Dark Mirror: The Sense of Injustice in Modern European and American Literature

609 Pages·1999·1.42 MB·English

by  Richard Sterne

Dark Mirror : The Sense of Injustice in Modern
title:
European and American Literature
author: Sterne, Richard Clark.
publisher: Fordham University Press
isbn10 | asin: 0823215105
print isbn13: 9780823215102
ebook isbn13: 9780585146980
language: English
Fiction--19th century--History and criticism,
Fiction--20th century--History and criticism,
subject
Trials in literature, Justice in literature, Natural
law in literature.
publication date: 1994
lcc: PN3499.S73 1994eb
ddc: 808.3
Fiction--19th century--History and criticism,
Fiction--20th century--History and criticism,
subject:
Trials in literature, Justice in literature, Natural
law in literature.
Page iii
Dark Mirror
The Sense of Injustice in Modern European and American
Literature
by
RICHARD CLARK STERNE
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
1994
Page iv
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© copyright 1994 Fordham University Press
All rights reserved.
LC 93-17963
ISBN 0-8232-1509-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 0-8232-1510-5 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Sterne, Richard Clark, 1927
Dark mirror: the Sense of injustice in modern European
amd American literature/by Richard Clark Sterne.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8232-1509-1: $32.00
ISBN 0-8232-1510-5 (pbk.): $18.00
1. Fiction 9th century History and criticism.
2. Fiction 20th century History and criticism.
3. Trials in literature.
4. Justice in literature.
5. Natural law in literature. I. Title.
PN3499.S73 1994 93-17963
809.3'9355 dc20 CIP
PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK
WAS AIDED BY A GRANT FROM
THE HENRY AND IDA WISSMANN FUND
Printed in the United States of America
Page v
For my family
Page vii
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
1. Idealistic vs. Realistic Conceptions of Justice from 1
Homer to George Eliot
2. The Sense of Injustice in Modern Religious Fiction 67
Tolstoy, "God Sees the Truth, But Waits" Resurrection
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux
3. The Sense of Injustice in Modern Social Fiction 108
Martin du Gard, Jean Barois
Dreiser, An American Tragedy
Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Koestler, Darkness at Noon
4. The Sense of Injustice in Modern Absurdist Fiction 168
Melville, Billy Budd
Kafka, The Trial
Camus, The Outsider
Kundera, The Joke
5. A "Dissenting" Perspective 218
Cozzens, The Just and the Unjust
Snow, The Sleep of Reason
Conclusion: Toward a Renewal of the Dialogue 243
Betti, The Landslide
Wright, Native Son
Glaspell, "A Jury of Her Peers"
Page viii
Porter, "Noon Wine"
Anouilh, Antigone
Muschg, "Reparations or Making Good"
Forster, A Passage to India
Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
List of Works Cited 263
Index 273
Page ix
Acknowledgments
It is a pleasure to thank friends and colleagues who in various ways have
helped me in my thinking about the theme of injustice in literature, and in the
creation of this book. The late Wylie Sypher, mentor and friend, whose
scholarly accomplishments lent particular weight to his judgments,
commented on a segment of Dark Mirror in terms that have buoyed me
through difficult years. The encouragement of David Friedrichs and David
Papke, former editor and current editor, respectively, of Legal Studies Forum,
to which I contributed two articles (in 1988 and 1992) that derived from my
work on Dark Mirror, has been invaluable. David Papke's criticism of a
portion of the book manuscript was astute; and though I do not refer in my
text to his Framing the Criminal: Crime, Cultural Work, and the Loss of
Critical Perspective, 1830-1900 (1987), I have learned much from it.
My kind, polymath cousin, Jonathan Clark, made suggestions about the
Introduction that led me to improve it. Myron Sharaf, who read several
portions of the manuscript, combined expressions of respect for what I was
doing with persistent houndings to do it better: may he be pleased at least
relatively with the final text.
I appreciate very much the written commentary that Charles L'Homme, my
late colleague in the Simmons College English Department, made several
years ago on an extensive portion of the manuscript. I am also grateful to Beth
Kowaleski-Wallace, formerly of the Simmons English Department, for an
excellent idea concerning the Introduction; to several members of the
Department who raised questions about it and made criticisms of that segment
of the work; to Artemis Kirk, Director of the Simmons College Libraries, for
providing me with a review of W. Wolfgang Holdheim's Der Justizirrtum als
literarische Problematik: Vergleichende Analyse eines erzählerischen Themas
(1969); and to Jenifer Burckett-Picker of the Simmons College Department of
Page x
Foreign Languages and Literatures for aid in transliterating a title from the
Russian.
I must also acknowledge my debt to the anonymous reviewer for Fordham
University Press whose helpful observations on the natural law tradition
affected my shaping of the final chapter.
Two books on literature and the law, though not cited in the text, had an
impact on my thinking as I revised the manuscript in recent years: Richard
Weisberg's The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern
Fiction (1984) and Brook Thomas's Cross-Examinations of Law and
Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (1987). Some time
before Richard Weisberg's book was published, he kindly sent me a copy of
his Rutgers Law Review (Winter, 1976) article, "Comparative Law in
Comparative Literature: The Figure of the `Examining Magistrate' in
Dostoevski and Camus."
As a seminar leader in the Humanities and the Professions Program since its
founding (1981) at Brandeis University by Sanford M. Lottor and Saul
Touster, who have remained its co-directors, I have had the opportunity to
discuss with state and federal judiciary members, and with law school
professors, several of the texts that I treat in Dark Mirror. I hope that my
listening to the observations of men and women engaged in the day-to-day
procedures of the law has helped to save this work from too abstract an
approach to its subject.
Finally, thanks to friends not named here, and to my family especially my
wife, Ruth; my sons, Larry and Dan; my father, Eugene Sterne; and my aunt
Helen Clark, for help and sustenance all along the way.
Page xi
Introduction
This book was born of my concerned realization that modern European and
American literature, which almost always treats criminal trials negatively,
rarely points to clear ethical criteria of justice. Believing that imaginative
literature reveals, in a complex way, cultural attitudes prevalent at the time of
its creation, I revisited Western fiction from Homer to the late Victorians in
order to determine to what extent perspectives on trial justice during that long
era agree with or differ from those of the modern age. I did not find many
trials in ancient literature after the Eumenides, or during the medieval period
until the late Middle Ages, when trial by jury had at last superseded the oath
and ordeal as a means of "proving" innocence and guilt. 1 Still relatively rare
in literature before the dramas of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, trials do not occur frequently until the nineteenth century, when
they begin to be important in many novels and tales. Conclusions that I
hesitated to draw solely from trial fictions written during the pre-modern era
appeared to be valid, however, when based in addition on the extensive
treatment of social justice in pre-modern imaginative and discursive literature.
For what emerged from my reading was a sense of a continuing battle a battle
which, significantly, has no counterpart in the imaginative literature of the
period since about 1880 between evolving conceptions of ethical natural law
and variations on the theme of Thrasymachus's definition of justice, in the
Republic, as "the interest of the stronger."2
Aristotle, articulating the idea of the "law of nature" as "a natural justice . . .
that is binding on all men, even on those who have no association or covenant
with each other," finds this ethical law in Antigone's defense of her burial of
Polyneices, in disobedience to Creon's edict, and in Empedocles's prohibition
of the killing of any living creature.
Aristotle remarks that "everyone to some extent divines" the