charles dickens and john grisham: agents of law and

Charles Dickens and John Grisham: Agents of Lawand Imperialism

Andrew Clarke and Stella Swain

What Can Novelists Do for the Law?

It is quite evident the law has been very useful to writers of fiction in terms of plot construction. The works of Charles Dickens and John Grisham provide notable examples of novels that draw a great deal of their power from dealing with aspects of the law. What such fiction does for law, on the other hand, is less obvious, though there are conflicting possibilities in this regard. One such possibility is the idea that novels, through dramatizing individual 's struggles in society, have contributed to the consolidation of power relations in the modem nation-state.

This view has recently been represented by Guyora Binder (Professor of Law at the State University of New York at Buffalo) and Robert Weisberg (Professor of Law at Stanford University) in their book Literary Criticisms of Law} They put the case for the conceptual and psychological efficacy of fiction in creating the “imaginative artifice” which is the community of the nation. They argue that from its inception as a literary form the novel has depicted the adjustment of

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2

Guyora Binder and Robert Weisberg, Literary Critiscisms of Law, PrincetonUniversity Press, 2000Binder and Weisberg above, p. 281

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the individual to social norms. The birth of the novel coincided with the emergence of the modem liberal subject, and was new because it focused on the life of the ordinary individual. Through its narrative structures it helped promote self-governance and helped secure the consent of the mass of individuals to regulation by the liberal state. An alternative point-of-view has been put forward by Martha Nussbaum (Professor of Law at the University of Chicago) in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life? Nussbaum, who has recently been labeled “the lawyer for humanity”4, argues contemporary citizenship needs to be informed by contact with literature because of its inherent capacity for generating moral qualities in its readers. She is not alone in believing that exposure to literature is a necessary supplement to law for legal practitioners; this is an established school of thought in the field of “law and literature” studies which has led to new courses being created for law students in a number of universities in the US, UK and Australia.

Nussbaum proposes that reading novels can have real impact upon the shaping and nourishing of the public imagination. She argues in Poetic Justice that literature educates readers into exercising powers of interpretation and judgment essential to our roles as citizens of enlightened democracies. The multiple voices, predicaments and different social roles presented in novels demand an empathic response from the reader which helps develop an ability to step into others shoes, and to see the world from others' perspectives. She says, “I defend the literary imagination precisely because it seems to me an essential ingredient of an ethical stance that asks us to concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own”.5 Literature, Nussbaum suggests, encourages active reflection toward a general human good. In fact, by reading novels important and powerful figures like judges will maintain their capacity for humanity and justice will be rendered - in a positive sense - less blind. Charles Dickens' novels are among her favoured points of reference.

Martha Nussbuam, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Beacon Press, Boston, 1995R.S. Boynton, ‘Who Needs Philosophy?’ Australian Financial Review, Review Section, p.2, 4 August 2000 Nussbuam, above, n3, p.xv 1

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CHARLES DICKENS AND JOHN GRISHAM

In this article we suggest that Nussbaum's view of novel-reading as an ameliorative supplement to law is insufficiently reflective (and as a result too optimistic). It is effective polemic, and probably does no harm to the cause of protecting and promoting the discipline of literary study (laudable in itself). However, it does not register the complexities inherent in narrative processes as they work to encode particular views. Inscribed in texts are the meanings operative within the cultural contexts and practices from which they emerge, and readers' negotiations of meaning are also informed by forces at play within their particular cultural contexts. Writing and reading are not neutral activities. Those others' lives represented are not treated disinterestedly, but embedded in the manipulative discourse of the text. Literary practice always takes place within a context of ongoing conflict and an interplay of power relations. It is difficult to see how our moral capacities can be improved in conditions governed by vested interests. As readers, for example, we will not simply empathise with all characters and thereby increase our understanding and tolerance. We will side with some against others, as writers encourage us to (therein lies the drama of narrative) and quite possibly come away from our novel-reading with a new and refined set of prejudices. So, whilst acknowledging the power of literature, and more broadly, narrative, to activate discriminatory behaviours in the reader and to trigger empathy with the problems of protagonists, the view elaborated here questions the idea that such processes necessarily combat prejudice and injustice. Arguably prejudice is the currency that novels deal in.

The view represented by Binder and Weisberg, that some literature helps create not necessarily better but compliant citizens, seems more persuasive. We would also suggest that in confirming aspects of the status quo novels that foreground law are necessarily inflected with a set of prejudices which are endemic to the legal systems which form an important part of their cultural context, and of the “realism” with which society is represented in their fictions.

Hayden White has suggested that concern with legality is intrinsic to all narratives; and that modem story-telling is impossible without “some notion of the legal subject which can serve as the agent, agency

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and subject”6 of the narrative, whether fictional or historical. The work of Charles Dickens and John Grisham lends support to this point; these authors constitute a phenomenon in and of themselves. Their stories are well-known as foregrounding law, and the status of the individual as legal subject. The popularity of their works suggests this is a strategy that has mass appeal.

They are well known for organising moral and ethical conflicts around the topos of 'the law' in their narratives. Dickens' was popular, and populist before he was canonised and became almost synonymous with educated contemporary literary tastes (it is not unthinkable the same fate awaits Grisham, though this is unlikely). Dickens has been reincarnated as a high/low cultural hybrid. His work has achieved the critical status of classic (almost definitively so) English literature. Yet the constant and never-ending translation of his works to the screen testifies to his continued mass popular appeal. In this regard, the output of both authors is currently of related social and commercial significance.

Elements of their world-views (whether in print or adapted to screen) have probably entered the consciousnesses of a more numerous and widespread audience than most other novelists, and that in itself endows them with a special status. They invite speculation as to their appeal and what sort of intervention their texts make in the public (and global) imagination.

We suggest that their focus on the law is of key significance in both regards.

To return to Binder and Weisberg's articulation of the idea that novels exist in symbiotic relation to the community of the nation, the contemporary popularity of these authors does present us with one problem.

Many cultural commentators represent our contemporary condition as 'postmodern', that is to say characterised by a break-down of modem institutions (and belief in those institutions) including the nation-state,

6 Hayden White, The Content of the Form, Johns Hopkins University Press, London


by the undermining of stable forms of identity, and of the secure sense of community. As Zygmunt Bauman has argued, 'it is precisely the great modem project of a unified, managed and controlled space which has today come under pressure and faces its critical challenge'. Such phenomena as globalisation, the creation of new virtual communities, widespread, constant migration, processes of historical revision and the ever-shifting political landscape of new nationalisms have contributed to a new postmodern condition of flux and uncertainty. In this situation the role of the novel as an instrument for internalizing social and self-regulating norms would seem to be complicated by the fact that what those norms are is no longer self- evident.

Yet Dickens and Grisham represent a kind of dependable, stalwart 'Englishness' and 'Americanness'. Their success must have come as no great surprise to the authors themselves. Best-seller status, the institutionalized aim of every author writing within a highly developed literary culture, and within the context of capitalism, was their aim (though Dickens in particular is also remembered for his highly developed social conscience). Neither has been overtly concerned with pushing back the limits of what fiction can achieve. Each had his eye not on pleasing an intellectual elite but as many people as possible. Their narratives involve strategies and preoccupations which have ensured for both a popularity readily exploitable across different mass media (in paperback, television productions, video and film). Readers and viewers evidently discover considerable gratification in their encounter with these texts.

Nussbaum's view would suggest this is a good thing because these texts can generate a valuable 'empathetic imagining' on the part of the public; Poetic Justice emphasizes the ethical necessity of responding to narratives that encourage us to 'concern ourselves with the good ofgother people whose lives are distant from our own'.

This does not take into account the strategies structurally in place in these texts for manufacturing discrimination between 'self and 'other'.

7 Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments. Essays in Postmodern Morality; Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1995, p. 186 Nussbuam, above, n3, p.xvi

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We suggest it is not so much altruistic impulses that they trigger, but what Theodor Adorno once called 'rituals of ideological recognition'9 which function to constitute and stabilise subjectivity; an effect that offers gratifications for the destabilized subject of postmodemity.

The critical analysis of mass media and popular culture made by critical theorists in the wake of Adorno's work would suggest the repetitive performance of works by these writers (reissues, reruns, film to video, and, in Grisham's case, more of the same with each novel) does not give rise to an enriched public morality and capacity for tolerance and compassion, but something close to the opposite of this. Ultimately they work to suppress and resolve difference and conflict, encourage narrowness and reinforce the status quo.

The continued exportability of Dickens in the form of BBC 'costume drama' productions (not least to Australia10 * and America) certainly supports Adorno's view that 'modem mass culture propagates to the people a system of social values which reflects almost unchanged the ideology of middle-class life of a much earlier period'.11 The same could be argued with regard to Grisham's promotion of traditional values.

The particular era of middle-class ideology to which the popular productions of Dickens' work returns us was informed by concerns arising from the colonial and imperialist agendas of nineteenth- century Britain. Grisham's work also emerged within the context of American cultural, economic and political global ascendancy. It expresses a longing for an unchanging condition of stability and prosperity which carries traces of life in the '50's and '60's America.

If the repetitiveness of modem mass culture tends to make for 'automatized reactions and to weaken the forces of individual

‘Television and the Patterns of Mass Culture’ in Communications; ed. WilburSchramm, University of Illinois Press, Illinois 1960, pp.595-612, p.601 Best selling author Peter Carey’s recent treatment of the character of Magwitch from Dickens’ Great Expectations in his story JackMaggs, University of Queensland Press, Queensland 1997, is another version of the phenomena of Dickensian recurrence.As summarised by Peter Goodall, High Culture, Popular Culture, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995, p,39

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resistance' and if they feed the need to be on safe ground in the interests of commercial gain, then the stories told by Dickens and Grisham are extremely bankable. Theodor Adorno's critique coincides with Binder and Weisberg's on the level of arguing that novels help to manufacture consent to the coercive regulation of the individual in the interests of the collective; the difference is that he takes a very negative view of this.

Adorno's view of popular cultural products as encoding and communicating to a passive (non-resistant, non-interpretative) audience reassuring conservative world-views has been problematised on the basis of its 'one-way' simplicity, it has to be said that where Dickens and Grisham are concerned, audiences know exactly what to expect and return to them again and again. Their success abroad is also partly a consequence of the fact that both authors carry a degree of cultural capital, speaking for, and with the authority of, members of the establishment of powerful and affluent nations past and present. Dickens' works once formed part of the teaching of literature as a school subject overseas as 'part of the drive for linguistic standardization and conformity'13; it is still a significant cultural export. The narrative voice in the texts they have produced is valued for speaking from a conservative position.

Their novels display a prominent concern with the role of law in the lives of ordinary people that has been attractive. Protagonists act on behalf of, or against the law; there are victims and there are aggressors, there is innocence and there is guilt. The ominous entity of 'the law' is prominently centered, and functions to contain, encode and arbitrate the conflict between them. The narratives chart processes of disruption and re-stabilization in the social world as monitored by law. This is the 'signature' drama of their work, an important part of what they are selling.

Dickens wrote through the middle of the nineteenth-century in Britain, Grisham through the latter portion of the twentieth- in America. Time separates them, but there are correlations between their respective

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Adomo, above, nlO, p.597 Goodall above, nil, p. 158

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historical contexts, and the sort of narrative authority they assume. Both write of legal systems that are the product and vehicle of imperial powers.

In the 19th century, a key facet of England's influence was (as the critic Edward Said explores in works such as Culture and Imperialism14) its exporting of its legal system and values. The English novel also became the model for novel-writing throughout the world. In the twentieth-century (and into the twenty-first) America has become recognized for its operation as a cultural imperialist (consequent upon its political, economic and military prowess) of unprecedented potency. These authors use the law in their fictions to peddle influential and exportable models of a sovereign 'Englishness' and 'Americanness' respectively, which, we suggest, helps account for their enduring marketability. They appeal to us at a psychological level in a fashion that renders us collaborator with and conscripts to the idealization of their nations' imperialism.

As readers we are, as Nussbaum contends is usually the case, drawn into the game they initiate of shifting between positions and viewpoints, interpretations and critical decisions. Their narratives fabricate for us the illusion of partaking in a process of discrimination that, through our own higher moral faculties, will lead us to a superior vantage point on the vicissitudes of the human condition. Ultimately, though we are free to choose, our choices are, by a variety of means, conceptually constrained. We too become agents (or in legal terms, sub-agents) of imperialism.

The cooperative reader constructed by these texts may then, find gratification not only in their representation of a status quo and confirmation of traditional values, but also at another level. We suggest they function as a cipher for the attractions and consolations of power for a public coping with new postmodern forms of instability and powerlessness where the “imaginative artifice” of the community of the nation is more imaginary than ever.

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Chatto & Windus, London, 1993

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Charles Dickens' Popular Legalism

In The Mystery of Edwin Drood and in the more well-known Great Expectations (as well as in other novels, Bleak House, for example) Dickens links the English law to notions of quintessential Englishness. The construction of 'Englishness', as Madan Sarup argues was intimately connected to Empire. The Empire, 'backed by military, naval and economic supremacy, became associated with certain beliefs', he remarks, which included 'the doctrine that the English are superior to other people's in the world'15. In both novels Dickens juxtaposes English citizenship against various forms of 'otherness'. The English legal system, in these texts, is clearly the locus of Imperial power, and is the instrument of acts of discrimination between those included and excluded from the privileged condition of Englishness.16 It is also characterized as paternalist, represented in terms of an omniscient, god-like father. The law knows and records everything, and it never forgets.

In Great Expectations Magwitch, the convict, is finally recaptured on his return to London after many years in Australia. During that time he was freed and made his fortune, but his outcast status still definitively marks him. The representation of Magwitch changes in the course of the narrative from a threatening figure to that of an old, infirm and vulnerable human being. Pip, the protagonist, says of Magwitch late in the novel, 'but for his illness he would have been put in irons, for he was regarded as a determined prison-breaker and I know not what else' but he 'never tried to bend the past out of its eternal shapd17. English law is represented as inescapable. It is an immutable and pervasive force. It's monolithic, monumental presence I

I #Madan Sarup, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1996, p. 138For a full discussion see Peter Fitzpatrick, ‘The Desperate Vacuum: Imperialism and Law in the Experience of the Enlightenment’ (in Post-Modem Law: Enlightenment, Revolution and the Death of Man, ed. Anthony Carty, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1990, pp.90-106), who shows how modem law derived authority and legitimation from process of the identifying and excluding the foreign and barbaric other in the context of empire.Charles Dickens, Great Expectations {1861) Claremont Classics 1999, p.416

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broods and presides over Britain and its colonies. Distance is irrelevant. It has perfect memory , and just as Empire is boundless (the sun never sets) its law is timeless, unsusceptible to historical mutation.

When Magwitch comes to trial the legal process is presented in terms of a ritual of Dantesque connotations, the language is biblical, suggesting that law's Empire circumscribes both heaven and hell. 'Among the wretched creatures' aligned before the judge, we are told, there is one 'whom he must single out for special address'.

One who almost from his infancy had been an offender against thelaws who, after repeated imprisonment and punishments, had beenat length sentenced to exile for a term of years; and who, undercircumstances of great violence and daring, had made his escapeand been re-sentenced to exile for life in a fatal moment, he hadquitted his haven of rest and repentance, and had come back to thecountry where he was proscribed. The appointed punishment forhis return to the land that cast him out being Death, and his case

19being this aggravated case, he must prepare himself to Die.

English law is God's law and England is God's land. The law is impersonal, a celestial machine that dispenses sentences like God rejecting the damned in droves. Pip's perception of the scene is excited and melodramatic.

At that time it was the custom (as I learnt from my terrible experience of that Session) to devote a concluding day to the passing of sentences, and to make a finishing effect with the Sentence of Death. But for the indelible picture that my remembrance now holds before me, I could scarcely believe, evenas I write these words, that I saw two-and-thirty men and women

20put before the Judge to receive that sentence together.

In Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1990) Peter Goodrich examines the symbolic mode of existence of English law as folk memory and convention, rooting its legitimacy in continuity, going back into ‘time immemorial’.Dickens, above, nl8, p.417 Dickens, above, nl8, p.417

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In this trial scene, the Court-room is likened to a Cathedral where God gazes down upon the proceedings, and the Judge who presides is God incarnate. Take for instance the following passage. Though at the level of the law's all-too-human agents Dickens often parodies, satirises and criticizes the law, at this pivotal, climactic moment in the narrative his vision is of another sort entirely. We perceive an awe, respect and almost fetishistic admiration for its power to inject meaning into a fallen, secular world.

The sun was striking in at the great windows of the court, throughthe glittering drops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad shaftof light between the two- and-thirty and the Judge, linking bothtogether, and perhaps reminding some among the audience, howboth were passing on with absolute equality, to the greaterJudgment that knoweth all things and cannot err. Rising for amoment, a distinct speck of face in this way of light, the prisonersaid, 'My Lord, I have received my sentence of death from the

21Almighty, but I bow to yours,' and sat down again.

Dickens suggests here the democracy of law, announcing equality amongst its subjects, and also its divine sanction. Whilst English ideology and nationalist rhetoric traditionally refers to Mother England (her ships, for example, are female servants and emissaries) and the Imperial project appears beneficently maternal, the law is portrayed by Dickens as paternal; righteous, impersonal and unbending.

Pip's subjection to the law takes the form of not knowing from whence his 'great expectations' derive. The law (in the guise of the lawyer Jaggers) holds the secret of Pip's benefactor until he finally discovers that his benefactor is not an English gentle- woman (the gruesome Miss Havisham of 'Satis' House) but Magwitch, the colonial former convict. Dickens was, of course, writing at a time when fortunes were being made in Britain's colonies, when people were able to dream of fashioning themselves into gentlemen by this suspect, off-stage method. The critical importance of the icon of the “gentleman” to the

Dickens, above, nl8, p.418

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ascendancy of 'Englishness' in the public imaginary cannot be underestimated. The fact that the currency of true gentlemanliness was being surreptitiously and persistently debased would have been producing a destabilising effect on the contemporary well-heeled novel-reading audience. The law then functions in the interests of a controlling fantasy, with the power to separate the real from the fake, and to punish misplaced ambition. However grim the deathly gothic edifice of Miss Haversham's labyrinthal, hushed, moulding pile - Satis house - may be, its faded magnificence signals more authenticity than all of Magwitch's money.

Secrets and the power that holding secrets gives to the law is a constant theme in Dicken's works. Lawyers are predominantly the keepers of those secrets. The ominous lawyer-figure in Bleak House is defined in the opening pages by reference to his being the repository of all sorts of information. He is Lady Dedlock's lawyer, a sphinx-like guardian of aristocratic privilege:

And at her house in town, upon this muddy, murky afternoon, presents himself an old-fashioned old gentleman, attorney-at-law, and eke solicitor of the High Court of Chancery, who has the honour of acting as legal adviser to the Dedlocks, and has as many cast-iron boxes in his office with that name outside. The old gentleman is rusty to look at, but is reputed to have made good thrift out of aristocratic marriage settlements and wills, and to be very rich. He is surrounded by a nimbus of family confidences of which he is known to be the silent depository.

Legal secrecy is inscribed at the heart of the profession's ethics. Its formal title is 'client confidentiality'. Lawyers are commanded to take their secrets beyond their clients' graves, and to their own graves. In Dickens, the power of law's secrecy is to render it the keeper of the keys to identity, status and the state of our souls.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House {1853), Norton Critical Edition, New York 1977, pp. 13-14As provided for in the English Law Society’s Guide to Professional Conduct of Solicitors, rule 16.01, ‘A soldier is under a duty to keep confidential to his or her firm affairs of the clients and to ensure that the staff do the same.’

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Dickens once wanted to pursue a legal career and remained profoundly preoccupied with many aspects of its social and imperial administration. In his novels he decried the injustices, slowness and expense of the English legal system in its domestic form, most notably as regards the court of Chancery in Bleak House. However, in public life he rigorously upheld the English rule of law as it applied to the dominions and colonies of the Empire. An example of this apparently contradictory position was his enthusiastic support of the brutal suppression of a native uprising in Jamaica by Governor Eyre24, and disdain for its critics. In 1865 he wrote to a friend:

That Jamaica business. That platform-sympathy with the black - or the native or the devil- afar off, and that platform indifference to our own countrymen at enormous odds in the midst of savagery, makes me stark wild; only the other day, here was a meeting of jawbones of asses at Manchester to censure the Jamaica Governor for his manner of putting down the insurrection!

This contradiction, concern for the good of the nation and lack of concern for the good of other nations was, as Peter Fitzpatrick has pointed out , internal to Imperial law itself. Away from England's shores, English law was licensed (by a sizeable proportion of the national community) to be a cruel and tyrannical father in the war against savagery. As Elleka Boehmer argues, the colonies were also 'places of banishment, unlawful practice, oppression, and social disgrace, dark lands where worthy citizens might not wish to stray' . A crucial part of the law's operational effectiveness involves categorization. This is endemic to legal practice. The law as a system also works via an intricate system of antagonistic binary opposites (the accused and the prosecutor, the plaintiff and the defendant, criminal and victim). These binaries, which are also known as correlative opposites (as encoded by the US jurist Wesley Hohfeld), are

The public impact and details of this case are covered by Catherine Hall in ‘Imperial Man: Edward Eyre in Australasia and the West Indies’ in The Expansion of England ed. Bill Schwarz, Routledge, London, 1996, pp 130-170 The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol.IH, Bernard Tachnitz, Leipzig 1880, p.79 Fitzpatrick, above, nl7Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1995, p.26

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employed dramatically by Dickens and Grisham, and elaborated within a wider system of shifting oppositions; rich and poor; good and bad, English and non-English, white and non-white, American and un- American, powerful and weak.

Dickens message (one that is appreciated by student readers before any other aspect of the text) that the 'real' gentleman is the Christian gentleman, not the decadent upper-class monster of a former era, nor the ambitious new-made man of his own, is still more emphatically about exclusion than inclusion. It serves as another way of recentring and privileging a superior brand of Englishness. The way in which Dickens contrives to present poor and simple characters like Pip's adopted black-smith father, Jo Gargery, as versions of his new notion of gentlemanliness, though enduringly appealing, is basically disingenuous indulgence. It is not to be taken seriously. Gargery is so very far from the domains of social privilege that his elevation amounts to no more than a pleasant authorial conceit and sop to readerly priggishness.

In Dicken's last and unfinished work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood8, which involves a murder investigation of an English gentleman {Edwin Drood) the chief suspects are Mr Jasper an Englishman contaminated by contact with Asians through his opium habit, and a dark-skinned foreigner named Neville Landless. Angus Wilson conjectures that whilst Dickens had been “fascinated since childhood with The Arabian Nights, we also know that the Orient, always a matter of disgust for him as embodied in the ancient, static, opiumladen civilization of 'John Chinaman', had become doubly hateful since the treachery of the Indian Mutiny in 1857 'the horror of the actual Asia of England's experience in the Mutiny is likely by this time (about 1870) consciously to outweigh his childhood fascination with The Arabian Nights.' Neville Landless is a subject of Ceylon. In an age of Imperialism and conquest that had been justified by legal fictions such as terra nullius, Landless's name is significant. His beginnings in the colonies of the Mother country were appalling, as

Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1993Dickens, above, n28, introduction p.22

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the hybrid Landless himself acknowledges to Mr Sapsea, a pillar of the community in a small, very English Cathedral town:

"I suppose you know that we come (my sister and I) from Ceylon?

"Indeed, no”

“I wonder at that. We lived with a stepfather there. Our mother diedthere when we were little children. We have had a wretched

30existence"

Neville and his sister have sought the protection of Mother England, and the comforts and civilities on offer from metropolitan London. But Neville Landless is aware that he is the chief suspect in the search for Edwin Droods murder. As he says:

“Perhaps you will think it strange sir,” this was said in a hesitating voice- “that I should so soon ask you to allow me to confide in you, and to have the kindness to hear a word or two from me in my defence?”

“Defence?” Mr Crisparkle repeated. “You are not on your defence, Mr Neville.”31

This is Dickens' Englishman speaking of the mantra of equality before the law that he foregrounds in the court scene in Great Expectations, but this is not how Neville sees it. This colonial subject clearly sees that he can never be equal before the law, and Dickens has him acknowledge his lowly place in the scheme of things. His emasculation is confirmed by the opinions voiced by other characters of his guilt.

Mr Sapsea expressed his opinion that the case had a dark look; in short (and here his eyes rested on Neville's countenance), an Un- English complexion. He wavered whether or no he should at once issue his warrant for the committal of Neville Landless to jail,

30

31

Dickens, above, n28, p.88 Dickens, above, n28, p.88

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under circumstances of grave suspicion; and he might have gone so far as to do it but for the indignant protest of the Minor canon: whoundertook for the young man's remaining in his house, and being

32produced by his own hands, whenever demanded.

Neville Landless is not protected by the English law's edict of 'innocence before being proven guilty', but by the church. The canon goes out on a moral limb, in a noble English fashion, to steady the hand of justice.

The subject positions made available in Edwin Drood by these characters are determined by their relation to English law, and thereby a privileged Englishness. Neville's position is weak, his passivity and silence linked with guilt. He must prove himself to be worthy, try harder to be equal. Dickens does treat the character sympathetically, but at a distance. He is as much the focus of unresolved suspicion in the novel as he is an opportunity for Nussbaum's brand of empathy.

Being shut out from 'respectable society' and wanting to 'get in' are key motivations in Dickens' works. Dickens was also an outsider trying hard to 'get in'. He was, by virtue of his family's financial shame and lower-middle class birth excluded from the club of English gentlemen, yet his name has become a signifier of Anglo-Saxon English respectability - a consequence of the bias of his writing.

Revealingly, Dickens met Queen Victoria only two months before his death and wrote to her private secretary afterwards to say that he would be honoured to let her in on the ending of Edwin Drood. He wrote: “If Her Majesty should ever be sufficiently interested in my tale to desire to know a little more of it in advance of her subjects, you know how proud I shall be to anticipate publication.”. Alas, Queen Victoria did not bother to reply. Edwin Drood remained unfinished.

The bias of Dickensian narrative (particularly in these two texts) is toward a process of characterization driven by suspicion. Characters are to be continuously assessed by the reader as to their potential guilt,

3233

Dickens, above, n28, p. 188 Dickens, above, n28, introduction, p.28


in relation to an absolute standard of good and authentic 'Englishness'. This abstract Englishness is constituted by sanitary and prototypical standards of morality and legality. It has the effect not only of criminalizing all that is excluded by that category, but of further affirming the authority and sovereignty of English and Imperial law.34

This later novel has not achieved the successful mass-cultural afterlife of earlier works, Great Expectations in particular. We would suggest that this is because Dickens has not sufficiently enveloped the discriminatory textual dynamic in a rehearsal of 'traditional' (i.e. Christian, decent) values, that can work to reassure and transcend difference. The features of social conflict identified and exploited by the narrative are not simultaneously subsumed into an ongoing, comforting universalized message. Opportunities presented by the text to empathise, therefore, are not as attractive or effective because they are not as safe as in Great Expectations. Too much uncertainty remains as a consequence of unsubsumed conflict.

John Grisham's Paternal Legalism

The public function and significance of American Law is a pet preoccupation of John Grisham's best-selling narratives, The Firm35 and The Testament.36 His difference from Dickens would be readily acknowledged by many as amounting to the distance of low from high culture. Dickens is assumed to be the better writer. Richard Posner, whose recent book Law and Literature expresses a reverence for canonical literature and a faith in its potential ethical value as a supplement to law which aligns him with Nussbaum, says of Grisham that he writes like an 11 year old. This is harsh; certainly Grisham's characterizations are thin and reflections about the human condition depthless, yet his popularity attests to the fact that he is also a very effective story-teller. As such, and if critics are to avoid patronizing a

See also S.Swain, ‘Narrative and Legality: Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood in new formations, 32, 1997, pp.77-90 where this point is pursued in more depth.John Grisham, The Firm, Arrow Books, London, 1993 .John Grisham, The Testament, Arrow Books, London, 1999Richard Posner, Law and Literature, Harvard University Press, Harvard, 1998Posner, above, n37, p.38

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broad and wide cohort of readers his work merits investigation. American readers, and readers globally, adore Grisham's product. Further, his popularity is not the only thing that connects his output with that of Dickens; his narrative strategies, structures and motifs recall those of Dickens already discussed.

In the late 20th century John Grisham exported a vision of America the new (and only) superpower's legal system to all comers of the globe. Grisham writes as if American law, whilst pervasive and often brutal, represents the global, indeed the human, status quo. In this vision, the US law is the modem global law enforcer; its reach is boundless (hence the US idea of foreign policy as characterised by unilateral rather than United Nations action).

Parallels with Great Expectations emerge in The Firm, which opens with Mitch McDeere, a young, green Harvard graduate (third in his year) being interviewed by partners from 'The Firm', a large commercial law firm based in Memphis. He is in awe of them. They represent a status and standard of living that he has learnt to admire and desire. His rite of passage into their domain, however, involves relinquishing autonomy and privacy. His CV alone is not enough to satiate their appetite for knowledge.

“Tell us about your family.”

“Why is that important?”

“It's very important to us, Mitch”, Royce McKnight said warmly.

He is further encouraged: “Tell us about your wife Mitch (it was a standard non-sacred area explored by every firm)”.39 40 The firm requires personal information, it needs 'secrets', ostensibly to satisfy its paternal yearnings. The moral codification of Mitch McDeere continues:

“Mitch, our firm frowns on drinking and chasing women. We're nota bunch of Holy Rollers, but we put business ahead of everything.

3940

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Grisham, above, n35, p.6Grisham, above, n35, p.6


We keep low profiles and we work very hard. And we make plenty of money”

“I can live with all that”

“We reserve the right to test any member of the firm for drug use”

“I don't use drugs”

“Good. What's your religious affiliation?”

“Methodist”

“Good. You'll find a variety in our firm. Catholics, Baptists, Episcopalians. It's really none of our business, but we like to know. We want stable families. Happy lawyers are productive lawyers. That's why we ask these questions.”41

As in Great Expectations, the narrative is launched with an attempt at personal classification according to contemporary social and moral codes. This is critical to the ideological work of the text. Midge trusts the motivations behind this prying and snooping. He can “live with it”, just as Pip accepts Jaggers' power over his fate. This interrogation accords with his own self-administered disciplinary processes. Despite the fact that this firm is later revealed to be corrupt, ready to make use of personal information for illicit ends, the imaginary function of the law as a sort of social conscience or superego is at the outset invoked and confirmed.

It is perfectly fine that the firm, as a collective of legal agents, should know more about McDeere than he does about himself. It is obvious they did not really need to ask him, but the interview serves to allow the character of Mitch to constmct itself as a model social entity, as well as an ideal young prototype lawyer.

When they arrive at the issue of Mitch's salary, the partners gently arouse Mitch and Grisham's readers with the promise of

Grisham, above, n35, p.6

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“a base salary of 80,000 the first year, plus bonuses. 85 the second year, plus bonuses. A low interest mortgage so you can buy a home. Two country club memberships. And a new BMW. You pick the colour, of course.”42

The sanctity of Mitch's McDeere middle-class aspirations would have been appreciated by Dickens, but, as is the case with Pip, the offer from these benefactors is out of all proportion to the status quo. There are limits to the extent to which one should expect to see one's situation improved, and trouble is sure to follow.

The dream of a sudden assumption into the realms of American high society, the acquisition of money, status, and a secure sense of belonging does entice the reader to Mitch's side in an impulse of empathy. It taps crucial features of contemporary suburban angst; fear for the future, of financial insecurity, of loss of comfort and stability, all of which increase Mitch's everyman magnetism. It also triggers fear for the hero's fate. We all know (have learnt our lessons well) that sudden good fortune of this nature is unreal, probably criminal, and to be suspected. It is clear that the figure of Mitch is also a mechanism by which readers can expect to be disciplined and punished, and can thereby be reassured of their safety in not pursuing such dreams. We can expect that the gratifyingly trite message which will emerge out of all this will be something along the lines of 'money will not make you happy', 'crime does not pay', 'honesty wins out' - an ideological fudging comparable to the subliminal sanctimonious chorusing that accompanies conflict in Dickens' narratives.

The law, as represented by Grisham, feeds on misplaced desire. It gathers knowledge and expands its power. “The Firm's headquarters in Memphis is, like the hungry and labyrinthal Satis House in Great Expectations, a metaphor for the ineluctable - even sadistic - power of the establishment. Satis House was the young Pip's undoing. This building also has the simultaneous draw and repulsion of a gothic mansion to the naive protagonist. It is a five storey building built by a cotton merchant which had been purchased by the firm's founding


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lawyer Anthony Bendini. He named it the Bendini building, and it now houses the firm 'Bendini, Lambert and Locke'. Bendini, like Miss Havisham, entombs himself and inflects the building with the pulse of his perverse love of power:

He pampered the building, indulged it, coddled it, each year adding another layer of luxury to his landmark. He fortified it, sealing doors and windows and hiring armed guards to protect it and its occupants. He added elevators, electronic surveillance, security codes, closed-circuit television, a weight room, a steam room, locker rooms and a partners' dining room on the fifth floor with a captivating view of the river. In 20 years he built the richest law firm in Memphis, and, indisputably, the quietest. Secrecy was his passion. Every associate hired by the firm was indoctrinated in the evils of the lose tongue. Everything was confidential.43

The building is the Firm; it takes on grotesque, almost human qualities that are far from benevolent. Its internal spaces generate fear, greed, ruthlessness and suspicion. The firm, as we discover, whilst criminally masquerading as agent of a paternal American legal system, is illicit ambition itself, and the instrument by which it is exposed in others.

Yet, as Grisham imagines it, the building is also designed to impress, and express the impersonal, omniscient power of the law. This is the almost impenetrable disguise the corrupt firm adopts for the public. Further, the building epitomises Empire's rewards, luxury and abundance, the saturation and satisfaction of desire (which is, of course, what 'Satis' house means); excess protected by total surveillance and powers of subjection. McDeere, like Pip, is belittled and diminished before its formidable, mysterious material splendour.

As icons of American respectability, Grisham's good lawyer figures function like Dickens' 'gentleman'. McDeere's role is to develop into a exemplar of besieged white, masculine, American honour. Other novels present us with US lawyers as ambassadors for civility, talismans against anarchy, barbarism and inferior forms of social organization. When Grisham's American lawyers head into the


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darkness of South America, where there are no credit card lunches, no McDonalds, none of the consoling support systems of home, they feel ill-at-ease and cast out; until they realize that wherever they are is still, despite first appearances, almost America. Any suggestion of a residual un-American barbarity just reassures them of their privileged status.

Nate, the middle-aged lawyer sent to find the recipient of a massive fortune left by will in The Testament is a washed out litigator banished by his firm, and just released from his third trip to 'rehab'. Well-behaved lawyers, by implication, have no time for such junkets. Given Nate's moral turpitude, he can be spared. Like a pale replica of Conrad's Marlow, Nate has to face up to his demons as he goes deeper in to Brazil. He hops aboard a smaller plane as he heads to the Pantanal rain forest, but he is comforted rather than dismayed by the ubiquitous evidence of US civilization he finds around him. Grisham writes:

There were no first class seats on the flight to Campo Grande, nor any empty ones. Nate was pleasantly surprised to observe that every face was behind the morning news, and a wide variety of papers at that. The dailies were as slick and modem as any in the States, and they were being read by people who had a thirst for the

44news.

Thus he flags the spread and power of empire. He goes on, undercutting Nate slightly for his naivety in expecting these foreigners to be primitive:

Perhaps Brazil wasn't as backward as he thought. These people could read! The airliner, a 727, was clean and newly refurbished. Coca-cola and Sprite were on the drink cart; he almost felt at home.44 45

Surrounded by these symptoms of American cultural imperialism Nate relaxes.

4445



American capitalism is global capitalism, and for Grisham it is a benevolent influence. CNN is a lode star for Nat, it reassures him like a child's dummy. Nate is another construct designed to arouse reader empathy. He taps into WASP America's suspicion of the 'other', and longing for security. He demonstrates what a big daddy America is, smoothing the way for its citizens through the unpredictable realms beyond its national boarders, where the process of mass adoption is still incomplete.

Outside America, readers of Grisham must inevitably feel the attraction of that adoption. As Julian Barnes, the London based writer, recently observed:

Non-Americans should never forget that every country in the world is more interested in America than America is in it; this is the normal loading of the international equation of money and power. As a visitor to the States you can work a very inexpensive piece of magic; buy a newspaper and see your own country disappear.46

Barnes remarks that during the Atlanta Olympics size became important for commentators on US television, which set out to explain to its domestic audience which countries were which by reference to their physical dimension. Britain was only the 'size of Oregon'47, a comparative point that might not have pleased an imperialist like Dickens. Time itself is American in Grisham's portrayal of South America. Pockets of barbarity resisting stream-lining with US culture lag behind; 'Time was racing elsewhere, but in the Pantanal time was of no consequence'48. Nate asks a flight attendant at one point:

“How far away is the Paraguay river?”

“This time of year, eight hours”

“Brazilian hours?”

46

47

Julian Barnes, Letters from London, Picador, London, p.xBarnes, above, 46, p.10Grisham, above, n36, p. 147

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She smiled at this. 'You've learned that time is slower here. Eight to ten hours, American time.'49

Whilst the omnipotence of American law is temporarily threatened in Grisham's scheme, this is only to demonstrate its critical social function as eliminator of the bad, the illegitimate, the foreign, and the corrupt. In the film adapation of The Firm McDeere is played by by Tom Cruise, whose US action-hero, moral-warrior status has been repeatedly sold to a receptive audience (the latest production being MI 2).

When McDeere, protype lawyer and legal crusader discovers that the firm is actually a money laundering operation for the Mafia he tells the FBI all about it. This time he gets the reward he deserves, millions of dollars, protection for him and his family and a new life on a yacht in South America. Each of the partners of the Firm of 'Bendini, Lambert and Locke' is indicted based on documents he supplies; they are satisfyingly, ritually cast out. Grisham triumphantly concludes The Firm with the following homily. The Firm's demise 'should be a dire warning to legitimate professionals and businessmen who are tempted to handle dirty money'.50 Judgment is delivered on the particular brand of criminality represented by the Mafia, of foreign extraction and masquerading as US establishment to an extent that challenges the law's omnipotence. There are bent lawyers, and there are straight lawyers; they look the same but the law is omniscient and the truth will out. The fraudsters will be jettisoned from US heaven.

Even more explicitly than Dickens in Great Expectations Grisham's narrative strategy involves resolving the conflicts undergone by the central protagonist, and therefore by the empathizing reader, in a recital of traditional, upright US values. Whilst Grisham, like Dickens, can present power as menacing and the law as untrustworthy, his narrative discourse ultimately celebrates the law's restraining powers and the fundamentally conservative function of supporting the US status quo, globally if necessary.

4950

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Dream-Agents and Satisfied Clients: How Dickens and Grisham Make the Law Work for You.

If the law for both Dickens and Grisham is omnipotent and omniscient, it is excitingly so. Massive and paternal, it protects social, psychological and material well-being. It also has a dark side, dealing in secrets and mystery, punishing deviance, destroying traitors. The role of law in their narratives is biblical in its resonance, the law giveth, the law taketh away. It knows more about you than you about it; it may be strong, menacing, and paternal but it can also be fair, just and a force for order in a world threatening anarchy.

By making stories about the law these authors tap into a psychological complex generated in the public by each individual's status as subject to the law. Grisham's and Dickens' novels offer us subject positions that catch us up in a drama which focuses our being before the law. As they do so, their narratives acquire a mesmeric authority and power.

R. Howard Bloch, a US academic who has studied the origins of European law, describes the pre-literate, oral dissemination of the law in 12th century France via the public performance of story-telling. These stories had the purpose of connecting disparate collectivity of the audience by affirming 'shared ideals^ between the performer or law-maker on the one hand, and the audience or legal participants on the other. Such performances helped forge a community out of individual agents. This process bears some similarities to the mass- consumption of the narratives of Dickens and Grisham (particularly in their screen versions). To engage with their narratives is to enact a ritual of social cohesion. They demonstrate how our identities are defined before the law and we are confirmed as subject to its power in the interest of collective good. Whether or not they portray the law in a negative light, they still stage its cohesive power.

Both Dickens and Grisham's stories (especially their later ones) are marked by paranoia. It is as if they are constantly bedeviled by the potential of empire to unravel, by the idea the community which is the *

51 R.Howard Bloch, Medieval French Literature and Law, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1977, p.2


focus of their narratives is only sustained by constant vigilance.Dickens and Grisham make choices. Ultimately they prefer thepredatory, conflictual dyad of powerful/powerless, law and subject, tobe played out over and over again to a dystopic 'nowheresville' wherethe privileged imperial subject becomes a 'non-entity', and where

52identities are 'neither given nor authoritatively confirmed'.

The glib and inoffensive morality of both authors is part of their sales pitch; the attention they draw to the plight of the underdog, to social victims of various sorts - what Nussbaum would take to be their ethical value - is decoration. The underlying focus of these texts is process by which 'the law' can be bought into play to eradicate confusion and realign power relations. Their popularity endures in a postmodern world (where the central organizing entity and source of identity that is the nation-state is losing significance) because of their inherent ideological support for the modem projects of imperialism and the rule of law. Ironically, as international exports their success is a symptom and function of globalisation; their mass distribution permits their narratives to offer the solace of imaginary subjection to modem forms of authority and social organization. Their narratives offer the 'comforts of universal guidance that modem self-conscience once promised' in a world constituted by fragmented and ephemeral imagined communities, where we are 'thrown back on our subjectivity as the ultimate ethical authority'.52 53

This paper concentrates on England and America as loci of imperial power, but Australia - a major consumer of these imperial cultural products - can also be viewed as a regional empire, for example from the viewpoint of Papua New Guinea, Fiji and other small nations economically dependent on Australia. From the standpoint of Australia's indigenes white Australians are imperialists. We should not see empire as rooted in history (in the case of Dickens) or centred at a geographical distance (in the case of Grisham). Imperial subjectivities are also currently constructed in relation to Australia, and offer resolutions to the problematic of contemporary Australians' sense of identity. Further, our continuing historical attachment to a former

52 Zvgmunt Bauman, Intimations ofPostmodemity,; Routledge, London, 1992, p. 193. this is one of Bauman’s understandings of postmodern subjectivity.

53 Bauman, above, n53, p.xxii

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imperial power has its consolations amidst the rootlessness and flux of this awkwardly postcolonial, constitutively migrant country.

As national institutions the work of Dickens and Grisham does evidently codify 'the tacit assumptions' which 'constitute the doctrines of the state religion'54, and engage in what Naom Chomsky calls the 'manufacture of consent’55, but in a postmodern context where the act of consent is more meaningful than the consent itself. These texts perform in a context of destabilized identities and generalized loss of belief in, and relevancy of, the institution of the nation-state.

Their appeal to unimpeachable, and unremarkable traditional values is a seductive aspect of their narrative discourse in Great Expectations and The Firm. It is those values that excite the reader into exercising empathy. Under the aegis of these values, expecting that ultimately they will triumph, consumers (including those who might be considered un-English and un-American) can be gratified by accompanying their protagonists on their quest to join the most powerful constituencies possible. They can safely and meaningfully indulge ambitions sanctioned by capitalism, access the enhanced sense of self which drives such aspirations, and all in the belief that theirs is also a quest for ethical enlightenment.

These novelists address us in the knowledge that we would like to consent to the rules of the game and that the game excites us. The 'mass' audience commanded by these authors (in the nineteenth- century and today) has been enthralled by the code of imperial citizenry that is played out in their novels, where the stakes are always high. In the end, though, whilst the law for both is a rather menacing entity, one of the main attractions of their fictional universes is that neither can conceive of a world without its symbolic administration and bereft of its rule.

54

55

Naom Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader, edited by James Peck, Serpents Tail, London, 1988, p.126Chomsky, above, n55, p.121

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charles dickens and john grisham: agents of law and

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