Greta Olson

'Cathedralesque' Courthouses and
'Forensic' Narratives

The Intermingling of Institutional Forms of Power
with Narrative Paradigms
in the Early Nineteenth-Century Novel

• Jonathan H. Grossman: The Art of Alibi. English Law Courts and the Novel. Baltimore, MD, London: The Johns Hopkins University Press 2002. 216 S. Hardcover. USD 41,00.
  ISBN: 0-8018-6755-X.

Jonathan Grossman’s The Art of Alibi situates its subject matter at a crossroads between ›Law and Literature‹ studies, genre history, and narratology. The Art of Alibi takes up the story of the intermingling of institutional forms of power with literary paradigms where John Bender’s Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (1987) left off, namely at the end of the eighteenth century. Whereas Bender’s study suggests that the English novel’s development anticipated the disappearance of public executions in favor of imprisonment in penitentiaries, Grossman argues that the genesis of the detective novel in the second half of the nineteenth century was preceded by another novelistic genre also concerned with crime. This ›forensic‹ novel took its cue from the argumentative techniques, evidential procedures, and architectural particularities of newly visible and socially prominent criminal courtrooms. Forensic novels occasioned a new awareness of the courtroom and the novel as sites for relating individual, sometimes clashing stories or alibis. For in contrast to the word’s current usage as an excuse, an »alibi« was understood to be »the mounting of a realistic story narrated in a law court« (24) during the period that Grossman analyzes. He discovers the cause of this new courtroom-inspired approach to presenting characters’ experience in individuals’ increasing failure to believe that they would be judged by God in the hereafter. Instead, they needed to tell their individual stories, or hear ones like them be told in novels, in a form of »secularized, here-and-now-accountability« (173).

Methodology

Employing the methods of cultural studies, Grossman begins and ends his work with close readings of two paintings with strong narrative elements, both of which feature families waiting for a verdict to be made on one of their members, probably the family father. As Grossman interprets them, these paintings – one dated from 1857, the other from the 1890s – document a change towards an increasingly pessimistic proto-modernist view of public authority and the courtroom. Whereas in the earlier painting, a nearly celestial light emanates from the open door of the courtroom and seems to promise the defendant’s waiting loved ones that he shall be judged fairly, the later painting features only the courtroom’s closed door. The room where the family waits is bleak and dark; it contains no connecting space, or, by implication, communication and trust, between those who worry and wait outside the courtroom walls and those who pass sentence within them. Just as Bender rests his thesis on the structural similarity between the panoptic penitentiary’s aim to make prisoners constantly visible and the realist novel’s goal to render characters’ consciousness transparent, Grossman notes another architectural development that mirrored a changing architecture of mind: the construction of palatial law courts during the nineteenth century. These newly prominent courtrooms were evidence of the lawyerization of criminal tribunals, the increasing lengthiness of trials, including presentations of evidence and cross-examinations.

Whereas the scaffold had once marked the apex of punishment, the trial and verdict now came to be the public conclusion of the prisoner’s story (33). The courtroom’s adversarial discursive structure was mirrored in the development of the novel, where due to the introduction and increasing use of free indirect discourse, the reader could gain simultaneous access to a variety of viewpoints, stories, and conflicting tales about novelistic events. (Note that some narratologists may object to Grossman’s use of »free indirect discourse« to describe a variety of textual phenomena for presenting characters’ thoughts and words as being undifferentiated. 1 ) Thus Grossman compliments his readings of contemporary architecture, paintings, and argumentative strategies within the courtroom with an analysis of discursive techniques for articulating characters’ individual interpretations of events, or alibis.

An Alternative History
of English Criminal Narratives

Employing the complimentary reading strategies outlined above, The Art of Alibi thus offers an alternative history of English crime writing which outlines the following developments:

• Out of formulaic criminal biographies, confessions, and broadsheets more nuanced novels about criminals and criminality by Defoe and Fielding developed during the eighteenth century.

• William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) represents a turning away from these early novels about crime towards ones whose paradigms are based on adversarial trial ritual. Mary Shelley adopts her father’s forensic novelistic form in Frankenstein (1818), which imagines a chaos of social relations caused by the absence of courtroom rituals for establishing the truth. (Among the close readings of selected novels, the analysis of Shelley’s Frankenstein deserves particular mention: Grossman’s interpretation of Frankenstein’s creation as ›the human creature‹ is highly innovative, and his attention to the legal and personal ramifications of Percy Shelley’s custody battle for his children in 1816–17 sheds new historical light on the circumstances in which Mary Shelley wrote her well-known work.)

• In Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) the law court is at once the space for narrative resolution and the area in which social truths can be displayed as evidence: the professionalization of law is demonstrated in the trial scene in the earlier novel and the fierce reality of workers’ unbearable poverty in the latter one. Moreover, Mary Barton’s narrator invites the reader to sympathize with the defendant and his witnesses, suggesting the possibility of the reader’s being put on trial her or himself.

• In Newgate novels such as Eugene Aram (1832), the sympathetic telling of the defendant’s story in the form of culminating dramatic trial scenes further suggests that the reading audience not condemn but instead comprehend the identified criminal’s story. Effectively such novels »retried« the characters who had been accused and executed in the omniscient narrations of early criminal biographies and broadsheets (150).

• Significantly, a backlash against the Newgate novel ensued with the dissemination of the detective novel after the middle of the century. These fictional renderings of crime stories feature literary descendants of Dickens’s Inspector Bucket and they firmly deny the reader access to the identified criminal’s consciousness. One never hears his or her alibi and is led to sympathize instead with the perceptions of the detective.

Bouquets and Brickbats

Grossman is to be greatly complemented for his subtle rendering of one phase of the history of English crime writing. He accomplishes this task in part by offering a lucid review of theories about punishment, changes in trial procedure, and developments in how crime stories were narrated during the period he studies. Where needed, he takes issue with theorists such as Foucault concerning, for instance, the importance of the courtroom as a public and visible form of power (15–16). Moreover, the verve with which Grossman brings together cultural developments in painting, courtroom architecture, and legal procedure to explain the genesis and significance of the forensic novel is admirable.

Yet some points of reservation about The Art of Alibi remain in my mind. The greater part of Grossman’s central argument for a shift to a novelistic form based on the trial paradigm which mirrored the increasing centrality of courtroom tribunals in the public imagination rests on a close reading of about six novels and a smattering of legal texts that affected the authors of these novels. A frequent criticism made of cultural studies which has to be voiced here is that the selection of texts in a given study is not broad enough to provide convincing evidence for a wider cultural narrative. As in Bender’s work, the question of transfer between context and text, architectural model and narrative paradigm, is not adequately addressed in Grossman’s study. Similarities are drawn between textual and architectural developments, but no theoretical model for the process of mutual influence is named.

Finally, I wonder whether a preoccupation with trials and juridical procedures is unique to the early nineteenth-century novel as Grossman suggests it is. Arguably, Renaissance playwrights were equally interested in dramatizing human conflict and differences of perception by using the trial paradigm. One thinks of the many trial scenes central to Shakespeare’s, Webster’s and Jonson’s plays. Although they have no notion of the latter-day meaning of an alibi, Shakespearean characters such as Lear and Duke Vincentio nonetheless instigate trials in order to make their own actions comprehensible to themselves and others. If as Grossman suggests, the need to explain oneself in the here and now rests on a disbelief in the possibility of one’s being able to do so in the great beyond, then the need for forensic narratives seems to be a recurrent rather than a historically isolated one.

Prof. Dr. Greta Olson
Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
Institut für Anglistik
Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10B
DE - 35394 Gießen Gießen

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Diese Rezension wurde betreut von unserem Fachreferenten Dr. Joachim Linder (1948-2012). Sie finden den Text auch angezeigt im Portal Lirez – Literaturwissenschaftliche Rezensionen.

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Greta Olson: 'Cathedralesque' Courthouses and 'Forensic' Narratives. The Intermingling of Institutional Forms of Power with Narrative Paradigms in the Early Nineteenth-Century Novel. (Rezension über: Jonathan H. Grossman: The Art of Alibi. English Law Courts and the Novel. Baltimore, MD, London: The Johns Hopkins University Press 2002.)
In: IASLonline [02.11.2004]
URL: <http://www.iaslonline.de/index.php?vorgang_id=860>
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