemplate the images without the urgent need to respond. Haynes describes the blueprint he had in mind during production: We followed those narrative steps while laying evidence of the values attributed to that self-knowledge, that growth, that realization, against the viewer. So you have to weigh the evidence, and feel the narrative closure that usually makes you feel relief, but in this case you had collected too many cues to question whether these values are really beneficial to these characters.33

32 Kristen Whissel, Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014): 2. 33 Haynes, Interviews, 216.

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Jacques Rancière, in The Emancipated Spectator, contends that to liberate the audience from visual constraints, filmmakers have to call forth an awareness of the power structure hidden within the film viewing experience: Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting; when we understand that the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection.34

The long takes and medium to long shots in Safe undermine the network imperatives to connect by allowing the audience to select evidence and build an understanding of Carol’s illness, thereby liberating the audience from the imprisonment of cinematic attraction.

Reconnecting the Flow Carol’s search for a cure for her undiagnosable illness does not succeed when she settles down in Wrenwood, an isolated community in the desert of New Mexico that tries to avoid environmental toxins. In sharp contrast to the affluent suburban environment, Wrenwood is surrounded by sterile desert and consists mainly of shabby huts. The community, as Carol gradually learns, is organized around a set of slogans concerning self-reliance and self-blame for misfortunes − beliefs that are all too similar to the words of her former friends. As a result, her health deteriorates at an even faster rate, and she soon has to drag an oxygen tank around with her. Her attempt at escaping the abundance of material and cutting off social ties fails to facilitate any substantive change. It is only in the last scene, when she comes back from a party at which she has started to develop feelings for her fellow patient Steve (Brandon Cruz), that she tries to put down the oxygen mask and look at herself in the mirror. A moment later, her eyes begin to glitter, her mouth parting and murmuring, “I love you” (S, 1:54:45–1:55:31). As mentioned in the previous section, Haynes intends to leave the ending open, without answering the question of what helps initiate Carol’s regaining of agency. I contend that this transition takes place precisely because Carol, under the impact of affective attachment to Steve, starts learning to regain her lost agency. That allows her, as hinted at in Nietzsche’s epigraph, to choose, to admit, and to trust, despite the urgency posed by the need to join the network.

34 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009): 13.

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Such an act of reconnecting after detaching herself from the engulfing network and assemblage suggests recovery of the mental flexibility needed to make a decision; this is the implied solution that Haynes offers in the film, one that bears similarities with William James’ account of radical empiricism. In the posthumously published Essays in Radical Empiricism, a series of related articles starting with the ambitious essay “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?”, first published in 1904, James vigorously challenges the rationalist tradition of philosophy, which, since Kant, has asserted the existence of consciousness, an entity that hangs above all objects and thereby distinguishes subject from object, mind from body. The solution, for James, is to replace rationalism with a revised kind of empiricism. The first step he takes is to reject the concrete form of consciousness as the first principle that precedes all materials, as posited by Kantian philosophy. As James writes, I believe that ‘consciousness’, when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles.35

However, James adds, this does not mean that consciousness does not exist; rather, consciousness is regarded as a “function.” By switching the role of consciousness from entity to consciousness, James dismantles the contrast between objects and thoughts in terms of the way they come into being, and, consequently, creates a homogeneous monism. He claims, “[t]here is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made.”36 After denying the Kantian dualistic model, James then presents his materialistic empiricism, which sees the aboriginal world as composed of “pure experience”: If we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’ then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is part of pure experience; one of its ‘terms’ becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the other becomes the object known.37

By claiming a materialistic empiricism, James locates his metaphysics in the concrete world, a position that anticipates the one held by Deleuze and Guattari. James’ thesis, in line with the frameworks of Deleuze and Latour, offers no

35 James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 2. 36 James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 3. 37 James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 4.

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indication of the nature of experience − in other words, he does not confine experience to the scope of human experience. Stuff or pure experience is absolute, shared by all creatures. He defines radical empiricism thus: I give the name of ‘radical empiricism’ to my Weltanschauung. Empiricism is known as the opposite of rationalism. Rationalism tends to emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts in the order of logic as well as in that of being. Empiricism, on the contrary, lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the element, the individual, and treats the whole as a collection and the universal as an abstraction [. . .]. To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.38

At first sight, James’ formulation of pure experience, the connective flow that breaks with philosophical dualism, is in a similar vein as the assemblage theory and ANT, but his emphasis on the link that connects the recognition of pure experience and the experiencing agent presupposes a sense of subjectivity that allows one to make a judgment about what is perceived and conceived. In other words, his is a homogenizing tendency that does not radiate a pulling force in the form of an obligation or necessity for an agent, such as Carol, to abandon the capacity to think and evaluate the essence of relation. With respect to the unit of experience, just as Haynes implies in Safe, James is aware of the joy as well as the peril of extending relation to the external flow and aligning with the objective others: Experiences of painful objects, for example, are usually also painful experiences; perceptions of loveliness, of ugliness, tend to pass muster as lovely or as ugly perceptions; intuitions of the morally lofty are lofty intuition.39

James, therefore, does not support the pseudo-optimism in favor of expanding the network that one generally finds in the discourses of ANT; rather, he understands that with careful evaluations of the quality of relations by the subjects, we are as likely to move closer to the flow as we are to distance ourselves from it, the sole criterion being the pleasure or pain the objects cause us. He explains that the whole theory would turn upon one’s success in explaining how or why the quality of an experience, once active, could become less so, and, from being an energetic attribute in some cases, elsewhere lapse into the status of an inert or merely internal ‘nature.’40

38 James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 42–43. 39 James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 34. 40 James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 35–36.

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The close associations between experiencing subjects and the alternation of closeness and distance between the subject and the external cluster of things, in James’ account, assumes the mental flexibility within the agent to determine whether she will join or leave the network. Carol’s awakening at the end of Safe can be seen as an echo of such Jamesian subjective flow. Haynes’ solution to the sickness, therefore, is neither to blindly immerse oneself in the network nor to completely withdraw, but to cultivate a flexibility of mind that allows one to decide whether to connect, how to disconnect, and when to reconnect. Haynes embeds a puzzle in Safe regarding the true cause and cure of Carol’s acute and undiagnosable sickness. Through tracing and explicating the cinematography as well as the camerawork, I have shown that Carol’s suffering comes primarily from the loss of subjectivity amidst the superabundance of material and social relations, which drag her into the toil of inauthenticity. Even if Haynes seems reluctant to directly unpack his solution to treat the precarity of assemblage, I suggest to decode the clue that the cinematic images have offered us: to take a middle stance in the spirit of James’ postulation of radical empiricism; this both affirms the heterogeneous flow of matter and, perhaps more importantly, gives leeway for one to choose when and how to connect, disconnect, and reconnect.

Stephanie Elsky. Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature. Oxford: Oxford up, 2020. 240 pp. ISBN: 9780198861430, GBP 55.00 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-014

Stephanie Elsky’s Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature delivers striking connections between legal, social, and political history. These connections are achieved through her in-depth, interdisciplinary perspective of custom in early modern law and literature. While ‘custom’ operates on multiple levels throughout the monograph, Elsky builds from the foundational understanding of custom in a legal setting and as a concept central to English legal identity. She explains in the introduction that the early modern English common law system “was distinct from other European systems law; unlike civil law, which was based on a set of authoritative texts, common law was considered ‘general custom’ or the ‘custom of the realm’” (3). Elsky’s introduction details the complexity of the term ‘custom’ and especially showcases the larger aims of the monograph by explaining how the unique temporality of custom – in which custom was thought of as “time immemorial” or “time out of mind” – afforded a unique creative capacity for literary writers to experiment with making new and foreign forms familiar (4). However, Elsky does not simply showcase the influence of legal and constitutionalist thought on early modern writers within their innovative and experimental implementation of custom in literary works. Rather, the book then moves to how this process transformed custom into a powerful ‘mythopoetic’ force that extends to broader socio-political implications in this time period and beyond. The overall frame of the manuscript’s argument is rich and intricate within Elsky’s multifocal view of custom in literary, legal, and political contexts. The chapters follow chronologically but are not forced into a particular narrative of development, which is very fitting for the ways in which the author uses custom to defy traditional, limiting organizational frames and chronologies. Elsky explains that each chapter is instead organized “around how a particular genre and even rhetorical figure become intertwined with a particular aspect of legal custom, building up to a holistic picture of a full engagement with the concept” (16). This organization can at times lead to overlapping ideas and slight convolution within the delineation of Elsky’s argument but is also a refreshing approach that matches her complexity and depth in the monograph’s impressive study of custom. Chapters also build from the same thematic considerations laid out in the introduction, in which Elsky first creates a foundation of the

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multiple meanings of custom and then details the larger socio-political implications from each case study or topic. At the same time, Elsky’s larger arc for the monograph moves from writers who were members or would be members of the court elite to a broader social spectrum and popular audience. The structure is thoughtful, multifaceted, and consequently something that keeps the reader engaged from beginning to end. The first chapter dives into custom as an overlooked category of study in the field of law and literature. This chapter also provides a strong foundation for Elsky’s in-depth readings of texts in subsequent chapters. She details the broad ranging uses of custom in early modern society, starting with its significance in the legal system. The chapter describes how custom is a key element of the perceived difference between common law and European legal systems and as a defining element of the English legal system overall – in which custom could be considered synonymous with common law and the terms were often used interchangeably. A significant part of this distinction is how custom was central to the English unwritten law (ius non scriptum) as opposed to the written law (lex scripta) of continental civil and canon law. This important distinction is something Elsky returns to in later chapters with rhetorical analysis of literary texts and is also crucial for understanding how a given practice would be determined to be something legally binding. Additionally, Elsky discusses custom within common learning practices in legal training at the Inns of Court. Within this detailed outline of custom’s place in common law, she builds from wellknown scholarship of legal historians such as JH Baker and brings in key legal texts from famed jurists like Sir Edward Coke and legal thinkers like Christopher St. Germain. The chapter then develops to show the strong relationship between literary and legal texts within the concept of custom and especially the unique temporality of custom – where Elsky effectively lays the foundation for custom as a poetic form seen in literary writers in subsequent chapters. The curious temporality associated with custom (as ‘time immemorial’) could also be used as a particular political tool and this phenomenon is described in more detail through the following chapters focused more specifically on literary texts. Beginning in chapter two, Elsky illustrates the literary interest in custom and its link to custom’s exceptional relationship to time. This chapter initiates Elsky’s profound consideration of custom’s temporality and its consequent larger effects on the socio-legal landscape. Specifically, her argument builds from the general suspicion of novelty in this time period noted in the introduction and first chapter to demonstrate how custom allowed for authors to create a space for novelty by creatively connecting to the past. Given the sense of ‘time immemorial,’ custom had a paradoxical capacity to make new forms and political ideas familiar by connecting them to the past. With More’s Utopia (1516) as an illustrative example,

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Elsky details how More creates a new socio-legal ‘commons’ or a commonplace by connecting developments of Renaissance Humanism to common law as the groundwork of England’s legal system and subsequently its political identity. In this way, literary authors like More and literary texts like Utopia embody the past-as-present – creating innovative literary and political forms by linking them to the past. However, Elsky also describes the tension between More’s new vision of a shared commons and his own perception of its probable limits. This tension, Elsky argues, is taken up by later writers in which the temporal, and consequently legal-political, concerns described in More become central to later understandings of custom. Each chapter of Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature showcases the paradoxes and tensions of custom not only in relation to content but also form. Elsky brilliantly illustrates how the language and rhetoric of custom became so crucial to perceptions of English identity. As the book moves to chapter three, she focuses more specifically on the relationship between custom and the English language. Elsky explains how More connected developments of humanism to the English common law but also writes his text in Latin. Later writers like Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey then debated on the burden of classical meter on English verse. Here, the author uses the SpenserHarvey Letters (1579–1580) and Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) to then explain how “custom enables the project of quantitative verse, or the writing of English vernacular poetry in classical meter” (76). This debate entangles the legal concept of custom to political and linguistic changes. Elsky showcases how custom works in colonial conquests by first detailing England’s long history as a place of invasion. She then cleverly juxtaposes the importance of custom in England’s own history with its attempts at expansion in Ireland detailed in Spenser’s A View. The inclusion of Ireland’s customary Brehon law adds a comparative view of custom, and in this process, demonstrates custom’s ability to think through concepts like ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ and even make the foreign familiar. The shrewd approach to law, politics, and language developed throughout the monograph clearly builds from the field of law and literature. Elsky weaves into each chapter influential scholars such as Bradin Cormack, Lorna Hutson, Victoria Kahn and Christopher Warren. This body of work on the importance of rhetoric and genre has clearly shaped the project; yet Elsky also perceptively expands what we might consider as rhetoric by focusing on vernacular forms. The chapters collectively illustrate the structural connection between rhetorical figures and common law through the commanding concept of custom. This multilayered methodology then provides fruitful analysis of this relationship between law and language and England’s political identity. The connections between language, rhetoric, and socio-legal concerns throughout the book is a difficult

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accomplishment and the exact kind of innovative work needed in the field of law and literature. The benefit of focusing on a larger concept like custom allows for a truly interdisciplinary approach to not only legal-literary studies but larger socio-political history. The remarkable attention to legal-political dimensions of law, language, and rhetoric are then further developed in chapters four, five, and six. While Elsky’s work on Spenser especially detailed language and identity within the binary of ‘native’ and ‘foreign,’ chapter four returns to the relationship between ‘written’ and ‘unwritten’ common law detailed in the introduction. By using Sidney’s Old Arcadia (c. 1580), Elsky illustrates custom’s authority as an unwritten form, as something stemming from practices and social performance rather than written statutes or decrees. The chapter then showcases how this speaks to the development of early modern England’s constitutional politics such as the nature of the common weal and the ‘ancient constitution’ where it was perceived that institutions like parliament had a collective authority of consent not simply delineated from monarchical power. Elsky establishes how custom’s political aims related to England’s constitutionalism by reading the crisis of regnal succession framing the Old Arcadia as directly tied to custom. In this process, custom has the flexibility to move between “poles of constitutional and consensual on the one hand, ceremonial and coercive on the other” (18). Custom is consequently central to English political identity and can vacillate between various political purposes. This political meaning of custom extends from authors more specifically in legal-political environments such as More, Spenser, and Sidney to a larger social spectrum in the final two chapters. In chapter five, Elsky focuses on Isabella Whitney’s printed commonplace book, A Sweet Nosgay (1573). Elsky describes how Whitney uses custom to create a sense of authorship and in this process actualizes the democratic potential and possibilities of custom’s literary elements. Adding yet another layer to the legal-political reading of custom, the final chapter on Shakespeare showcases perhaps the most extreme version of custom as a political tool, in which Elsky argues that the theater demonstrates how custom could be utilized to resist or even overthrow a sitting monarch. To illustrate these various political uses of custom, Elsky employs a strong close reading of Laertes’s rebellion in Hamlet (1599–1601) and includes an interesting circling back to More with the deeply political play Sir Thomas More (1591–1593). While these chapters insightfully bring together modern political theory and criticism on early modern drama, they also illustrate the enduring power of custom in multiple settings and times. Ending the arc of the chapters with another look at Sir Thomas More in a different context is a clever way to showcase the unique, innovative approach to organizing a monograph demonstrated throughout the text and feels necessary

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for the intricate concept of custom so thoughtfully discussed in this book. Elsky’s aim to showcase the relationship between politics, law, and literature is persuasively accomplished in these careful readings of texts and combined interdisciplinary analysis contained in each chapter. The central arguments of Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature have important stakes not only for literary critics or legal historians, but anyone interested in historiography or even larger processes of change and development. Elsky demonstrates how custom allows us to rethink such terms and methods because of its complex, often paradoxical relationship to time and culture. The legal and literary meta-discourses on change discussed in a full-length study of custom inevitably question categories of time such as ‘early modern’ or periodization itself. This critical perspective of time and change is also incredibly relevant to current political climates and collective understandings of the past. The inventive approach Elsky has so carefully crafted in this study of custom is an astute model for the very best scholarship out there today. Jessica Apolloni

Christopher Newport University

Siobhan Somerville, Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2020. 279 pp. ISBN: 9781108741897, GBP 22.99 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-015

As Sioban B. Somerville points out in her introduction, The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies is one in a series of several hundred works that appear with Cambridge University Press under the heading “companion,” as reference works that provide an overview, or cross-section, of a specific field. The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies follows several notable works that have tried to map – or outline – the field of queer studies, its origins and significant developments, since the 1990s. Next to the extensive Routledge Queer Studies Reader (2012), edited by Annamarie Jagose and Donald Hall, which followed The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader published a decade earlier, the early twenty-first century has seen various edited collections that brought together contributions on specific aspects of queer studies and that frequently expanded the field by attending to previously obscured and excluded facets of what queer studies might mean and do. Examples of this proliferation are Susan Stryker’s Transgender Studies Reader (2006) and its expansion into a second volume in 2013, the collection No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black (2016), and Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature published in 2013. The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies is at once an update to these earlier companions and anthologies, a taking stock and a tracing of queer theory genealogies, and a snapshot of current directions in queer studies. Structured into the four parts of 1) Genealogies, 2) Confluences, 3) Representation, and 4) Key Words, and encompassing altogether fifteen contributions, this companion is specifically characterized by its commitment to intersectionality. Another notable quality is the authors’ frequent foregrounding of queer studies as methodology – for example by asking what trans* perspectives (Keegan, chapter 4), or queer performative study (Ellis, chapter 10) can do, rather than what they are. The first two chapters, Kadji Amin’s “Genealogies of Queer Theory” and Keguro Macharia’s “Queer Writing, Queer Politics: Working Across Difference,” trace the various “habits of thought and feeling” (26) as well as the “radical forms of world imagining and world making” (32) that shaped the field of queer studies. The subsequent sections then illustrate queer studies as an interdisciplinary practice that becomes entangled with a variety of other fields, and that far from being “only” focused on matters of gender and sexuality, offers an important tool-box for challenging restrictive and oppressive structures such as the nation state, the health care system, institutionalized

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knowledge, and governmental violence. At the same time the authors also present queer studies as a discipline that wants to raise awareness of the complexities of power and that therefore, as Chandan Reddy remarks, seeks to be mindful of its “obligations towards those made more marginal by one’s own conditions of flourishing and resistance” (60). Preceding the introduction, the collection begins with a chronology of queer studies compiled by Erin Grogan, which might, as Grogan acknowledges, seem very much like a “normalizing practice” that cannot adequately account for the “looping and folding, zigging and zagging, circling back, and moving sideways” of time as queer critique might understand it (xiv). What it does, however, successfully, is point to a number of events that make up the heritage / inheritances of queer theorizing as an academic discipline and as a practice. This outline goes beyond white sexology and post-structuralist thinking, and traces legacies besides Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Their importance is not denied; their names and influence are apparent throughout the volume, and some contributions, like Kadji Amin’s chapter on “Genealogies of Queer Theory” (chapter 1) and Ren Ellis Neyra’s chapter on “Queer Poetics” (chapter 8), engage with this ‘heritage’ directly. But their influence does not obscure queer studies’ wealth of influences from other sources, such as Black antihumanism, or “U.S. Third World Feminism.” The chronology lists the Compton’s Cafeteria Riots in San Francisco in 1966 as well as the Stonewall Riots in New York in 1969 while also pointing out explicitly that the latter were “led by queer people of color and drag queens” (vxi). It illustrates the contemporaneousness of The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) with Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (1976). Moreover, it extends previous chronologies by recent events and publications, such as Saylesh Wesley’s article “Twin-Spirited Woman: Sts ’iyóye smestíyexw slhd:li” in the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2014, the repeal of House Bill 2 in 2017, which previously restricted trans persons from accessing restrooms in North Carolina, and the publication of Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Queer Black Genders in 2018. Drawing on these diverse points of origin, inspiration, and theoretical genealogies, the contributions in the volume cover a broad range of queer studies’ intersections, from Indegequeer Films (June Scudeler, chapter 5), to the affinities between “crip” and “queer” (Alison Kafer, chapter 6), to queer ecology (Nicole Seymour, chapter 7), to Puerto Rican trans beauty queens and formations of kinship and family (Richard T. Rodríguez, chapter 14), to queer digital cultures (Kate O’Riordan, chapter 12), to the role of critical regionalism in queer studies ( J. Samaine Lockwood, chapter 15). Despite this range, the contributions converge time and again on certain themes, even across the sections in which they are placed in the volume. Somerville herself names queer of color critique, and the relationship

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between transgender and queer studies, as two such prominent nodes in the introduction. Disability (studies) and performance form further significant junctions that surface throughout the different contributions. Three chapters which particularly exemplify this companion’s strengths are “Convergence, Dissymetry, Duplicities: Enactments of Queer of Color Critique” by Chandan Reddy (chapter 3), “Queer Disability Studies” by Alison Kafer (chapter 6), and “Queer Poetrics: Deviant Swerves, in Three” (chapter 8) by Ren Ellis Neyra. Reddy’s chapter not only traces multiple points of origin for queer of color critique – including queer studies, postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, indigenous studies and feminist studies – but also points out that, from the 1990s on, queer of color formations forced an interrogation of queer studies’ own structural complicity with the racialized institutional and property order of US society whose pervasive structuring and violent liberal heternormativity it sought to contest. (52)

The author begins with a definition of queer of color “groups and formations” as “emergent and highly differentiated non-white racialized subjectivities and collectivities constituted by and through gender and sexual perversities and nonnormativites” (51). The author’s attentive and careful explications of his subject never cloud the transparency of the argument as Reddy illuminates how queer of color critique seeks “liberation” rather than “social inclusion” (58) and how it aims to trace inherent connections between supposedly disparate forms of state/ institutional violence, such as the intimate connections between “US wars in the Middle East, which have been ceaseless and ongoing since its inception” and “the socalled ‘domestic’ wars on drugs, single motherhood, and HIV” (54). Moreover, queer of color critique also pushes queer studies and queer activism to rethink its premises, by seeking ways of forging community that go beyond simply being included in existing structures and instead “demand a different kind of society” (58). Alison Kafer’s chapter on “Queer Disability Studies” in turn lays out the connections between the terms ‘crip’ and ‘queer’ quoting Eli Clare’s explanation that these terms are “cousins: words to shock, words to infuse with pride and selflove, words to resist internalized hatred, words to help forge a politics” (94). Kafer concludes that “‘crip’ thus [. . .] signal[s] a refusal of ableist norms and a commitment to other disabled people” (94). Kafer’s chapter then focuses on artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and the Bay Area disability arts and justice organization Sins Invalid, whose performances complicate both queer studies and disability studies drawing attentions to the blind spots and exclusions within those fields. Discussing Piepzna-Samarisinha’s memoir Dirty River (2015), Kafer draws attention to the fact that “claiming crip is more possible for some than others” because the activist’s “brown skin, immigrant status, alienation from neoliberal productivity, and queer femme presentation all render a determination of

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mental illness more dangerous” as these identities make her vulnerable in multiple intersecting ways (96). The chapter’s discussion of Piepzna-Samarisinha’s writings and performances thus continually highlights “disability as inseparable from other structures of social stratification” (97) and emphasizes also the ambiguous status of diagnosis as an instrument of surveillance that may nevertheless be the only possible means of access to treatment within a health care system of “unequal access” (98). Kafer also takes on the question of how disability might obscure the reading of a body as queer because the types of signals and “mannerisms” that define our constructions of gender are predicated on the “nondisabled body” (102). Acknowledging the various erasures and careful negotiations that persons living with disability experience, which might lead them to avoid claiming ‘queer’ or ‘crip’ publicly, Kafer points out that disability studies’ intersection with queer studies can also be a powerful impulse to find new ways to imagine desirability/desirable bodies, as well as a “provocation to imagine sex differently” (101). Ren Ellis Neyra’s “Queer Poetics: Deviant Swerves, in Three” is likely the most performative piece in the collection, and also the one that most obviously mirrors its time, when it speaks about “skrrrrr or skrt skrt” as “an ad libbing veering all over contemporary hip-hop” (127), an onomatopoetic insertion imitating the swerve of tires. Presenting itself as a “lyrical essay on how queer poetics [. . .] imagines desire as swerve” (125 [original emphasis]), Neyra creates the pleasure of reading in the rhythm of spoken-word poetry in their contemplations, such as [t]he word “ad lib” comes from “ad libitum,” which can be translated as “as desired” or “with libido.” In a musical score, the direction of an “ad lib” invites freedom to improvise. But Trap’s “ad libs” exceed the one-way run of freedom, enacting, instead, the pleasure of vernacular bursts and what the poet and musician Christian Black calls “blinguistics,” where “bling,” we remember, is a vibraphonic sound for commodification’s glister. Channeling Trap’s sonic misdirection, I sense that queer poetics swerves “ad libitum” on the constraints of form and imagines a range of possible formal feelings. (127)

Following Hortense Spillers, the chapter contests US grammar, which, according to Neyra, carries the “fantasy of standard language” (128) as well as “gender binary and genitally obsessed essentialisms” (129). Instead it invokes an unruly poetics that moves across, and that swerves: a movement which can indicate collision, evasion, risk, and playfulness all at once; a poetics that is motivated by proximity and fantasy (132), one that thinks pleasure and survival together, and that “makes [s] pleasure with our bodies out of how we have been harmed” (129). Neyra’s contribution performatively pulls readers into the swerve, not so much laying out a clear-cut argument, as immersing them in the process of queer poetics and pulling them along. In this way, it adds a different dimension to the volume, and one that is not frequently included in the genre of academic companions, but one that illuminates an important facet of what queer can do.

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No reference book or handbook, particularly in a fluid field like queer studies, can aspire to completeness, and even claiming representativeness is tricky. Among recent directions that are touched upon in the Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies but that are not fully fleshed out are queer gaming, poor queer studies, and queer age studies.1 It is also obviously focused on North America (although Keguro Macharia includes a perspective on Kenya, and Anne Muhall’s chapter focuses on Ireland). At the same time, it is a strength of this companion that its ‘omissions’ matter less, because it does not limit itself to an overview of content, but instead presents its readers with a range of things that queer can do across and in convergence with various fields. Those methodologies are not limited, then, to a specific set of works or academic areas, but they can be transposed, further enriched, or bent in a different direction. As Somerville posits, the aim of the volume is to present “some of the field’s most salient debates, concepts, and interpretive strategies” (1). This, the present companion does elegantly and successfully while also providing compelling suggestions for further readings at the end of each chapter. Queer studies are by now so firmly established at universities and in academic discourse that works like The Companion to Renaissance Poetry (2018) and The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism (2020) include a section on queer studies. And at the same time, queer perhaps still remains at its most productive when it retains its elusiveness and abrasiveness. While not necessarily suited as introductory reading for students and scholars new to the field, this volume is a valuable resource for scholars of queer studies as well as those in intersecting fields such as Black Studies, Disability Studies, Indigenous Studies, Ecocriticism or Performance Studies. The individual chapters offer rich materials for scholarship as well as (graduate) classroom discussions focused on queer theory, particularly through the cogent ways in which multiple marginalizations and their consequences are made tangible by the authors. Moreover, the approaches presented in these contributions provide a vivid snapshot of queer studies, as they are now in the second decade of the twentyfirst century: a dynamic field, which, despite having ‘arrived’ in academia, on the one hand needs to critically question and rethink some of its own central assumptions and narratives, and on the other continues to develop its multidirectional potential. Linda Hess

Augsburg University

1 Vanessa Fabbre, Jane Gallop, Linn Sandberg and Barbara Marshall have theorized queer aging, Ronnie Rubert and Adrienne Shaw published their edited collection on Queer Game Studies in 2017 (U of Minnesota P), and Matt Brim published Poor Queer Studies in 2020 (Duke UP).

Shazia Rahman. Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism: Pakistani Women’s Literary and Cinematic Fictions. Lincoin: u of Nebraska P, 2019. 246 pp. ISBN: 9781496213419, USD 60.00 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-016

Considering that our day-to-day activities and their related economic, gendered, racial and cultural politics are interlocked with questions of the environment, the field of humanities lies at the very heart of articulating environmental concerns. In such a context, ecocritics have often reflected on the role of literature and other cultural forms in challenging anthropocentrism and mediating alternative imaginaries that are more receptive and hospitable to all kinds of species on our planet. In times when our physical movements, as well as our imaginative capacities, are being increasingly quarantined, how do we create pathways that may strengthen our interactions and engagements with the marginalized narratives of those places that are facing severe environmental degradation? What Shazia Rahman’s timely monograph Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism does, broadly, is to explore the forms of literary and cinematic representations that emerge from those marginalized bodies and places that ecologically respond to the neocolonial globalization and anthropocentric development projects of nation-states. Her book begins by lamenting the failure of “postcolonial theories of nation, cosmopolitanism, and globalization” in providing a lens to examine “the many quandaries and contradictions of present-day Pakistan” (2). By “bridging ecofeminist theories and postcolonial Pakistani literary and film studies” (22), her study offers a much-needed perspective on the contribution of Pakistani women in addressing the entwined relationship between social and environmental justice within the South Asian landscape and beyond. By analyzing two films, including Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani (2003) and Mehreen Jabbar’s Ramchand Pakistani (2008), as well as three novels – Sorayya Khan’s Noor (2006), Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing (2003) and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) –, Rahman focuses on Pakistan, not as a nation but a “place that includes landscapes and seascapes superimposed by man-made borders” (9). By doing so, she sheds light on how Pakistani women’s engagements with the more-than-human environment and place-based identities challenge the stereotypes of Pakistan as a nation of singular Muslim identity and oppressive patriarchy. Her perceptive readings of the films and novels also underline the women protagonists’ resistance to the rippling effects of U.S. imperialism and the environmental damage in those South Asian regions that reflect a

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long colonial history of economic and ecological exploitation. Neatly divided into five chapters, the book attempts to transition from “local to national to global, combining ecocriticism with postcolonial and feminist theories of social justice” (17). However, as Rahman repeatedly claims throughout her book that the local and the global are not mutually exclusive and constantly flow into one another, the claim of “transitioning” from the “local to national to global” in the introduction of the book gives the impression of a progression from one form of spatiality to a distinct and not a related other. This further obfuscates her work’s standpoint on the scalar and spatial politics of our world systems that fail to address the conceptual limitations of and mutations within the local, national and global terrain. Although she attempts to reveal how the local and global are spatial threads of our planet’s tapestry, what perhaps would have clarified her position on the scalar politics of place is a discussion of those political rationalities and anthropocentric tactics that demarcate and govern the relational meanings of local, regional, national and so on. However, despite these limitations, the book’s strength lies in its architecture of the astutely designed chapters transporting the readers to multiple regions that both encompass and spillover presentday Pakistan’s geopolitical border. All five chapters serve as shifting frames that highlight Pakistan as a “place” characterized by a long history of invasions, internal conflicts and environmental degradation that have led the women inhabitants to establish multiple forms of attachment and belonging (5). Chapter one, titled “Punjab: Eco-cosmopolitan Feminism,” introduces the ecological engagement with Pakistani place-based identities, and reflects on the acute food and water scarcity in Punjab through Sabiha Sumar’s film Khamosh Pani. By extending the key arguments of Ursula Heise’s seminal work Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008), the chapter deconstructs “ecocosmopolitan feminism” in the film, and examines Muslim and Sikh women’s resistance to global capitalist practices and “patriarchal religious nationalism” (31). Located between the Partition of British India in 1947 and Zia-ulHaq’s military regime in 1979 (24), the film’s historical expanse allows Rahman to illustrate that violence against women, whether in the form of rape or coerced suicides, has also been a form of violence against the agricultural land, the community wells and rivers of Punjab. The illustrations of the cinematic shots in the first and the second chapters (23–80) appended to the lengthy critique also underline the links between class and caste politics, food dictatorship and the environmental implications of corporate greed. In congruence with the themes of place and resistance to the inequitable distribution of natural resources, chapter two, titled “Thar: Bioregionalism,” demands a shift from “place-based bioregionalism” to “eco-cosmopolitanism” (57). Using Mehreen Jabbar’s film Ramchand Pakistani as a case study, Rahman underlines the correlation between “capitalist forces of

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desertification, discriminatory caste politics, and patriarchal religious nationalism” (53). What also makes this chapter noteworthy is its emphasis on cinematic strategies of representing the plights of the poor Hindu Dalit woman Champa and her child. As the film projects their affective attachments with the bioregion of the Thar desert through an aural and visual excess, it challenges the nationalist exclusionary lens of India’s and Pakistan’s (in)security acts in which borders appear as arbitrarily drawn “white cement markers” (77). As we turn to the third chapter, “Bengal: Vernacular Landscape,” we enter the world of Sorayya Khan’s novel Noor that reveals the devastating effects of the 1970 floods of Bhola Cyclone and the 1971 genocide in East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). Rahman’s ecofeminist approach towards the analysis of the nonnarrative moments (Noor’s drawings and paintings of Bengal’s landscape) in the novel also underlines West Pakistani state’s atrocities on Bangladeshi women’s vernacular relation to their land. Such an ecocritical reading especially in the sections “Spatial Dreams and Spatial Drawings” (94–102) and “Forgiveness and the Future” (108–111), help us to constellate feminist social and spatial relations, and move away from Othering and the blame game that emerges from narratives of war and nationalism. The “spatial postcolonial ecofeminist lens” of this chapter also enables an understanding of the present-day oppression of women and the resource-rich land of Balochistan at the hands of the Pakistani state (111). In chapter four, titled “Karachi: Pakistani Eco-cosmopolitanism,” a postcolonial ecocritical reading of Usma Azlam Khan’s novel Trespassing enables Rahman to recognize that local and place-based consciousness cannot be equated with a form of nationalism. By perceiving the environment through the marginalized perspectives of human characters such as Salaamat, Dia and Daanish, and nonhuman characters like turtles, seashells, silkworms, land and the sea, the novel provides a critique of Pakistani and American nationalisms, patriarchy and global economy (116). Critical of the International Monetary Fund that continues to stay numb on issues of scarcity of electricity and water in Pakistan (138–139), this chapter posits a particular form of Pakistani ecocosmopolitanism that is rooted in the material realities of its local landscape and implicates the planet globally. In the final chapter, “Displacement: Animalization,” Rahman examines the complexities of deterritorialization that emerge from nationalist forms of violence in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows. By building on Peter Massey’s concept of “throwntogetherness” (142), the chapter considers the multiple ways in which the protagonist Hiroko Tanaka attaches herself and negotiates with the spaces she occupies. The trope of animalization also provides Rahman the framework to critique Islamophobia, racism, nationalist violence and contemplate the dilemma of posthumanism or the issue of how, as humans, we may think through

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animals and birds (146). She further claims that theorizing about animalization and migration together will fill in the gaps between postcolonial and ecocritical theories (153), and more importantly, imaginative literature can act as “a catalyst for social action and environmental advocacy” (166). The conclusion of the book wraps up the discussions on the ongoing effects of climate change. It calls for a decentralization of the notion of nation in postcolonial theories of belonging to focalize the material realities and changes in environmental conditions. It reveals that while “fast violence” is often reported in the media, the slow violence of human-induced environmental degradation and climate change remains disregarded (171). Rahman also emphasizes that a place-based sense of belonging must move away from the West-centric ideas of wilderness and deep ecology. This is necessary to take into consideration the particularities of the South Asian landscape and the global social inequalities generated through capitalist exploitation of resources. Most importantly, she highlights the role of Pakistani feminist activists, feminist academics and fiction in coalescing, advocating and ensuring environmental and social justice across borders (173). Having highlighted some of the strengths of Rahman’s book, I have some reservations concerning its epistemological standpoint on various discourses. Any ecological inquiry today must investigate the conceptual frameworks within which the categories of “human” and “nonhuman” or “more-than-human” are produced. What also needs equal attention is the ideological imperative through which our environmental practices are rationalized. In such a scenario, who has the power to define, represent and speak for the “more-than-human” or the “nonhuman”? And what are the implications when Rahman titles one of the sections in the book as “Human and NonHuman Others” (120)? According to Maxine SheetsJohnstone, “the fundamental binary opposition that categorically separates humans and nonhumans and that progressively orders much of Western human thought” is “not only a suspect to begin with, but the axiological schemes that inform them are equally so.”1 As ecocritics incautiously use the flawed binarism of humans and nonhumans or more-than-human, what needs urgent attention is the centrism of “human” within it. More crucially, in a postcolonial context where a sense of planetarity is repeatedly called for, we also need to reflect on the ecological and affective implications of placing words such as “Others” next to “NonHuman.” Rahman’s unclear distinction between “fiction” and “narrative” predicated on “linear logics of cause and effect,” and the unwavering faith in the capacity

1 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “Human Versus Nonhuman: Binary Opposition As an Ordering Principle of Western Human Thought,” Between the Species 12.1 (1996): 57–63.

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of fiction to bring about an ecological drift in our imagination (95, 98, 173), underlines some of the anxieties concerning the need and impact of her nonfiction critical prose. After all, what are the ways in which human cultures may responsibly approach diverse living organisms and non-biotic resources? Who determines what humans may do or not do to the environment? How do we determine this and under what conditions? Whatever the ideological ambiance within which literary and cinematic representations take place, it is alwaysalready implicated in the environment, questions of the Self and associated power politics. More generally, what novels and films (whether fiction or not) can do, perhaps, is struggle to trace the invisibilized politics and rationalities of our anthropocentrism even within the limitations of the respective medium. They may also generate powerful insights by foregrounding the non-anthropocentric perspectives emerging from diverse living organisms and non-biotic resources. Although Rahman’s book offers useful tools to examine such literary and cinematic fictions, like most ecocritical works, it only glances over the practicable ways in which ecology, literature, cinema and criticism may operate. For instance, the differences between the ecological responsibilities of filmmaking and novel-writing remain neglected domains and so do their distribution and reception in the material landscapes in which they are embedded. These are significant but few drawbacks of the book which otherwise is an applaudable effort, and a useful scholarly reference for those wanting to engage with alternative imaginaries of the place called Pakistan. Jayana Jain

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Amy Cook. Shakespearean Futures: Casting the Bodies of Tomorrow on Shakespeare’s Stages Today. Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2020. 84 pp. ISBN: 9781108749558, GBP 15.00 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-017

Amy Cook’s Shakespearean Futures argues that contemporary productions of Shakespeare “are using casting to tell the future” (2). Through the bodies of actors that they cast, directors not only interpret Shakespeare’s stories anew. Casting allows us to imagine new stories that destabilize culturally given ideas of race / ethnicity, gender, and (dis)ability, and changes the way in which we see bodies in and outside the theater: “In the bodies – and no bodies – selected to tell our stories, we can imagine a different future” (62). The premise is simple: in the theater, bodies tell stories – and which bodies do the telling has and will always determine how we understand not only the stories, but our own and others’ bodies and identities. In insightful and differentiated analyses of innovative Shakespeare productions from the past years, Cook presents and comments upon a large spectrum of possibilities for and effects of casting Shakespeare’s plays today. Cook’s essayistic volume presents itself as “a record of performances from the last three or four years with particular attention to the bodies of the actors on stage” (16). After exposing her notion of casting as a process building on and against expectations for characters such as Shakespeare’s, Cook explains the fundamental precondition of casting: bodies that are present enact absent characters’ stories. The distinction between character and actor(’s body) allows for a play of similarity and difference that awards possibilities for reflection on the expectations one had, as a spectator, for the body that embodies this character and lives their story. Cook rightly establishes that casting – and especially “counter casting”– “is always political” (13). What political gesture it makes, however, is not so easily determined. In the first section of Shakespearean Futures, Cook looks at race, gender and (dis)ability in contemporary productions of diverse plays by Shakespeare, zooming in on casting choices and effects that particularly illuminate the political potential of the actor-character-ambivalence that comes into effect in performance. In the second section, the author switches to a comparative perspective on five productions of King Lear witnessed between 2017 and 2020, looking at how the bodies on stage shed light on what it means to hold power – a central issue that structures debates and policies around inequalities outside the theater, too. She thereby provides a second look at the categories developed earlier with the added complexity of comparing the way in which the casting of bodies

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of different gender, color, and (dis)ability interacts with the central concepts and overarching story of one play in particular. In the final section, Cook expands the gaze towards more general theses on “productions that invite us to reimagine what the self is – where it begins and ends – through casting,” especially focusing on the way in which these productions “are providing us with opportunities to develop interpretive protocols that think about the story, the ecosystem, rather than the individual” (52). Amy Cook intriguingly dissects the effects produced by casting by reversing the usual gaze on the question of how character is built. While a perspective that theorizes the way in which actors’ bodies are made to signify and ‘represent’ characters naturally focuses on the impact that casting has on new readings of well-known characters, Cook also analyses the effect that casting has on the way we read the actors’ bodies themselves. She focuses on the way the actors’ bodies and the spectators’ bodies are readable in the light of the story, uncovering a new potential of the theater experience for understanding the way in which processes structurally akin to casting operate in the world outside the theater. In addition to analyzing a large spectrum of productions, Cook provides an overview over the wealth of recent and challenging critical positions on gendered bodies, bodies of color and (dis)abled bodies on stage. Especially impressive is her capacity to integrate the concepts and political potentials of Shakespeare’s plays, the directorial intention governing casting, its aesthetic effect and the role of the spectator in performance with the political field outside the theater performance itself. She sheds light on the way in which theater critics participate in and fuel the debate around casting as political gesture, and uncovers the connection between casting, the institutional context of theater, and struggles of gendered bodies, bodies of color and (dis)abled bodies for visibility and agency in society at large. She convincingly argues, for example, that in Teresa Rebeck’s Bernhardt/Hamlet (2018), casting Janet McTeer, an unusually tall actress in her late fifties, as Bernhardt/Hamlet does more than reimagine our idea of Hamlet: “The play is not about her Hamlet but about her taking on a part not meant for her and demonstrating that she deserves to be there, even if she’s hated for it” (34). Similarly, she astutely observes that in Michelle Terry’s inaugural production of Hamlet (2018) opening her first season as artistic director of the Globe Theater, the bold political move “wasn’t that she was Hamlet but that she did the casting” (32). Cook is a keen observer of those political implications that reach beyond questions of character or the playtext and into the history of theater as an institution within society: By casting herself as Hamlet, she was casting herself as the inheritor not of Rice but of Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, Lawrence Olivier, Henry Irving, Richard Burbage. She may not be the first female to play Hamlet, but she’s the first female Artistic Director to play Hamlet. (33)

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While Cook places the casting choices within their institutional and historical context, she remains equally aware of those complex interactions that occur between an actor’s body and the character as well as the story that they are embedded in. Cook shows that the success of a political gesture made through casting can never rely on the body itself, but that it is in relation to the character and vice versa that the gesture fails or succeed. This allows for the debunking of absolutist claims and seemingly easy solutions, such as the idea of a casting blind to gender, race or ability. Cook does so as decidedly – “The old saw about the ‘best actor for the job’ simply will not do” (14) – as convincingly: “sure, actors can play anyone, but the spectators will see the actors’ bodies as the characters’ bodies” (18). She thereby lends current debates around identity politics the sharpened gaze of a literary and theater scholar that acknowledges the inherent ambivalence of casting and the multiplicity of possible relationships between actor and character and between theater and world. However, the informed and subtle analysis and the intriguing read that is Shakespearean Futures still leaves the reader wanting more with regards to the theoretical framework supporting Cook’s analyses of concrete productions, not only in the name of academic rigor, but because the argument would benefit from it. This is for instance the case for the title’s central claim: Casting the Bodies of Tomorrow on Shakespeare’s Stages Today drafts a historical connection that is interestingly not oriented backward – as a book on Shakespeare’s theater might lead to expect – but forward. What is most compelling about Cook’s analysis, is the variety of ways in which she discovers Shakespeare’s plays to speak to our present through the directors and actors that perform it today. While Cook’s analyses show that the conditions of production and reception of theater make it particularly apt for speaking to the present, one remains wondering how the plays written by Shakespeare might invite politics through casting in particular, or how the process of repeating plays and representing characters deeply anchored in the cultural and collective memory with a difference facilitates the particular political impact of casting Shakespeare. Is it not Shakespeare’s past concern with identity and the mind-body dualism that makes his plays prone to future-telling through the casting of diverse bodies on stage? Similarly, casting becomes a metaphor throughout the book that sometimes seems strained. The term ‘casting’ is made to serve all kinds of purposes in the argument: It stands in for processes of character-building in the theater and for analogous processes of cognition and categorization outside the theater. It is also made to signify the involvement of spectators in the theater experience. This somewhat obliterates the claim that Cook, I believe, successfully defends: that casting, as one part of the creative process through which a production of a Shakespeare play comes into being, is a decisive political act, “a way to blur or

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transform categories” (42). In attempting to use the term metaphorically, to describe effects and processes constitutive of the theater performance in general, Cook reduces its operational value for understanding the phenomenon of casting at stake, while making casting carry the entire conceptual weight of all that occurs in the theater performance, the involvement of the spectators among others, which has been extensively analyzed in performance studies over the past decades. That spectators are required to cast the title role in Pan Pan’s The Rehearsal: Playing the Dane (2010) need hardly be described anew as “we have been cast” (54). When Cook does provide a theoretical and methodical framework for her readings, this somehow weakens what they achieve all on their own. The notions of embodied and distributed cognition that make neuroscientific insights productive for understanding the processes involved in aesthetic experience, as Cook herself has developed them in Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting (2018) and in a volume edited with Rhonda Blair, Theater, Performance and Cognition (2016), are an unnecessary framing of Cook’s powerful readings and determined political claims that exposes theoretical shortcomings of her argument, to boot. They seem less productive here than the work that has been done in the past decades in theater and performance studies, gender studies, and phenomenology. Cook’s argument that “[c]asting is how we rehearse change” would have benefitted from the work of scholars that have already attempted to understand the process of identity constitution as performative, and therefore the political potential of theater to change through repetition. Judith Butler’s theory of performative gender constitution, whose absence is felt especially in the passages on gender on stage, comes to mind among many others. But Shakespearean Futures is no work on the theory of the theater performance or the politics of theater in general. It is a unique example of a scholarly informed reflection about casting that is useful to practitioners asking themselves how to cast Shakespeare’s plays today. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, it is a rare example of manifestly politically engaged criticism, reaching outside of academia into societal and artistic processes that have often been the object of a more distanced critical gaze. The title of Cook’s book, I believe, functions best if read as a manifesto. Describing the tentative and experimental ways in which theater directors grapple not so much with future, but rather with present debates that rightfully benefit from much public attention, Cook’s text invites, even demands from artists to use the political power within the reach of directors, theater makers, and ultimately: spectators, to understand past failings, take stock of present endeavors, and imagine future narratives. In implicitly formulating this request, Cook also opens up a more politically engaged style and stance for criticism at large. To the rigorous theorizing of the powerful systemic and individual components

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that make up categories such as gender, race, age, class and many more, we might now add a determined political attitude that openly structures our reading of literature and theater. This reading also includes reaching beyond the the aesthetic experience towards the institutions that produce them, and to defend future ways of distributing power and agency within them. Cook’s Shakespearean Futures leads the way, as she openly admits, for example, to her lack of “patience for and interest in old men causing massive trouble for their kingdoms and then being sad that they were also impacted by their poor choices” (47–48), when talking about conventionally cast productions of King Lear, but also calls out those aspects of Shakespeare’s work that academics and critics have forever ignored in the name of the coherence of his timeless genius: “As many have experienced, playing a female character in Shakespeare often requires justifying silence, or submission, or acceptance of the unacceptable” (27). Why not finally “see what Shakespeare and Fletcher depict as the moral and intellectual weakness of women as the misogyny it is” (37), so that artists can work towards a rewriting of Shakespeare in performance without either idolizing or condemning his work entirely? By dissecting and discussing productions that she sums up as “theater I can use” (55), Cook asks us, as academics, directors, actors, spectators alike, to use theater the way it was used by Shakespeare, too: to rehearse change. Elisa Leroy

Independent scholar and dramaturg

Marisa Palacios Knox. Victorian Women and Wayward Reading: Crises of Identification. Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2021. 233 pp. ISBN: 9781108496162, GBP 75.00 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-018

Marisa Palacios Knox’s monograph promises two things already in its title: to sketch models of wayward, that is subversive, practices of reading among Victorian women, and link these to crises of identification. This is a multifaceted agenda, but one that the study for the most part approaches in a convincing manner, drawing on an impressive array of material from the period. Such an eclectic scope also has its drawbacks, however, when occasionally the respective chapters appear like different contributions to an edited collection rather than part of a continuous argument. Most generally put, the monograph is part of debates that have taken shape in the last thirty years about the evolution and history of reading (practices), for instance Kate Flint’s The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (1994), Liza Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006), Rita Felski’s Uses of Literature (2011) and Dorothee Birke’s Writing the Reader: Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel (2016). The latter two Palacios Knox does not reference at all, however, a major research gap in this study. Especially the connection to Birke’s study, which is precisely concerned with the history of shifting views of the value of novel reading, an investigation of how novels themselves participate in this development and an assessment of the female (quixotic) reader whose reading behavior is psychologized – Birke notably also uses Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864) as the focal point in one of her chapters – is an unfortunate missing link. One must concede, though, that Palacios Knox’s understanding of ‘reading’ is a rather broad one and has many semantic overlaps with ‘identification’ which also enables her to draw on such a diverse range of material and which makes her study such a positively surprising and varied read. The overarching thesis of her study is that both fictional and real Victorian women readers exercised identification as a flexible capacity instead of an emotional compulsion. The crisis narrative of female quixotism developed in concert with increasing accounts of women’s conscious and deliberate identification with literature: what I call ‘wayward’ reading. (3)

Wayward reading is a practice placed on a spectrum that includes intra- and extratextual practices and both literal and figurative readings of character such as actresses and mediums (this latter part indicates the author’s flexible understanding of ‘reading’ – there are strong overlaps to processes of perception and

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recognition more generally). To use the term ‘wayward’ is an intriguing choice: the term connotes both unaccountability and obstinacy, and for the Victorian women partaking in this practice could enable them to “unite [. . .] in imaginative affiliations that they translated into creative, political, and professional action” (4). The choice of this term is also inspired by Sara Ahmed’s feminist study on “willful subjects” – Palacios Knox makes the case that the historical female readers that form the object of her study in their waywardness are taking approaches that we find in modern critics and scholars. Put simply, an approach that is against the grain, that is unashamed of the personal and that, ultimately, aims at achieving a personally empowering gain and construct herself. What is also innovative about the study is that it diverges from an analysis of the prevalent Victorian discourse of anxiety about female identification and turns to accounts of wayward reading (although it seems necessary to include quotation marks around the term ‘reading,’ as not all practices subsumed under this term are literally those of reading) that have been neglected up to this point in the relevant scholarship. The second central term is ‘identification’ – a term with a “bad reputation” (6) as it breaches disciplines. The author understands it as a “state of being or feeling oneself to be closely associated with a person, group, etc., in emotions, interests, or actions” (6) – a definition that is reminiscent of Felski’s recent attempt to suggest ‘attunement’ as a form of identification in her study Hooked: Art and Attachment (2020). Palacios Knox’s method to fine-tune the term reflects the presence of this octopus of terminological overlaps when she turns to an article on the Lord of the Rings film series (2001–2003) by communication and media studies scholar Martin Barker for a definition of identification, or to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605). Linked to this, there is the somewhat erratic (wayward?) tendency to cite scholars from other neighboring disciplines out of context, for instance, when referring to theater scholar Elin Diamond as calling identification in modern cultural criticism “narcissistic” (13). The media scholar Jonathan Cohen’s definition of identification as “internalizing a point of view” (15) rather than projecting one’s own view onto someone or something else forms the basis for Victorian Women and Wayward Reading. Just like with the term ‘wayward,’ it is the author’s agenda to dust off the layers of bad reputation and mis-appreciation from the term ‘identification,’ the negative connotation having been brought about in the twentieth century particularly by the Affective Fallacy repudiated by the New Critics. Both of these acts are, crucially, voluntary, intentional and directed at self-discovery and construction of the female readers’ selves. The study turns to both literary depictions of wayward reading in selected novels by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charlotte Brontë,

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George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, George Gissing, and others, as well as to responses from actual readers. The literary texts are contextualized in a thorough, lively and poignant manner with contemporary reviews from periodicals, autobiographical material and other accounts from the time from leading critics. The first chapter uses Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as a focal text to argue that masculine literary identification – that is, authors adopting conventionally masculine subject matters or styles – did not necessarily enhance female empathy with these male perspectives and by consequence with the men in their real lives but actually was picked up by female readers as an incentive to transcend their own societal limitations. In a skillful instance of contextualization, a connection is made to John Ruskin’s “Of Queen’s Gardens” lecture (1864) via a quote that accentuates the value of identification as a means for women to not only read texts but also bring about collaborations with male authors as it is deeply necessary that she should be taught to enter with her whole personality into the history she reads; to picture the passages of it vitally in her own bright imagination; to apprehend, with her fine instincts, the pathetic circumstances and dramatic relations, which the historian too often only eclipses by his reasoning, and disconnects by his arrangement. (33 [emphasis mine])

Aurora Leigh therefore also continues the line of emancipatory novels such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Madame de Staël’s Corinne (1807) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853). In addition, the second section of the chapter shows how such “excursions into imaginary masculinity” (25) fortified actual female readers in their plans to become educators or political activists. In the final section, the chapter turns to how Aurora Leigh in its portrayal of the protagonist’s decision to marry presents this as an active choice that facilitates and shapes her poetic self. While the argument is as such convincing, the connection to the role of marriage laws of the time comes relatively late. The discussion, and especially the link to the role of smell and fragrance – and Aurora’s cousin’s Romney’s wish to have her ‘infuse’ his life, which can be read as a trespassing of material boundaries – is very informative, however. The second chapter turns to the genre of sensation fiction and Braddon’s novels Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863). The chapter aims to offer a new take on the genre, one that differs from the prevalent standpoint in Victorian studies that sees sensation fiction as a passive genre that was primarily aimed at somatic and nerve-wracking readerly identification. Conversely, the chapter argues that sensation fiction with its flexibility and openness precisely makes total identification impossible and demands a great amount of readerly labor in that readers have to choose between multiple perspectives. While the difference between the popular viewpoint on sensation fiction and

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the proposed new one offered here is not as stark as the author would have it, her take is certainly a fresh addition and especially the remark that the ‘threat’ of sensation fiction consisted in offering women readers the conscious decision of where “to devote their imaginative interest” (53) is to the point. The author illustrates her claim by assessing how Braddon in her novels triggered continual shifts of the readerly perspective by creating a narrative that was at its core evasive. The following passage may be among the wittiest ones in the study: Even when Braddon explicitly places her reader in the text, she leaves room for infinite points of departure. The opening sentences of Lady Audley’s Secret invoke the reader in the second person: ‘It lay down in a hollow, rich with fine old timber and luxuriant pastures; and you came upon it through an avenue of limes, bordered on either side by meadows, over the high hedges of which the cattle looked inquisitively at you as you passed, wondering, perhaps, what you wanted; for there was no thoroughfare, and unless you were going to the Court you had no business there at all’ (1). The audacious vagueness of using a definite pronoun without an antecedent as the very first word of the novel, along with the hesitancy of ‘perhaps,’ implies that while the narrator is inviting the reader into the setting, the reader’s reaction is independent and not entirely predictable. Even the cattle are wont to speculate. (59–60)

This analysis is original, fresh and suggests that sensation fiction, through the lens of identification, may also be understood as ‘speculative’ fiction. The third chapter looks at literary depictions of actresses in Brontë’s Villette (1853), Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and Collins’s No Name (1862). It conceptualizes the performances of actresses as ‘wayward readings’ of dramatic texts alongside writings of actual Victorian actresses as exercises of “imaginative mobility” (80) and “wayward identification” (80) with the roles portrayed. One gets the impression that the use of the term ‘reading’ here indeed breaches its scope and the turn to dramatic performance could have been better fleshed out in a separate study more clearly embedded in the appropriate terminology from a phenomenologically informed performance studies. Similarly, the chapter’s focus on the figure of the medium and the depiction of the female medium as being neither passive nor active – in the spiritualist memoir There Is No Death (1891) by Marryat, The Lifted Veil (1859) by Eliot and Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker – but instead a figure in itself for (reading) strategies that protect oneself from exterior influences is innovative but also warrants a study of its own. The fifth chapter provides a perhaps more direct link to the general agenda of the study in discussing how, at the turn of the century, in the New Women novels as well as George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) and The Odd Women (1893) a link was constructed between the increase in women’s access to education and professionalization and their inability to identify, which constituted a crisis of

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identification. In turn, women who did identify could be portrayed as acting in an irrational manner and link this deficit with femininity itself. The concluding chapter is a small surprise in a study that has been published as part of a series dedicated to ‘nineteenth-century literature and culture’ – but a welcome surprise. It has been motivated by the V21 Collective’s manifesto to be not only historicist but also presentist and by applying the insights gained about Victorian wayward reading onto current pedagogical praxis it is an eye-opener. It uses insights from pedagogy and pedagogical psychology in order to shed light on how readers today identify as readers and, with what, how teachers have to pay particular attention to inherited gendered responses to literary identification among their students. Victorian Women and Wayward Reading has a lot to offer: each chapter is richly contextualized and informed by several innovative takes on staple works belonging to the Victorian canon. While some links are missing – wayward reading could have been embedded into the context on recent discourses on ‘herstory’ and a more poignant connection to concepts from reader-response theory might have streamlined the argument here and there – the book will be of great interest to scholars of Victorian literature and culture, English studies more generally and also university teachers of English who are interested in encouraging a more inclusive method of wayward reading in their students. At the same time, the study opens up several areas for future research, for instance, on the performative turn in Victorian fiction. Heidi Lucja Liedke

University of Koblenz-Landau

List of Contributors Anna Auguscik is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Oldenburg, where she completed her PhD thesis on the role of literary prizes and book reviewing for the literary marketplace (Prizing Debate, transcript 2017). As a Fiction Meets Science (FMS) research fellow and a junior fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Studies, she has been working on the media presence of the science novel and on scientific expedition narratives in contemporary historical fiction. The author is grateful to the Volkswagen Foundation for its generous support of her work on this essay as part of the Fiction Meets Science (FMS) project. Birte Christ is Assistant Professor of American Literary Cultural and Media Studies at JustusLiebig-University Giessen. Within the field of Law and Literature, she is particularly interested in prison studies and the death penalty as well as in methodological questions and the expansion of the field, for instance through the inclusion of poetry. With Stefanie Mueller, Birte has published a special issue on “Poetry and Law” of the journal Amerikastudien/ American Studies; with Éve Morisi, she has edited a collection entitled Death Sentences, focusing on literature about the death penalty in a comparative perspective. Currently, Birte is preparing a book manuscript on representations of capital punishment – Imagining the American Death Penalty: Representational and Racial Politics from the Antebellum Era to the Twenty-First Century – and is working on a new project in prison studies, tentatively entitled Solitary Confinement: A Brief Cultural History of the Present. Susanne Gruss is visiting professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Passau and senior lecturer in English literature and culture at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. She has published a monograph on contemporary feminist writing, co-edited a collection of essays and a special issue on neo-Victorianism, and written articles on film adaptation, canonisation, contemporary literature, the ‘Jacobean Gothic,’ early modern piracy, and law and literature. Her research interests include the intersection of legal discourses and literature, early modern drama and popular culture, gender studies, film and media studies, contemporary literature, and the gothic. She is currently working on projects on the literary, cultural, and historical narratives of piracy in the early modern period and the culture of collaboration in early modern English theatre, and has just finished her second book project, entitled The Laws of Excess: Law, Literature, and the Laws of Genre in Early Modern Drama. Sarah Heinz is Professor for English and Anglophone Literatures at the University of Vienna, Austria. She has taught English Literatures and Cultures at the Universities of Passau, Mannheim, and at Humboldt-University, Berlin, and she was a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD for a study on postmodern identities in A.S. Byatt’s novels and did her habilitation on critical whiteness studies and intersectionality in Irish literature and film. She has expanded this interest in critical whiteness studies in a series of articles dealing with the nexus of white subjectivity and ideals of home and homemaking practices, e.g., in British, Nigerian, and Australian writing, as well as in cultural production like property TV. Further research interests include postcolonial theory, subject philosophy, and contemporary drama.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-019

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List of Contributors

Stephan Karschay is Associate Professor (Juniorprofessor) of British Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He has previously taught as Lecturer in English at the University of Passau. His main research interests are the relationship between literature and science in the nineteenth century, the late-Victorian and modernist novel, as well as Gothic and detective fiction. He is the author of Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and his current book project examines ‘Scandals, Censorship and the Visual Imagination in Britain from 1740 to 1960.’ Stefanie Mueller is a lecturer (Privatdozentin) at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She has been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, University of California at Irvine, and Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include Law and Literature, AfricanAmerican Literature and Culture, Sociology of Literature, Economic Humanities, Popular Culture and Film, and the Environmental Humanities. She is the author of The Presence of the Past in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Winter Verlag, 2013) and has co-edited special issues on Poetry Imagines the Law (2017) and Financial Times: Competing Temporalities in the Age of Financial Capitalism (2018), as well as a collection of essays on contemporary Westerns (Violence and Open Spaces, 2017). Her second book, The Corporation in the NineteenthCentury American Imagination, is in preparation. Corinna Norrick-Rühl joined the English Department of the University of Münster, Germany in April 2020, after having been assistant professor of Book Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany since 2016. At the Chair of Book Studies, her research and teaching focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century book culture and publishing history, with a special interest in popular formats. As of June 2020, she formally joined the DFG-funded collaborative research center SFB 1385 Law and Literature at the University of Münster. Her most recent publications are Book Clubs and Book Commerce (Cambridge UP, 2019), The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities (co-edited with Tim Lanzendörfer, Palgrave, 2020) and the textbook Internationaler Buchmarkt (Bramann, 2019). She is Director of Publications for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) and serves on the editorial boards of Quaerendo (Brill), Publishing Research Quarterly (Springer) and International Journal of Young Adult Literature (Fincham). Camilo Peralta Camilo Peralta is an Instructor of English at Fort Hays State University, Kansas, and a former Wilbur Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. He has been teaching ESL, composition, and literature for over a decade in such far-flung reaches of Middle-earth as Spain, China, and the United States. He now lives in rural Kansas with his wife, Li, and Cho the Cat. When not grading essays or dodging tornadoes, he prefers to read and write about authors related to the Catholic literary revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He hopes to be able to defend his dissertation on Kirk’s ghostly tales and novels in the Fall of 2021. Recent and forthcoming publications include an article on religious text and subtext in Animal Farm and a criticism of the postmodern values evident in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Franziska Quabeck is a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre 1385 ‘Law and Literature’ at the University of Münster, Germany. She teaches English and Anglophone Literatures at the University of Münster and her current research focus is in English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her first book, Just and Unjust Wars in

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Shakespeare, was published in the Law and Literature-Series at de Gruyter in 2013 and her second book, Oddities – Kazuo Ishiguro’s Narrators is in preparation for publication. Her most recent book, The Lawyer in Dickens, is scheduled to appear with de Gruyter later in 2021. Her other publications include a number of articles on Shakespeare, contemporary Anglophone literature and Charles Dickens. Markus Schmitz is a German comparativist based in Beirut. Trained in Middle Eastern Studies and English Literary and Cultural Studies he is senior lecturer and academic consultant at Lebanese University’s Doctoral School of Literature, Humanities, and Social Sciences. His research revolves around (Anglophone) Arab Representations, Relational Diasporic Formations, Theories of Cross-Cultural Comparison, Decolonial Arts, Forced Migration and Border Regimes. Publications include Kulturkritik ohne Zentrum: Edward W. Said und die Kontrapunkte kritischer Dekolonisation (2008) and Transgressive Truths and Flattering Lies: The Poetics and Ethics of Anglophone Arab Representations (2020). His current project is a book-length study with the working title “Escape to Europe: Comparative Refugee Imaginaries.” Marlena Tronicke is Assistant Professor of British Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Münster, Germany. Her areas of research and teaching include early modern as well as contemporary British drama, (neo-)Victorian literature and culture, as well as gender and adaptation studies. Her first monograph, Shakespeare’s Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter, was published by Routledge in 2018, and she is currently working on a second book project on negotiations of empire and domesticity in neo-Victorian fiction. She is co-editor of Writing Brexit: Colonial Remains (special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2020), Queering Neo-Victorianism Beyond Sarah Waters (special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, 2020), and Black Neo-Victoriana (Brill|Rodopi, forthcoming 2021). Dong Yang is a doctoral candidate of comparative literature at the University of Georgia, currently writing his dissertation on the question of affect and vitalism in continental philosophy and global cinema. His research interests include twentieth-century French philosophy, affect theory, and art cinema in general. His other articles and reviews have appeared in The Agonist: A Nietzsche Circle Journal, Rebuilding the Profession (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), Recherche littéraire/Literary Research, Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue canadienne d'études cinématographiques, Early Popular Visual Culture, and Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image.

Index abject 16, 32–33 aestheticism 57 aesthetics 29, 46, 57, 65, 121 affect, affective 15, 16, 22–25, 28, 32, 34 al-adab al-muqawama (resistance literature) 188 Alfred A. Knopf Inc. (publishing company) 35–54, American penal system 115–134 ANT (Actor-Network-Theory) 237, 240, 242–245, 249, 252 (see also Latour, Bruno) Antarctica – Antarctica (Kim Stanley Robinson) 153–155, 158–165, 171–173 – Antarctic fiction 157 – Antarctic Treaty 158–159, 160–161, 163–165 Anthropocene 86, 156, 159, 173, 239, 269–270, 273 Arendt, Hannah 179 Aristotle 201 Ashour, Radwa – Granada 181–185 assemblage 237, 239–242, (see also Deleuze, Gilles) author/authorship 8–9, 10–11, 13, 35–54, 59–61, 260 Bataille, Georges 17, 32–33 Benjamin, Walter 183–184 Bennett, Arnold 63 Beowulf/Beowulf 219–220, 226, 229–230, 232–233 Bildungsroman 57, 214 Biron, Sir Chartres 55–56, 59, 60 (fn), 64 (fn) Black Mediterannean 184–185 Blasim, Hasan 180, 189 – “The Truck to Berlin” 189 Bodkin, Sir Archibald 56 book club rights 52 book studies 35–54 Bourdieu, Pierre 180

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-020

brand 37, 39, 41–42 Brittain, Vera 60 (fn), 63 censorship 42, 55–75 – commercial censorship 38, 53 Chamorro 97–98, 106–112, (see also Santos Perez, Craig) Chancery 6, 198–203, 205 Chettle, Henry – The Tragedy of Hoffman 32 cinematography 235, 247, 249, 253 climate change fiction 153–173 Cockburn, Alexander 59–60 Coke, Edward 17–18, 31 Collins, Wilkie – The Woman in White 7–8 colonialism 79–81, 99–108, 185 – settler colonialism 79–81, 84, 86 common law 15, 17–18, 26–28, 31 – Common Law Court 201 condensation rights (digest rights) 40, 44–46, 52 Confessional Unmasked, The 60 conscience 201–203, 208, 211, 214–215 consciousness 184, 237, 248, 251 consent 139, 141–143 consumer capitalism 244–245 Crichton, Michael 13, 154–156, 170–173 – State of Fear 13, 153–154, 157, 165–171 criminal courts 3 Criminal Law Amendment Act 69 (see also Labouchère Amendment) critical legal studies 16 (fn), 18, 26–27 death penalty 127–128 decadence 57–58, 65–66, 68–75 deconstruction 16, 18, 24–26, 32 Deleuze, Gilles 237, 240–243, 245, 248, 251 (see also assemblage) Derrida, Jacques 15–17, 24, 29–30, 33, 180 Dickens, Charles 3, 5–7, 197–215 (see also Victorian novel) – Bleak House 6, 197–206 – A Christmas Carol 200

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– David Copperfield 14, 197–198, 206–207, 209–215 – Great Expectations 3–5, 199 – Little Dorrit 199, 214 – The Old Curiosity Shop 199, 210 – Oliver Twist 197, 199 – Pickwick Papers 199, 210 Dimock, Wai Chee 175, 181 Douglas, James 56, 57, 64–71

Han, Byung–Chul 245 Hardy, Thomas 4 Haynes, Todd 235–237, 245–253 Heidegger, Martin 238–239 Hersey, John – A Single Pebble 35–54 Hesiod 224–225 heterotopia 120, 124–125, 133 human trafficking as thingification 184

early modern drama 15, 16 (fn), 31–34 ecoterrorism 153, 158, 167 Ellesmere (Lord) 201 Ellis, Havelock 60, 66–67 embodiment 118–119, 132, 197, 204–205, 211, 215 enterprising selves 84, 94 environmental law 158, 165, 172 equity 3–4, 6, 27, 29, 197–215 eucatastrophe 231–233 European Agenda on Migration 178–179 evidentiary/forensic writing 126 expertise – legal expertise 153–154, 158, 169, 172 exploration 79, 89–90, 160–162

identification 118–120, 132–134, 281–285 indigeneity 78–96 – Indigenous presence and resilience 86 – Indigenous relations to land 77–82, 89, 91 – Indigenous sovereignty 77, 85–87, 89

female body 142–143, 150–152 Fielding, Henry 4 flow 122, 124, 126, 129, 237, 240–248, 250–253 Forster, E. M. 60 (fn), 61, 62 (fn) Foucault, Michel 84, 120–121 – technologies of the self 84 Freud, Sigmund 15–16, 20, 22, 30 Frontex 178 genre 17, 26, 29–31, 33 global warming 154–155, 158, 165–167, 169 Goodrich, Peter 15–34 “Governmentality” 84 (fn) Guam 97–114 Günday, Hakan – More 189–190 Hall, Radclyffe – The Well of Loneliness 55–75

James VI and I 15, 23–24 – The Trew Law of Free Monarchies 23–24 James, William 236–237, 251–253 Jameson, Frederic 244 Joynson–Hicks, Sir William 56 jury of matrons 145–147 Kanafani, Ghassan – Men in the Sun 186–189 Kirkwood, Lucy – The Welkin 136, 143–151 knowledge 86, 145, 147, 155, 160, 162–163, 169, 171–173 Krafft-Ebing, Richard Freiherr von 60 Kristeva, Julia 16, 32–33 Kyd, Thomas – The Spanish Tragedy 32 Labouchère Amendment 69 (see also Criminal Law Amendment Act) Lacan, Jacques 15–16, 19–23, 30 land rights 88, 201 Latour, Bruno 237, 240, 242–245, 251 (see also ANT) law of the father /nom/non du père 15–16, 19, 21, 25 Lawrence, D. H. 64, 71 legal fiction 24, 150, 152 Legendre, Pierre 15–17, 19–26, 28–34

Index

lesbianism 61–68, 72–75 (see also same-sex desire) literary value chain 37 Literature and Politics 119 long takes 236, 246, 249–250 Luster, Deborah 117–119 lyric 115–116, 132 Mabo decision 85–88, 90 (see also Wik decision) materiality of literature 128–129 metaphor 101–105, 110–112, 277 – metaphor of incorporation 97, 99, 102, 105–106, 110, 113 Middleton, Thomas – The Revenger’s Tragedy 32–34 migration (migrant experience) 175–195 narrative agency 193 Native Title Acts 87, 90 Nietzsche, Friedrich 235–236 nineteenth-century novel 3, 5, 63 (see also Victorian novel) Obscene Publications Act (Lord Campbell’s Act) 58–59 Olson, Greta 16 (fn), 18, 27, 30–31, 116 Ovid 225 ownership 77–80, 82–86, 89, 110 performativity 9, 137–140, 266, 278 poetics 119, 121, 264–266 poetry (poetic texts) 97–99, 105, 107–114, 115–126 post-structuralism 16 (fn) psychoanalysis 15–26, 27–34 publishing 35–54 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel 37, 38 print run 40 racism 79 Raine, Nina – Consent 136–143, 151–152 reconciliation 85 Regina v. Hicklin 59–60, 66, 70 revenge tragedy 17, 31–34

293

rights sales 39 Rihani, Ameen – The Book of Khalid 190–192 Robinson, Kim Stanley – Antarctica 153, 154–155, 157–173 Sackville-West, Vita 60 (fn) same-sex desire 61–68, 72–75 (see also lesbianism) Santos Perez, Craig 97–102, 105–106, 109–110, 114 (see also Chamorro) – from unincorporated territory 97–105, 106–114 scientific expertise 155, 163 settler Australia 77–79, 82, 86 settler-as-entrepreneur 86 sexism (sexist) 77 Shakespeare, William 15, 16 (fn), 32 – Titus Andronicus 32 slow cinema 236, 246 smart power 245 smuggler represented as a threat 179 spatiality 120, 128–129, 270 spectacular digital effects 249 speech act 138–141 Spenser, Edmund 221, 229–230, 259 Statius 226 Stephen, Fitzjames 6 stuff 236, 251–252 subject-formation 84 subjectivity 16, 21, 23–24, 82, 85–86, 89, 93, 139, 235–237, 241, 244–245, 252–253 symbolic order 15, 16, 21–24 symbolic totality 195 temporality 115–134, 257–258 terra nullius 77, 82–83, 86–87, 94 theatre 135–136 Tolkien, J.R.R. – The Hobbit 219–223, 232 – The Lord of the Rings 220, 224, 232 – The Silmarillion 219–222, 229–231 transgression 15, 17, 21, 24, 32–34 trial 135–136 truth 135–152

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Index

Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich 60 UN-Charter 9 unconscious of the law 17–23, 28–29 U.S.A. 37, 100–114 U.S. Supreme Court 97–98, 100–105, 109, 113 – Insular cases 97–114 Üexkull, Jakob von 239 Victorian novel 3, 5, 63 (see also Dickens, Charles) Vizetelly, Henry 67 voice 118 Voragine, Jacobus de 229 white privilege 77–78, 94 white property 77–92

whiteness 77–84, 87–88, 93 Wik decision 87 (see also Mabo decision) Wilde, Oscar 55, 57–58, 64–66, 69–73, 122 – The Picture of Dorian Gray 69–70, 72–73 Winch, Tara June 9, 88, 90–91 – The Yield 9, 77, 79, 85, 89 Wiradjuri – Wiradjuri language 89, 91, 95–96 – Wiradjuri people 88, 90–91, 95 Woolf, Leonard 60 (fn), 62–63 Woolf, Virgina 55–57 – A Room of One’s Own 55–56, 60 (fn), 62, 63 – Orlando 56–57 Wright, C. D. – One Big Self 115–134