Textual properties: The limit of law and literature – Towards a Gothic jurisprudence

Published date29 February 2008
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(07)00605-9
Pages113-131
Date29 February 2008
AuthorSusan Chaplin
TEXTUAL PROPERTIES:
THE LIMIT OF LAW AND
LITERATURE – TOWARDS
A GOTHIC JURISPRUDENCE
Susan Chaplin
Law and Literature scholarship appears in recent times to have come up
against a limit or, perhaps more optimistically, a threshold. It is lucidly
defined by Costas Douzinas and Adam Greary in terms of the movement’s
‘restricted sense of the literary’, its tendency thus far to avoid ‘the darker,
problematic elementsof the literary, the philosophical problem with literature
itself’ (Douzinas & Greary, 2005, p. 337). This article seeks to address ‘the
problem with literature’ from a philosophical and historical perspective that
prioritises the extentto which ‘the literary’ is implicated in and disruptiveof a
law that ‘shares the conditions of its possibility with the literary object’
(Derrida, 1992, p. 191). Literature is fundamentally the law’s problem. This
essay considers the ‘darker elements’ of the literary (which might be
understood as the symptoms of the law’s literary dis-ease) in an attempt to
re-appraise the relation between literature and law. In particular, it suggests
an engagement with one of the most contested, undisciplined and margin-
alised of modern literary forms – the Gothic – as a means of opening up
a point of passage beyond a somewhat bounded sense of the literary that
seems partially to have stifled the promise of law and literature jurisprudence
thus far.
Special Issue: Law and Literature Reconsidered
Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 43, 113–131
Copyright r2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(07)00605-9
113
The essay re-visits first of all the philosophical status of ‘writing’ within the
Western tradition, drawing particularly upon Derrida’s account of the
impossible relation between textuality and truth within this tradition. I seek
initially to establish the paper’s theoretical orientation through an analysis
of Derrida’s playful reading of a text that he terms a ‘handbook of literature’,
a text that, significantly for my argument here, concerns the staging of a
crime: Mallarme
´’s Mimique (Derrida, 2000a, p. 223). This aberrant, yet
exemplary literary work
1
introduces one of this chapter’s central concerns:
the juridical and literary significance of the narration of ‘crimes’ that appear
in some sense spectral, half-hidden, always just outsideof the proper scene of
representation.
This conceptualisation of literature’s ‘darker elements’ and their place
within/beyond the law will then be brought to bear upon the emergence in
the early modern period of the literary Gothic – a genre that contests the very
notion of ‘genre’ and that from the moment of its inception embodied and
articulated the dis-ease that marks the modern philosophical and ideological
relation between literature and law. In the eighteenth century, literature was
brought decisively before the law; it was defined in juridical terms and
subjected to processes of generic and historical systemisation that had the
aim of categorising and disciplining newly emerging modes of textual
production. This project of literary systemisation can be compared to efforts
jurisprudentially to formulate a rigorous ‘discipline’ of English law through
the rationalisation of juridical textuality: to both of these developments, the
emergence of a deeply ambivalent English Gothicism was the key.
2
The
Gothic enters into legal and literary discourse in the modern period as an
aberrant, yet exemplary narrativity that simultaneously guarantees and
repudiates the possibility of authentic juridical and literary ‘truth’. This
chapter considers the Gothic as a literary and juridical ‘category’ that
‘challenges the concept of category’ and that may thus be deemed, as Punter
puts it, ‘the paradigm of textuality’ per se (Punter, 1998, p. 1). The modern
Gothic also becomes, I will argue, increasingly implicated in the law’s
uncanny relation to spectrality and death as it presents/effaces its crime
scenes, spectres and monsters.
This leads in the final part of this essay to a consideration of two early
Gothic novels that set various ambivalent precedents in terms of literary
Gothicism and that I take to be exemplary of ‘the literary’ as such: they
function, in terms of my argument, as ‘handbooks of literature’. They are
Horace Walpole’s (1764/1996) The castle of Otranto and Mary Shelley’s
(1818/1996) Frankenstein. Each of these texts privileges a certain transgres-
sive textuality and a strangely spectral criminality: central to each work is the
SUSAN CHAPLIN114

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