‘As a glow brings out a haze’: understanding violence in jurisprudence and Joseph Conrad’s...

© 2007 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2007 The Society of Legal Scholars. Published by Blackwell Publishing,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

Legal Studies, Vol. 27 No. 3, September 2007, pp. 465–485DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-121X.2007.00063.x

‘As a glow brings out a haze’: understanding violence in jurisprudence and Joseph Conrad’s fiction

Stephen Skinner*

Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus

This paper explores connections between jurisprudential discussion of pain and violenceand the methodology of law and literature. Starting with Robert Cover’s work on law’s‘field of pain and death’, it argues that the theory on which he relied in rejecting literaryapproaches to law can equally justify a turn to fiction in understanding violence. It thenconsiders the experiential dimension of Austin Sarat’s and Thomas Kearns’s jurisprudenceof violence and argues that interdisciplinary perspectives, including relevant fiction, canassist in engaging with the challenges of capturing such experience in textual form.Situating the argument in relation to broader law and literature rationales, the paper findsrelevant illustrations in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent and UnderWestern Eyes. It argues that Conrad’s stories represent dimensions of pain and violencethat might otherwise be irreducible to non-fictional textual discourse, whilst also express-ing the limits of that representation.

INTRODUCTION

The nature of violence is deeply problematic: not only can the term ‘violence’ beused to carry a wide range of meanings – physical, mental, real, metaphorical, direct,indirect, symbolic, to name but a few – but also, ultimately, the experience of violenceis subjective, variable and hard to express or reproduce in textual form.

1

That said,we can come close: testimony, ethnography and fiction (among other forms of story)all capture, in different ways, different dimensions of violence and how it is experi-enced. In relation to law, the nature and impact of violence have been concerns inmany strands of legal theory. However, whereas legal theory might readily turn towitness statements, criminology or anthropology in developing arguments aboutviolence, a turn to fiction still seems, if not inappropriate, then at least awkward andin need of careful justification, despite nearly four decades of ‘law and literature’writings: fiction is made up, while the law is the law, and legal theory, perhapsespecially when concerned with violence, pain and death, has very real concerns. Thispaper seeks to show how, in theoretical terms, two strands of legal theory about

* I wish to thank Catherine Dupré, Richard Ireland, Melanie Williams and this journal’sanonymous referees for dissecting drafts of this paper. Earlier versions were presented at theSociety of Legal Scholars annual conference in September 2006 and at a law and literatureresearch seminar at Hull University in March 2007. For these opportunities and related discus-sion my thanks to Philip Bielby, Katharine Cockin and Tony Ward.

1.

See further S Skinner ‘Stories of pain and the pursuit of justice: law, violence, experienceand jurisprudence’ [2007] Law, Culture and the Humanities (forthcoming).

466 Legal Studies, Vol. 27 No. 3

© 2007 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2007 The Society of Legal Scholars

violence are open to a literary approach and that bringing relevant fiction alongsidethem can, albeit in limited and abstract ways, be useful.

The two strands of law and violence theory considered here are Robert Cover’swork on law’s ‘field of pain and death’

2

and the subsequent work of Austin Sarat andThomas Kearns, who have largely responded to Cover’s call to focus on law’s painfulimpact by laying the groundwork for developing a ‘jurisprudence of violence’, a keyaspect of which is the need to include experiential accounts of law’s violence.

3

Thispaper argues that Cover’s work contains within its theoretical underpinnings the basesfor a turn to fiction, despite his rejection of a certain type of literary approach, andthat the experiential analysis of violence called for in Sarat’s and Kearns’s work canusefully be extended to include relevant fictional accounts.

4

These openings to fiction are situated in relation to some of the broader rationalesfor ‘law and literature’ studies, and examples are then drawn from three works byJoseph Conrad, namely

Heart of Darkness

,

The Secret Agent

and

Under Western Eyes

,selected because of Conrad’s modernist concerns with violence and the fragmentationof meaning, which are apparent in these works’ subject matter and style. The paperargues that Conrad’s representation of the experience of pain and violence in theseworks, in terms of both content and narrative technique, can at least illustrate and atbest also inform understanding of that experience, some dimensions of which mightotherwise be irreducible to non-fictional textual discourse, whilst at the same timeexpressing the limits of that representation. The suggestion here is that this prelimi-nary consideration of the expressibility of violence’s experiential dimensions can helpto direct and delimit jurisprudential investigation into the nature and impact ofviolence, as influence on and object, instrument and consequence of the law, whichit is hoped subsequent work will continue to explore.

1. VIOLENCE AND WORDS

In a well-known essay published in 1986, entitled ‘Violence and the Word’, Americanlegal theorist Robert Cover sought to remind those favouring a literary and interpre-tation-based approach to law that it operates in ‘a field of pain and death’.

5

AlthoughCover was not the first to concern himself with the connections between law andviolence, his was a particularly dramatic reminder of the ways in which legal deci-sions, particularly in the area of criminal law, cause hurt and have a physical impacton peoples’ lives in painful ways.

2.

R Cover ‘Violence and the word’ (1986) 95 Yale Law Journal 1601. See also R Cover‘The bonds of constitutional interpretation: of the word, the deed, and the role’ (1986) 20Georgia Law Review 815.

3.

A Sarat and TR Kearns ‘A journey through forgetting: toward a jurisprudence of violence’in A Sarat and TR Kearns (eds)

The Fate of Law

(Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1991)pp 209–273; A Sarat and TR Kearns ‘Introduction’ in A Sarat and TR Kearns

Law’s Violence

(Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1995) pp 1–21; A Sarat ‘Situating law between therealities of violence and the claims of justice: an introduction’ in A Sarat (ed)

Law, Violenceand the Possibility of Justice

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) pp 3–16; A Sarat‘Introduction: on pain and death as facts of legal life’ in A Sarat (ed)

Pain, Death and the Law

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001) pp 1–14.

4.

Compare P Tuitt ‘Law and violence in Richard Wright’s “Native Son” ’ (2000) 11 Lawand Critique 201.

5.

Cover ‘Violence and the word’, above n 2, at 1601.

‘As a glow brings out a haze’ 467


Cover’s reason for issuing this reminder was what he saw as the predominant focuson interpretive practices in theoretical writing at the time. In Cover’s view, work byRonald Dworkin on legal interpretation as the construction of meaning,

6

and inparticular the work of James Boyd White, which emphasised law’s function as asystem of constitutive rhetoric providing shared meanings through textual interpreta-tion,

7

ignore the fact that the law is grounded on real force, or violence, which‘frequently marks the failure of community and the metaphors that evoke it’.

8

ForCover, as violence causes pain, which destroys ‘the world that interpretation callsup’,

9

legal theory that forgets the law’s infliction of hurt forgets its essential charac-teristic. Cover’s principal point was that we should not lose sight of the fact that law’sconstruction of shared meaning is limited where one side in any interpretive situationexperiences the law as a source of pain: as pain resists language, he rather sweepinglyargues, and can destroy the sufferer’s world, law’s infliction of pain is thus a barrierto law’s giving of meaning.

Cover’s argument about the destructive impact of pain was constructed largely onthe basis of Elaine Scarry’s influential – but controversial – work published theprevious year,

The Body in Pain

.

10

Cover seems to have been most influenced by whatis, perhaps, the best known argument advanced by Scarry, about the effect of pain onlanguage:

‘Physical pain does not simply resist language but actually destroys it, bringingabout an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds andcries a human being makes before language is learned.’

11

Scarry explains that pain brings about an ‘absolute split between one’s sense of one’sown reality and the reality of other persons’

12

and that it defies linguistic expression:‘it is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon,resists objectification in language’.

13

However, it is recalled here that while this aspectof her work certainly supports Cover’s criticisms, subsequent parts of

The Body inPain

can support an alternative view, as will be outlined below, that certain texts canshare meaning about pain and, as Scarry puts it, even defeat or unmake violence.

After arguing that pain resists expression and is objectless, Scarry then exploresit in terms of its relations with power through the examples of torture and war, asparadigm illustrations of the ‘unmaking of worlds’ through hurting. She subsequently

6.

Cover refers specifically to R Dworkin

Law’s Empire

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1986).

7.

Cover refers specifically to JB White

When Words Lose Their Meaning

(Chicago: ChicagoUniversity Press, 1984) and

Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law

(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).

8.

Cover ‘The bonds of constitutional interpretation’, above n 2, at 817.

9.

Cover ‘Violence and the word’, above n 2, at 1602.

10.

E Scarry

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

(New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1985). In ‘The bonds of constitutional interpretation’, Cover calls Scarry’swork ‘a brilliant evocation of the world-destroying character of pain for those who suffer it’;above n 2, at 817. Ways in which Scarry’s work has been questioned are outlined in Sarat‘Introduction: on pain and death’, above n 3, pp 7–9 and P Fitzpatrick ‘Why the law is alsononviolent’ in Sarat

Law, Violence and the Possibility of Justice

, above n 3, pp 142–173 at p 161.

11.

Scarry, ibid, p 4.

12.

Ibid, p 4.

13.

Ibid, p 5.



turns to the processes of human creativity, approaching it in two stages. First, sheproposes a close connection between pain and the imagination. Pain, she reminds us,is objectless and ‘cannot easily be objectified in any form, material or verbal’; but,she continues:

‘. . . it is also its objectlessness that may first give rise to imagining by firstoccasioning the process that eventually brings forth the dense sea of artifacts andsymbols that we make and move about in. All other states, precisely by taking anobject, at first invite one only to enter rather than to supplement the naturalworld.’

14

In other words and condensing her thesis, she suggests that the objectless state of‘having pain’ might be the originary stimulus in human creativity that seeks to alterthe world, to seek to express pain or to alleviate it. She then argues that pain and theimagination are similar due to their anomalous nature:

‘The only state that is as anomalous as pain is the imagination. While pain isa state remarkable for being wholly without objects, the imagination is remarkablefor being the only state that is wholly its objects. There is in imagining no activity,no “state”, no experienceable condition or felt-occurrence separate from theobjects: the only evidence that one is “imagining” is that imaginary objects appearin the mind. Thus, while pain is like seeing or desiring but not like seeing x ordesiring y, the opposite but equally extraordinary characteristic belongs to imag-ining. It is like the x or y that are the objects of vision or desire, but not like thefelt-occurrences of seeing or desiring. While, then, pain is like other forms ofsentience but devoid of the self-extension that is ordinarily the counterpart ofsentience, the imagination is like other forms of the capacity for self-extensionwithout the experienceable sentience on which it is ordinarily premised.’

15

In Scarry’s analysis then, pain involves sensing or feeling without an object (it maybe caused

by

an object but occurs in the body, in the nervous system in a disembodiedway); the imagination involves an apparent perception of an object, which is not thesame as the actual perception of a tangible object. Pain is feeling, without necessarilyfeeling a real something; imagining is like feeling or seeing a real something, but thatfeeling or seeing is not real. However, according to Scarry, the

products

of theimagination do involve self-extension and experienceable sentience: artifacts (physi-cal, or textual) project and reciprocate the human body, recording and recreatinghuman sentience.

16

On this basis, Scarry then focuses on poetry, stating that:

‘. . . the poet projects the acuities of sentience into the sharable, because objec-tified, poem, which exists not for its own sake but to be read: its power now movesback from the object realm to the human realm where sentience itself is remade. . . the poet is working not to make the artifact . . . but to remake human sentience;by means of the poem, he or she enters into and in some way alters the alivepercipience of other persons.’

17

In this way the poem is not an end in itself, but a means to the end of reproducingand sharing sentience, awareness and understanding of the poem’s objects.

14.

Ibid, p 162.

15.

Ibid, p 162.

16.

Ibid, p 280.

17.

Ibid, p 307.



Consequently, Scarry argues, the imagination may be triggered by pain and is similarto pain in its objectlessness (pain lacks tangible objects; the imagination constitutesits own objects), but also, crucially, the imagination can produce artifacts that bothacknowledge and counteract pain (which would otherwise – in her analysis – fore-close or limit sharable sentience by destroying or resisting language) by remakinghuman sentience: ‘Directed against the isolating aversiveness of pain, mental andmaterial culture assumes the sharability of sentience’.

18

In other words, although paincan destroy language and defeat expression, poetic texts – and arguably therefore alsofiction – can, on this basis, (re-)establish communication and share experience, poten-tially unmaking pain’s destructiveness through creative processes in the imagination.

19

However, at this stage of the analysis Scarry’s claims appear to shift in focus. Theearlier part is about pain as a physical experience limiting, if not defeating, thepossibility of verbal expression and, in its most extreme forms, destroying a sufferer’sworld (that is, identity and relationship with surroundings and others). This last part,about sharing sentience through poetry, moves beyond the physical to meanings andimpressions of pain and to its emotional and psychological dimensions. Poetry, andfiction as this paper goes on to explore, can express pain and violence approximativelyand help us to understand them. That linguistic expression, through its sympatheticand empathetic effects, can lead a reader or listener to imagine the pain or violencein question and perhaps even to feel it, without the direct experience itself. As such,by creating shared sentience, pain’s destructiveness can be said to be unmade. Suchemotional or psychological unmaking of pain can also be seen in the therapeuticeffects of poetry, fiction and other forms of narrative account expressing and sharingexperience of violence for those who have suffered it, helping to restore identity andassert being in its aftermath.

20

In these ways, language can unmake pain and itsdestructiveness, but not physically, repairing damaged nerves and tissues. It must alsobe recalled that language does not only share sentience about pain, but can also causeit, exerting a violent force of its own through its emotional impact, and even as aninstrument of hate and aggression.

21

Consequently, whilst noting the shift in registerfrom physical to cognitive in Scarry’s writing about pain, the imagination and lan-guage, it is important to remember that this is but one aspect of the complex relation-ship between language and violence.

So, Cover argued, law cannot establish common meaning where it also causespain, which resists or destroys language and thus communication and understanding.Yet, following Scarry’s further argument, textual artifacts of the imagination can sharemeaning about pain and its effects and perhaps balance or counteract it. Consequently,whereas Cover argues on the basis of Scarry against ‘literary’ approaches to law thatfocus on legal meaning, a different sort of ‘literary’ approach that includes creativetexts can be justified from within that same theoretical discourse in order to address

18.

Ibid, p 326.

19.

Compare C Nordstrom

A Different Kind of War Story

(Philadelphia: University of Penn-sylvania Press, 1997).

20.

Compare S Brison ‘The uses of narrative in the aftermath of violence’ in C Card (ed)

OnFeminist Ethics and Politics

(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999) pp 200–225 andsee n 54 below.

21.

J Butler

Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative

(New York: Routledge, 1997).My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this reference.



Cover’s central concern.

22

The suggestion here is therefore that pain is not as completea barrier to meaning as Cover indicates in his partial reliance on Scarry. Poetry and,for the purposes of this paper, fiction can share meaning about pain and violence.Although such sharing of meaning is in a more general sense than Cover’s specificfocus on law’s violence, it is suggested here that it is nevertheless relevant as part ofjurisprudential engagement with the nature and experience of pain and violence as apreliminary stage in exploring their relationship with law and justice.

2. A JURISPRUDENCE OF VIOLENCE

Cover’s concern with the relationship between law and violence has inspired otherefforts to take that debate further. Perhaps foremost among these is a series of essaysby Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns, who have set out the groundwork for developingwhat they call a ‘jurisprudence of violence’, that is, theoretical engagement with theconnections between law and violence and its relevance to law’s scope for and abilityto imagine and provide justice.

23

For Sarat and Kearns, as for Cover, the concern withlaw’s violence is primarily with the law’s real impact, essentially physical, that causespain to real people. Yet, in addition to physical violence within and beyond law, theyinclude a form of metaphorical, or textual, violence present in legal decision makingand interpretation, in their words ‘wherever a legal edict, a judicial decision, or alegislative act cuts, wrenches, or excises life from its social context’.

24

They arguethat law has a constitutive relationship with violence: violence is present in thefounding of legal orders, it is law’s object and reason for being and provides themeans through which the law acts

25

(here they include ‘violent’ acts by legal officialsand those acting under a legal dispensation or excused by law

26

). In short, Sarat andKearns are concerned with physical and metaphorical violence inside law, but alsobring the violence outside law – law’s object – into their jurisprudential discussion.

Ultimately, Sarat’s and Kearns’s concern is with the dissonance between law andits violence and with those on whom such violence has an impact. Along similar linesto Cover, they argue that violence and pain defeat language and attempts to rationaliselaw’s violence.

27

The purpose of their project to develop a jurisprudence of violenceis to explore the ways in which the apparent gulf between law and the impact of itsviolence affects understandings of justice: whether the law can still aspire to, orpurport to promise, justice, when it is written on bodies and deals in pain and death.

28

One aspect of this endeavour is, for Sarat and Kearns, the consideration of experiencesof law and the effects of its violence.

29

22.

For different views on the connections between Cover’s work and ‘literary’ approachessee C Greenhouse ‘Reading violence’ in Sarat and Kearns

Law’s Violence

, above n 3, pp 105–139 and M Constable ‘The silence of the law: justice in Cover’s “Field of Pain and Death” ’in Sarat

Law, Violence and the Possibility of Justice

, above n 3, pp 85–100.

23.

Sarat and Kearns

Law’s Violence

, above n 3. See further Skinner, above n 1.

24.

Sarat and Kearns ‘A journey through forgetting’, above n 3, p 210.

25.

Sarat and Kearns ‘Introduction’ in

Law’s Violence

, above n 3, p 2.

26.

Sarat ‘Situating law’, above n 3, p 3.

27.

Sarat and Kearns ‘Introduction’ in

Law’s Violence

, above n 3, p 2 and ‘A journey throughforgetting’, above n 3, p 219.

28.

Sarat ‘Situating law’, above n 3, pp 6–7 and 9.

29.

Sarat and Kearns ‘A journey through forgetting’, above n 3, p 272.



The idea of including experiential accounts of law’s violence raises a range ofdifficulties, including, it is argued here (and elsewhere

30

), the general problems ofobserving and recording experiences of any form of violence. Along similar lines toScarry, anthropological accounts of violence emphasise its irreducibility into textualaccounts: for example, ‘the horror and humiliation of violence can perhaps never bereduced into discursive accounts let alone adequate theories making it rational andcontrollable’.

31

Other studies emphasise the problems of recording experiences ofnon-verbal aspects of violence, the effect of the passage of time and elements ofhuman expression not reproducible in textual form.

32

Given these difficulties in capturing experiences of violence in textual form, it hasbeen suggested in a recent anthropological analysis that ‘integrated’ and ‘pluri-disciplinary’ approaches are needed in this area, in an effort to try to achieve a‘spectroscopic view of the phenomenon of violence’.

33

In other words, as there is notone certain way of observing experience, considering it from a range of perspectivesand studying representations of it in different contexts and formats can be informative.Consequently, it is suggested here that an interdisciplinary approach to recording andunderstanding experiences of violence is a valuable adjunct to Sarat’s and Kearns’sidea of including experiential accounts in a jurisprudence of violence. Although theirproject has a specific focus and specific theoretical aims, the idea here is that ajurisprudence of violence can usefully widen its scope and its sources to includerelevant fiction, in order to seek to understand violence, its impact and their express-ibility as broadly as possible and not solely in relation to the law’s field of pain anddeath. Such an approach is useful, it is suggested, in determining the limits oftheoretical inquiry and in raising questions that might then be applied to specificallylegal investigation. The next section situates this interdisciplinary turn to fiction inrelation to broader law and literature rationales.

3. JUSTIFYING A ‘LAW AND LITERATURE’ METHODOLOGY

The discussion so far has led to the argument that theoretical analysis of law andviolence needs to include consideration of how pain and violence are expressed increative texts, based on recognition of such texts’ particular ability to convey meaningabout those complex phenomena and the suggested need for a range of forms ofevidence about how pain and violence are experienced. This is not to suggest,however, that fiction holds more answers than other texts, but rather to explore therole that fiction could play as an additional and illustrative source of information.Bringing fiction, often loosely described as ‘literature’, to law is not of course new:law and literature scholarship, in its forms of ‘law as literature’ and ‘law in literature’,or combinations of both, is by now well known and increasingly well established.Histories of this branch of interdisciplinary studies have already been produced, as

30.

Skinner, above n 1.

31.

J Abbink ‘Preface: violation and violence as cultural phenomena’ in G Aijmer and JAbbink (eds)

Meanings of Violence: A Cross Cultural Perspective

(Oxford: Berg, 2000) p xv.

32.

See further Skinner, above n 1.

33.

G Aijmer ‘Introduction: The idiom of violence in imagery and discourse’ in Aijmer andAbbink, above n 31, p 2.



have useful summaries of the main underlying rationales.

34

Rather than offer anadditional overview of the origins and general purposes of law and literature studies,this section presents two sets of rationales for turning to fiction, which are deemedto be of particular relevance to the problems raised by the phenomenon of violence.

(a) Beyond the law: holism, emotions and alternative worlds

The turn to literature as an adjunct to law is said by its proponents to enable criticaldiscussion to move beyond orthodox legal analysis in three main ways. The first isthe idea that literature allows for a more holistic exploration of human activity andexperience. The law, in order to be objective and impartial, approaches its subjectsin detached and generalised ways – the legal individual, the reasonable man – whichare quite rightly said by Douzinas and Geary to be ‘censored, constrained andcontextless’.

35

However, as Sarat and Kearns point out, in so doing the law (neces-sarily) excises life from its social context,

36

that is, it reasons reductively about thosebefore it, considering only what the law allows to be relevant. Such an approach is,though, to be criticised when the view taken on legal subjects divorces them fromessential explanatory context. In contrast, the literary individual is, in Douzinas’s andGeary’s words again, ‘corporeal, free and gendered’.

37

In other words, this line ofargument runs, the literary treatment of characters is said to be more holistic (even‘realistic’) than the law’s and that a literary jurisprudence can be used to confront lawand legal theory to expose instances where their view is too narrow.38

The second advantage of the turn to literature, closely related to the first, has beensaid to be the idea that ‘reading fiction puts the emotional back into the legal equation’and ‘draw[s] our attention to the emotional realm that lies beyond the reach of thelaw’.39 The basis of this argument is that the human being is as much a creature ofemotion and feeling as of reason and thought, and that the emotional complex is acrucial part of understanding the human condition and human behaviour.40 The extent

34. Robert Weisberg ‘The law-literature enterprise’ (1988) 1 Yale Journal of Law and theHumanities 1; Richard Weisberg Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1992); I Ward ‘Law and literature’ (1993) 4 Law and Critique43 and Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1995); M Pantazakos ‘Ad Humanitatem Pertinent: a personal reflection on the historyand purpose of the law and literature movement’ (1995) 7(1) Cardozo Studies in Law andLiterature 31; G Minda ‘Law and literature at century’s end’ (1997) 9(2) Cardozo Studies inLaw and Literature 245; M Aristodemou Law and Literature: Journeys from Her to Eternity(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); M Williams Empty Justice: One Hundred Years ofLaw, Literature and Philosophy (London: Cavendish, 2002); A Manji ‘Law, labour and resis-tance to French colonialism in Sembene Ousmane’s Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu’ (2005) 25 LS320 at 322. See also R West ‘Jurisprudence as narrative: an aesthetic analysis of modern legaltheory’ (1985) 60 New York University Law Review 145 and ‘Disciplines, subjectivity andlaw’ in Sarat and Kearns The Fate of Law, above n 3, pp 119–157.35. C Douzinas and A Geary Critical Jurisprudence: The Political Philosophy of Justice(Oxford: Hart, 2005) p 342.36. Sarat and Kearns ‘A journey through forgetting’, above n 3, p 210.37. Douzinas and Geary, above n 35, p 342.38. Williams, above n 34, p 191.39. S Skinner ‘ “A benevolent institution for the suppression of evil”: Joseph Conrad’s TheSecret Agent and the limits of policing’ (2003) 30 J Law and Society 420 at 440.40. Pantazakos, above n 34, at 35 and 43. See also T Massaro ‘Empathy, legal storytellingand the rule of law: new worlds, old wounds?’ (1989) 87 Michigan Law Review 2099.



to which the law recognises, or needs to recognise, the emotional is, however,debatable.

On the one hand, it is arguable that reading literature that explores the emotionaldimensions of a given situation assists understanding by deepening it, providingindirect evidence of feeling; by extension, such evidence helps to identify and under-stand the limits of law and of its institutions.41 Moreover, emotive literature thatreminds us of human feeling and complexity has been said to serve important ethicaland educative functions. Perhaps foremost among proponents of these arguments areRichard Weisberg and Martha Nussbaum. Richard Weisberg has famously argued thatliterary jurisprudence – using fiction in the analysis of law – can serve to fill ‘theethical void’ in legal thought,42 by inducing readers to ‘see the other’ and ‘to under-stand the world from within the other’s optic’.43 Reading stories can assist in imag-ining and seeking to do justice, by drawing attention to the complexity of others andin confronting values and belief systems with alternatives.44 Along similar lines,Nussbaum has argued that literary texts’ rich representations of human beings andhuman life in its variety, complexity, otherness and similarities are of ethical and, assuch, educative importance. She has argued that the arts (that is, the contentious ideaof good books) help to form the ‘narrative imagination’, which assists in cultivating‘a capacity for sympathetic imagination’, helping us to understand ‘the limits of eachperson’s access to every other’ and to develop compassion.45 She has also argued,more specifically in relation to justice, that ‘literary imagination’, in conjunction withmoral and legal judgment, is an essential part of ethical reasoning: ‘an ethics ofimpartial respect for human dignity will fail to engage real human beings unless theyare made capable of entering imaginatively into the lives of distant others and to haveemotions related to that participation’.46 To this end, she has emphasised the strengthsand advantages of fiction in developing readers’ – and lawyers’ – capacities forethically sophisticated (that is, sympathetic, imaginative but also objective)47 under-standing and judgement.

On the other hand, the skeptical Robert Weisberg has argued that:

‘It is obviously desirable that law should be informed by the voice of theconcrete, the particular, the empathetic, the passionate. But to make this pointabout legal discourse hardly should require recurrence to the great works of theHumanities . . . Lawyers or law students are or should be perfectly aware evenfrom conventional case analysis that human pain underlies doctrinal abstraction. . . To say that we need to read works of imaginative literature to see this point isodd. It should be unnecessary, since normal human minds and sensibilities shouldrealize the point even by reading the bare facts of [a] case . . .’48

Thus, in his view, the turn to literature with regard to the emotional is unnecessary.Indeed, to a certain extent, given the growth in critical approaches to law, including

41. Skinner, above n 39, at 423 and 440.42. Richard Weisberg, above n 34, p 4.43. Ibid, p 46.44. Ibid, p 46.45. M Nussbaum Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) pp 6, 10–11 and 85–92.46. M Nussbaum Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: BeaconPress, 1995) p xvi and note p 12.47. Ibid, pp 90 and 120.48. Robert Weisberg, above n 34, at 17–18.



the psychoanalytical, and an apparent increase in subjective approaches in some areasof substantive law, with partial recognition of emotional factors and the slow devel-opment of restorative justice, the emotional is arguably less of a ‘beyond’ than someaccounts have claimed.

Nevertheless, it is argued here that in relation to law and violence and the com-plexities of understanding the experience of violence, a plurality of approaches –interdisciplinarity, or the use of a range of forms of evidence – is required.49 Conse-quently, a turn to relevant fiction that serves as an adjunct to legal analysis, thickeningand deepening it by showing a range of dimensions of and responses to violence andthe complexities of its settings, can be beneficial – and of these the emotionaldimension is essential, both in its expressibility and inexpressibility, a duality dis-cussed further in the next section.

The idea of plurality and range is the third advantage of the turn to literatureconsidered here, especially its scope for offering a ‘vision of alternative futures,including alternative legalities’,50 or as a ‘fabular model to explore philosophicalquestions’.51 In other words, literature can offer alternative worlds in which law, itslimits, responsibilities and problems can be re-imagined and tested and, more simply,can be used to illustrate relevant problems and dimensions of existence as an aid tounderstanding. In this way, fiction does not seek to provide (or impose, or assert)objective truths, but instead offers possibilities for understanding. Relevant fiction canillustrate problems, representing and explaining them in different ways, providingunrestrained perspectives that can assist – or challenge, or stretch – understanding ofa given phenomenon, such as violence.52

(b) The significance of narrative: form and content

The second main type of rationale considered here concerns the significance ofnarrative, which needs to be approached with reference to a broad context.53 Muchwork relating to processes of truth and reconciliation in transitional democracies hasdiscussed the significance of narrative accounts of experience – personal stories – inre-establishing dignity, identity and a sense of justice.54 Similarly, work on the liter-ature of testimony has engaged with these issues in relation to historical and semi-historical accounts.55 Free narratives, whose stories, bounded only by the teller’s

49. See also Aristodemou, above n 34, pp 2–4 and Williams, above n 34, p xxix.50. Manji, above n 34, at 336.51. Williams, above n 34, p xxiv.52. Lane argues that whereas psychology, philosophy and sociology tend to ‘explain away’aspects of human behaviour, a more complete understanding can be derived from literature‘which recasts social issues in imaginative ways and lets responsibility take a backseat torepresentation’; C Lane Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2004) p xx. Nussbaum argues that novels allow for theexploration of issues in imagined social settings, which in their difference from, or similarityto, the reader’s call for reflection and critical (re)assessment; above n 46, pp 7 and 29.53. Compare R Delgado ‘Storytelling for oppositionists and others: a plea for narrative’(1988) 87 Michigan Law Review 2411.54. For example T Godwin Phelps Shattered Voices: Language, Violence and the Work ofTruth Commissions (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2004) and D Tutu No FutureWithout Forgiveness (London: Ebury Press, 1999); see further Skinner, above n 1.55. For example J-M Schramm Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature andTheology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).



capacities and told from the teller’s unconstrained perspective, or narratives boundedby rules of relevance but still in the teller’s voice and time, have been shown to beof great importance and value for narrator and audience. Narrative accounts such asthese are significant for their content, their structure and their style. In this light, it issuggested here that fictional narratives can also similarly inform legal theory withregard to violence, in the ways that they tell violent stories and represent pain, throughthe interplay of content and form.

For example, one of the problems identified above with regard to reducing theexperience of violence to textual form is the complexity of verbal and non-verbaldimensions in that experience and its expression, such as the mixture of nameableemotions and fears alongside phenomena such as confusion, suddenness and expec-tation, which are hard to capture in textual discourse. Similarly, the expression ofviolent experience may use verbal and non-verbal communication, may be interruptedand disjointed, or may involve deliberate or subconscious practices of distancing.56

In this respect, it is suggested here, a turn to literary narrative can be useful in seekingto achieve a broader representation of these dimensions of violent experience: fic-tional narrative in terms of content, style and form can go some way to capturing andexpressing elements that are otherwise hard to encapsulate in rational, ordered dis-course. Style and form in fiction, freed of the linear or logical constraints of non-fiction, can convey meaning as powerfully as content.57 Characterisation and narrativevoice can represent important issues relating to identity with regard to violence, aswell as voice and language when talking about it. The content of fiction is also,obviously, significant, with regard to its portrayal of the context and impact of events,often providing a richer, more pluri-dimensional picture than non-fiction. Finally, inliterature, it is as much what is included – expressed by the text or implied by theform – as what lies beyond the text that has significance, in terms of both the unstatedand the story’s effect (its impact on the reader). Consequently, fiction, as an alternativeor an adjunct to accounts of real violence, has, on the basis of the above arguments,much to offer – and may in some instances even be preferable to politically rooted,real-life testimony in imagining alternative worlds, freer of constraining meaning andmoral pre-judgement.

Ultimately though, the role of fiction is constrained by one key factor: relevance.For this reason, the paper turns now to the fiction of Joseph Conrad, an author forwhom pain and violence were significant themes, the interaction of content andnarrative technique particularly important, and for whom awareness of the limits oftextual expression was paramount.

4. UNDERSTANDING VIOLENCE IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S FICTION

This section explores the relevance of Joseph Conrad’s fiction to studying violenceand, specifically, the representation of violence and its impact in three of his works,

56. Nordstrom, above n 19, pp 10, 16–24 and 116 and C Nordstrom and A Robben (eds)Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival (Berkeley: CaliforniaUniversity Press, 1995) p 12; see further Skinner, above n 1.57. See also M Nussbaum ‘Introduction: form and content, philosophy and literature’ in MNussbaum Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1990) pp 3–53 at p 3 and Richard Weisberg on content and style in legaldiscourse, above n 34, pp 6–7.



namely his 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness and two of his novels, The Secret Agentfrom 1907 and Under Western Eyes from 1910–11,58 which have been chosen becauseof their various portrayals of violence and pain, their particular narrative styles andfor their cohesion in terms of the development of Conrad’s writing. Here, as above,the term violence is used in its prima facie sense of the contested causing of physicalor mental hurt to another, or others, and pain is considered to include emotionalsuffering and anguish.

(a) The relevance of Conrad’s fiction to understanding pain and violence

Joseph Conrad’s fiction is celebrated for its innovations in theme and narrative style,marking the transition from the Victorian novel to modernism. Reflecting the fin-de-siècle decline of moral confidence and loss of previous certainties about humanknowledge and humankind’s place in the world, largely influenced by rapid socialchange and major advances in science, the modernist novel was marked by fragmen-tation, linguistic experiment and narrative disturbance.59 Turning against faith inobjective truths, idealism and metaphysical understanding of the world around us,modernism and the modern novel sought to disrupt expectations and, at the sametime, question, through content and form, humankind’s capacity to understand theworld, the self and others, and to achieve meaningful communication. This question-ing of boundaries and objectivity and this focus on human understanding means thatmodernist novels are well suited to a late, or post- modern questioning of legalproblems through interdisciplinarity, particularly with regard to the limits of theoret-ical and textual understanding.60 Moreover, the modern novel was particularly con-cerned with issues of violence: some modern writers, such as Conrad, were motivatedto write about ‘the random incidental violence sometimes shaken loose from ordinaryexistence’ and others, later, were concerned with facing up to ‘the continuous pur-poseful violence’ of the First World War.61

Joseph Conrad was a significant and innovative figure in the development ofmodernist fiction and these themes characterise his writing, partly due to his lifeexperiences of solitude, exile, rootlessness and despair.62 Conrad’s fiction is bestknown for his exploration of various antagonistic themes – and for that very antago-nistic tension in his works.63 These are, primarily, the tensions between isolation andcommunity, between solidarity and betrayal, between duty, civilised values and

58. All references are to the Oxford World’s Classics series: C Watts (ed) Heart of Darkness(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); R Tennant (ed) The Secret Agent (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998); and J Hawthorn (ed) Under Western Eyes (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2003).59. M Levenson ‘Introduction’ in M Levenson (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Modern-ism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) p 1.60. M Bell ‘The metaphysics of modernism’ in Levenson, ibid, p 9.61. D Trotter ‘The modernist novel’ in Levenson, ibid, p 77.62. See J Hawthorn Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment (Lon-don: Edward Arnold, 1990); C Watts A Preface to Conrad (London: Longman, 2nd edn, 1993)pp 42 and 46; J Batchelor The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell,1994); A Gillon The Eternal Solitary: A Study of Joseph Conrad (New York: BookmanAssociates, 1960) especially pp 56–57; and Skinner, above n 39, pp 424–425.63. K Carabine ‘Under Western Eyes’ in J Stape (ed) The Cambridge Companion to JosephConrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) pp 122–139 at p 122.



restraint, on the one hand, and baser human feelings and desires, on the other, andbetween communication and uncertain meaning.64 With regard to the latter, Ravalexplains that:

‘Conrad’s fiction . . . dramatizes those moments of experience which some-times force his main characters, sometimes his narrators, and always his readers,to ask whether they can be trusted to understand what has been brought to theircritical attention. It deals with issues in the context of a historical-political-socialworld in which understanding is a problem, our knowledge of ourselves and ofthe world questionable, and our language inadequate to grasp the experience whichmakes up our cultural and spiritual life.’65

His positing of an antagonistic framework for his stories offers a partial explanatorymatrix in which action, consequence and experience can be understood but, even so,his work does not propose affirmative views, or impose a particular understanding ofsocial existence; it is neither redemptive nor nihilistic and always aware of doubt andthe limits of expression. Conrad’s fiction thus offers a critical distance from theproblems of existence and encourages the reader to reconsider such matters; heprovides a hazy glimpse of alternative worlds without a coercive worldview. Again,Raval observes that ‘Conrad’s fiction resists any prescriptive attitude’.66

In this light, with reference to the jurisprudential discussion outlined above, Con-rad’s fiction is a valuable source for a literary jurisprudence, or more precisely, forthe study of elements of fiction relevant to legal theory. Pain and violence, in variousmanifestations, are common in Conrad’s works, as catalysts for developments leadingto the playing out of other themes and as devices for highlighting his fundamentalview on the unplanned and unpredictable vagaries of humanity’s difficult existence,as ‘an endless chain of dull events broken by unexpected shocks’.67 Most significantlyfor this study, Conrad’s portrayals of pain and violence, through the content and formof his stories, illustrate their complexity and impact, together with the difficultiesinvolved in recording and expressing them through text. The examples discussed hereare taken from three works in which these elements are particularly striking.68

(b) Violence and pain in Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes

Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, is perhaps his best known story, due to thememorably bleak yet uncertain tale it tells, its distinctively dislocated narrative styleand its grim portrayal of colonial misdeeds in Africa. It is the story of a voyage up agreat African river (which is clearly the Congo) made by Marlow, Conrad’s recurrent

64. For example Gillon, above n 62; R Roussel The Metaphysics of Darkness: A Study in theUnity and Development of Conrad’s Fiction (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1971); S RavalThe Art of Failure: Conrad’s Fiction (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986); R Hampson JosephConrad: Betrayal and Identity (London: Macmillan, 1992); U Lord Solitude Versus Solidarityin the Novels of Joseph Conrad (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998).65. Raval, ibid, p 2. Lord, ibid, p 95 argues that ‘[h]umankind in the late nineteenth centurywas forced to acknowledge that human ideals are derivative of our own illusions, ultimatelyunsupported by any reality outside ourselves’.66. Raval, ibid, pp 167–168.67. Gillon, above n 62, p 143.68. For some readers three works will be too many or too few: the aim is to support thearguments advanced with a broader than usual range of examples, but within reasonable limits.



narrator, in search of a mysterious colonial administrator named Kurtz. The storyinvolves ‘doubly oblique narration’,69 in that an anonymous narrator tells the story asrelated by Marlow in unexplained circumstances to a group of friends gathered atdusk on the deck of a sailing boat on the Thames. Marlow tells how he joined anexpedition up the African river, recounting his strange and inexplicable experiencesalong the way to the final, disturbing encounter with Kurtz.

The whole story is marked by doubt and uncertainty, representing Conrad’s con-cerns with the impossibility of unequivocal understanding and ‘effectively commu-nicating the difficulty of effective communication’.70 In relation to the story’s doublyoblique narrative style, Lord observes that:

‘Conrad’s creation of Marlow and his embedding of Marlow’s narrative withinanother acknowledges that we always perceive the world many times removed,filtered through our own consciousness and that of others, as through a glassdarkly. [It is] a formal device that acknowledges and reflects the alienation andfragmentation of the modern experience.’71

The dark glass of the narrative succeeds only in revealing the elusiveness of under-standing; in Conrad’s stories, particularly in Heart of Darkness, the narrator finds that:

‘. . . neither his language, his narrative sequence, nor the dramatized event ofthe story-telling itself succeeds in ordering the events to reveal meaning. Disclo-sure is promised from the language, the incidents narrated, and the structure of thenarrative, but it is not forthcoming.’72

Famously, Marlow’s own style is impressionistic: ‘to him the meaning of an episodewas not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out onlyas a glow brings out a haze . . .’.73 In this web of vagueness, violence is a constant,but unclear and inexplicable presence in Heart of Darkness. The most striking form,as is well known, is the violence against the native population committed by thecolonial administration in pursuit of riches.74 Conrad’s political position in this regardhas been the object of much discussion and, even though his work has been criticisedin terms of racism and imperialism, his portrayal of brutal colonial folly appears quiteclearly negative.75 Yet early on in Marlow’s African adventure, this sort of violenceis introduced in a way that serves mainly to highlight its apparent pointlessness andits defiance of explanation:

‘Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. Therewasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush . . . In the empty immensityof earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.Pop, would go one of the eight-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, alittle white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech– and nothing happened.’76

69. Watts ‘Introduction’ in Heart of Darkness, above n 58, p xix.70. Ibid; see also Lord, above n 64, p 93.71. Lord, ibid, pp 63–64.72. Ibid, p 101.73. Heart of Darkness, above n 58, p 105. See further Lord, above n 64, p 104.74. On violence in the Belgian Congo, see T Ward ‘State crime in the Heart of Darkness’(2005) 45 British Journal of Criminology 434.75. Watts ‘Introduction’ in Heart of Darkness, above n 58, pp xxi–xxvii.76. Heart of Darkness, ibid, pp 114–115.



Similarly, during Marlow’s riverboat journey, when the bush is the source of an attack,the violence is again primarily meaningless and confusing. Marlow recalls that‘[s]ticks, little sticks, were flying about – thick’, before realising that they were‘[a]rrows, by Jove!’,77 which, although ‘[t]hey might have been poisoned . . . lookedas though they wouldn’t kill a cat’.78 The pilgrims on the boat with him start to shootback, but are described – echoing the man-of-war off the coast – as ‘simply squirtinglead into that bush’.79 The result is a literal, dense smokescreen that obscures the riverchannel and causes further confusion: Lord observes about this scene that the ‘keynotion is the initial indecipherability of unmediated experience’.80 As accounts ofexperiences of violence, both scenes convey the difficulty of presenting an orderedor explanatory account of such events. The man-of-war incident is apparently clear,but incomprehensible; the riverboat incident is sudden, confusing and disruptive ofdescription and understanding. The scenes reveal the gulf between violent experienceand subsequent textual treatment, and between the story’s narrative promise and thereader’s ability to find in it meaning.

Towards the end of the story, Marlow evokes the strange violence in Kurtz himself.Kurtz is described by Marlow as having given into the ‘gratification of his variouslusts’, after the wilderness ‘had whispered to him things about himself which he didnot know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this greatsolitude – and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating’.81 Kurtz, who was inMarlow’s view ‘hollow at the core’ finally cries out ‘The horror! The horror!’ as thelast expression of his experience, before dying.82 Again though, the significance ofthis episode is uncertain. Although Marlow indicates that Kurtz’s fate is the result ofabandoned restraint and unfettered desires, conveying the idea that civilisation is aveneer beneath which savagery lurks, the reasons for Kurtz’s behaviour are leftunclear and his final cry enigmatic.

In these representations of violence, it is not so much the dynamics of the violenceitself but the way that it is expressed and portrayed by Conrad that is of particularsignificance. The ‘doubly oblique’ narrative and the uncertainty of Marlow’s account,both in terms of his own inability to find or convey meaning and the atmosphere ofdoubt that pervades his account in descriptive terms, serve Conrad’s central purposeof questioning the individual’s ability to achieve understanding of the external world,to attain any sense of truth or to communicate it. In this way, the novella effectivelycommunicates the problems of reducing experiences of violence to textual discourse,whilst at the same time evoking the very uncertainties of such experiences themselvesthat make them so hard to capture and recount; although expressing this is ‘ultimatelyunattainable’, Lord notes, ‘it can be approximated’.83 Violence can defeat languageand resist expression, but in its evocation of that very problem, Heart of Darknessachieves a certain shared sentience about it, as well as about – and within – itsepistemological limits.

In similar ways, The Secret Agent ‘thickens’ understanding of the experience ofviolence, whilst effectively showing the limits of that understanding, again through

77. Ibid, p 149.78. Ibid, p 150.79. Ibid, p 149.80. Lord, above n 64, p 113.81. Heart of Darkness, above n 58, p 164.82. Ibid, p 178.83. Lord, above n 64, p 113.



the content and the form of the story it tells. The Secret Agent is the ‘simple tale’ ofan anarchist, Adolf Verloc, a police informer and double agent for a foreign embassy,who is called upon by that foreign power to bomb the Greenwich Observatory. In atragic plot twist, Verloc engages his idiotic brother-in-law, Stevie, to help him, whichresults in Stevie’s death, causing in turn Stevie’s sister, Winnie, to murder her hus-band, Verloc, and then kill herself. The Metropolitan Police, believing they havesolved the mystery of the bomb attack disappear from the story three chapters beforethe end, with the subsequent deaths of Verloc and Winnie serving to show the realdepths of the tragedy beyond the limited conclusions of the police investigation.84

In terms of content, The Secret Agent includes a number of scenes of violence,conveying its impact on the characters involved and how it is experienced, andinducing the reader to share not only objective understanding of pain, violence andtheir effects, but also to feel some effects subjectively. For example, in an early scene,in which the anarchists meet in Verloc’s sitting room to discuss social forces andrevolution, Karl Yundt criticises the early criminologist Lombroso’s theories onwhich Comrade Ossipon relies to describe Stevie as degenerate. After dismissingLombroso as an idiot, Yundt questions his understanding of crime, restricted tophysical features:

‘Teeth and ears mark the criminal? Do they? And what about the law that markshim still better – the pretty branding instrument invented by the overfed to protectthemselves against the hungry? Red-hot applications on their vile skins – hey?Can’t you smell and hear from here the thick hide of the people burn and sizzle?That’s how criminals are made for your Lombrosos to write their silly stuffabout.’85

From a social revolutionist’s view point, Yundt indicates that crime is the result oflaws made by the privileged. His imagery is graphically violent: whether read meta-phorically or as a vivid reminder of the actual branding of criminals, the image ofburned skin is almost painful to read. This shared understanding of pain betweenConrad’s character and the reader is echoed strikingly by Stevie, who is apparently‘rooted suddenly to the spot by his morbid horror and dread of physical pain. Stevieknew very well that hot iron applied to one’s skin hurt very much. His scared eyesblazed with indignation: it would hurt terribly. His mouth dropped open’.86

Understanding Stevie’s shock, the reader also experiences their own, recoiling atthe description of sizzling flesh. Subsequently, Conrad narrates another scene ofshocking violence, this time involving Stevie’s death. In the description of ChiefInspector Heat’s investigation of the explosion in which the hapless Stevie is blownapart, the reader is presented with gruesome images of the bomb’s aftermath. Theaccount begins with Heat’s swallowing ‘a good deal of raw, unwholesome fog in thepark’, prefiguring the unwholesome, violated raw flesh of Stevie’s shattered remainsthat he then sees at the hospital:

‘Not accustomed, as the doctors are, to examine closely the mangled remainsof human beings, he had been shocked by the sight disclosed to his view when awaterproof sheet had been lifted off a table . . . [revealing] a sort of mound – aheap of rags, scorched and bloodstained, half concealing what might have been

84. Skinner, above n 39, at 435–437.85. The Secret Agent, above n 58, pp 47–48.86. Ibid, p 49.



an accumulation of raw material for a cannibal feast. It required considerablefirmness of mind not to recoil before that sight.’87

The passage is brutal and very visual, emphasised by the repetition of ‘sight’. Heat,a laconic and ‘efficient officer of his department, stood his ground, but for a wholeminute he did not advance’ and loses his ‘inclination for food’. The gory details are,in Conrad’s inimitable comic-horror style, emphasised by the local constable’s asser-tion that ‘He’s all there’ and Heat’s observation that the constable must have used ashovel, given the scattering of gravel he notices when ‘his eyes searched the gruesomedetail of that heap of mixed things, which seemed to have been collected in shamblesand rag shops’. The reference to shambles, as a place of animal slaughter, drives homethe bloody violence. Heat then reflects on the horror:

‘The Chief Inspector, stooping guardedly over the table, fought down theunpleasant sensation in his throat. The shattering violence of destruction whichhad made of that body a heap of nameless fragments affected his feelings with asense of ruthless cruelty, though his reason told him the effect must have been asswift as a flash of lightning. The man, whoever he was, had died instantaneously;and yet it seemed impossible to believe that a human body could have reachedthat state of disintegration without passing through the pangs of inconceivableagony. No physiologist, and still less of a metaphysician, Chief Inspector Heatrose by the force of sympathy, which is a form of fear, above the vulgar conceptionof time. Instantaneous! He remembered all he had ever read in popular publicationsof long and terrifying dreams dreamed in the instant of waking; of the whole pastlife lived with frightful intensity by a drowning man as his doomed head bobs up,streaming, for the last time. The inexplicable mysteries of conscious existencebeset Chief Inspector Heat till he evolved a horrible notion that ages of atrociouspain and mental torture could be contained between two successive winks of aneye.’88

The agony of Stevie’s demise is laid before the reader and heightened by the stoicalHeat’s evident shock at what he has been confronted with. The graphic and forcefulpassage pushes pain and death out of the page: sentience and sensation are shared.89

Although this story is told by a less oblique, omniscient narrator, the structure ofthe story again serves to underline Conrad’s concerns with certainty in communica-tion, by way of ironic distancing,90 chronological jumps and plot discontinuity.Moreover, the characters interact in bubbles of misunderstanding and failed commu-nication:91 Verloc misses two bedtime opportunities to talk to his wife about hisworries concerning the imposed bomb plot;92 he fails to realise that his wife chose to

87. Ibid, p 86.88. Ibid, pp 87–88. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for reminding me of these passages.Further examples of violence can be found in Verloc’s reflection on Stevie’s death, Winnie’sgraphic mental picture of her brother’s death, her attack on her husband and her subsequentsuicide in chapters 11 and 12.89. Compare A Houen Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to CiaranCarson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) pp 43–45 on the interconnectedness ofviolence and text.90. S Kim ‘Violence, irony and laughter: the narrator in The Secret Agent’ (2003) 35 Conra-diana 75.91. A Fleishman Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad(Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1967) p 193.92. The Secret Agent, above n 58, pp 59 and 179.



live with him solely for the sake of her brother and thinks he is loved for his ownsake;93 the only clear views expressed in the novel are those of the mentally chal-lenged Stevie;94 and the police characters misinform each other.95 In this way, as withHeart of Darkness, although The Secret Agent represents violence in its human settingand emphasises its devastating impact, it also highlights the limits on its expressibilityand explicability: the investigators fail to understand it fully and Winnie kills Verlocdue to mutual misunderstanding about the cause and effect of Stevie’s death.96

Finally, Under Western Eyes shares The Secret Agent’s theme of revolutionaryviolence but also focuses on its main protagonist’s inner, emotional agonies, whichcause him to hurt others and to seek his own destruction. It is the story of the solitaryRazumov, who becomes a police informer for the Russian Czarist authorities, betray-ing a revolutionist hero, Victor Haldin, out of resentment when the latter seeks hisassistance following a bomb attack, jeopardising Razumov’s future. Razumov subse-quently moves to Geneva to spy on the revolutionists operating there and, driven byresentful hatred, is tempted to hurt Haldin’s sister, Nathalie, who also lives there.However, out of remorse engendered by meeting Nathalie, Razumov is eventually ledto confess to her his betrayal of her brother and then to admit the truth to therevolutionists themselves, leading to his being violently attacked by a revolutionistassassin. As with Heart of Darkness, Under Western Eyes is told by a participantnarrator, a language teacher and acquaintance of Nathalie who tells the story partlyon the basis of Razumov’s diary, which comes into his possession, and partly fromhis own experience of events in Geneva.

Several key aspects of this novel are highlighted here with regard to violence. Aswith Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes conveys Conrad’srecurrent concerns about certainty and understanding and, in so doing, illustrates howa fictional narrative of experiences, including violence, can provide an effective, non-linear account that embraces some of the difficulties that would otherwise challengetextual discourse. As in the above two works, this is partly achieved through shifts innarrative chronology and perspective: the story jumps forwards and backwards intime for dramatic effect and the narrative slides from the journal to first-handaccounts.97 Also, like Marlow’s elusive story-telling, the language teacher in UnderWestern Eyes clouds his tale with doubt from the outset: in the opening line of thestory, the narrator disclaims ‘the possession of those high gifts of imagination andexpression’, and seven lines later declares ‘[w]ords, as is well known, are the greatfoes of reality’.98 In this way the narrative seeks to alert the reader to the story’sunreliability as a source for understanding the characters’ experiences. The teacher’stale tries to piece together events, but only approximates them: the textual versionreduces an illusory fraction of a fictional reality to the page.

Under Western Eyes includes numerous reminders of non-verbal communicationabout the story’s events. Jeremy Hawthorn, in his introduction to the novel, discussesthe significance of eyes, bodies and gestures in the story and explains that it ‘is packedwith descriptions of what we can term the speaking body’.99 Highlighting the novel’s

93. Ibid, p 234; see also Hampson, above n 64, p 159.94. Ibid, eg p 171; see also Fleishman, above n 91, p 196.95. Ibid, pp 127–132; see also Skinner, above n 39, at 434–435.96. Ibid, ch 11.97. Under Western Eyes, above n 58: see, eg, the time-shift at the start of Part Fourth and themixed perspectives and narrative interjections in Part Second.98. Ibid, p 3. See also Hawthorn, ‘Introduction’ in ibid, p xxi.99. Ibid, p xxv.



references to characters’ eyes – in particular Nathalie’s and Razumov’s – he pointsout how the characters ‘communicate and express themselves . . . through posture,gesture, and physical appearance’, as if their bodies try ‘to utter those truths’ thatwords ‘conceal or camouflage’.100 Striking examples of this non-verbal communica-tion can be found in the lengthy description of Nathalie Haldin’s and Razumov’smeeting, together with the teacher, in the Bastions gardens in Part Second.101

Razumov’s anger and barely contained violence at the memory of Haldin, awakenedby meeting his sister, is manifested more in his bodily movements than his words: ata certain point he makes ‘such a brusque movement that he even tottered a little’ andthen ‘shrugged his shoulders so violently that he tottered again’.102 In the absence ofverbal expression, Razumov’s violent reactions are still effectively expressed. Duringtheir conversation about an English newspaper’s publication of the details of Haldin’sarrest the teacher observes:

‘At that point I thought he was going to speak vehemently; but he onlyastounded me by the convulsive start of his whole body. He restrained himself,folded his loosened arms tighter across his chest, and sat back with a smile inwhich there was a twitch of scorn and malice.’103

With these frequent non-verbal signals, the very place of words in the hierarchy ofindicators of meaning is displaced: feelings, pain and violence are expressed physi-cally as well as verbally, and captured in the narrative.

Violence and pain occur in Under Western Eyes in physical and emotional-psychological forms. The novel’s backdrop is of course Russian autocracy andoppression, together with violent revolutionary plots and assassination.104 However,the examples of violence considered here centre on Razumov’s personal experiences.Graphic physical violence is portrayed in Razumov’s frenzied attack on the drunkensledge driver, Ziemianitch, in a strange scene in which normal sensory perception isdisturbed:

‘A terrible fury – the blind rage of self-preservation – possessed Razumov . . .He looked round wildly, seized the handle of a broken stablefork and rushingforward struck at the prostrate body with inarticulate cries. After a time his criesceased, and the rain of blows fell in the stillness and shadows of the cellar-likestables. Razumov belaboured Ziemianitch with an insatiable fury, in great volleysof sounding thwacks. Except for the violent movements of Razumov nothingstirred, neither the beaten man nor the spoke-like shadows on the walls. Only thesound of blows was heard. It was a weird scene.’105

There is further physical violence towards the end of the novel when Razumovhimself is attacked by the revolutionist assassin:

‘Razumov . . . received a tremendous blow on the side of his head over his ear.At the same time he heard a faint, dull detonating sound, as if some one had fired

100. Ibid, p xxvii.101. Expressive eyes and faces convey more than the conversation: ibid, p 132.102. Ibid, pp 135–136.103. Ibid, p 139.104. For a surprising account of Conrad’s sophisticated portrayal of anarchist terrorism, seeM Scanlan Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville:University Press of Virginia, 2001). Compare Houen’s analysis, above n 89.105. Under Western Eyes, above n 58, pp 22–23.



a pistol on the other side of the wall . . . He was exhausted; he had to watchpassively the heavy hand of the brute descend again in a degrading blow over hisother ear. It seemed to split his head in two, and all at once the men holding himbecame perfectly silent – soundless as shadows.’106

Deafened by the assassin’s blows, thrown into the street and blinded by lightning,Razumov staggers senselessly before falling under a tram, which breaks his limbsand crushes his side. In both instances the experience is somehow incomplete anddisembodied: in the former, only the noise of the blows appears real and in the latter,Razumov is deprived of hearing and sight, reeling ‘like a lost mortal in a phantomworld’.107 The violence is harsh and real, but the experience of it incomplete, accurateperception unattainable.

Finally, the novel’s emotional violence is apparent throughout in Razumov’s angerand hatred towards Haldin, who walked into his life with unwanted and unsoughtconfidence in him, ruining, as Razumov perceives it, his quiet existence and chancesof future success. Razumov’s strong emotions run, to list some examples, from thebarely concealed anger in his voice, which rapidly turns into hatred, during hisencounter with Haldin;108 his anger towards the owner of the lowly eating house wherehe seeks and then angrily beats Ziemianitch, before becoming aware of a ‘tranquil,unquenchable hate’ for Haldin;109 the hatred for Haldin he expresses to CouncillorMikulin, the state official who recruits Razumov as a spy;110 the ‘wave of wrath’ thatchokes his thoughts as he gazes into the river;111 and the anger, bitterness and boilingrage expressed during his encounters with the revolutionists, Sophia Antonovna andLaspara.112 Such emotional violence then, through Razumov, is shown to be a pow-erful force, but a force that, while partially explicable in terms of isolation, anger andantipathy, cannot be fully understood nor adequately expressed.113

CONCLUSION

Drawing together these brief discussions of three of Conrad’s stories, it is suggestedthat they are relevant to understanding pain and violence in two main ways. First, atthe simplest but still significant level, in their interplay of content, structure and style,each of the three stories helps to deepen analysis by illustrating the context and impactof pain and violence and their social, psychological and emotional complexities. Assuch, whilst theoretically removed from the law’s field of pain and death that con-cerned Cover, Sarat and Kearns, such fictional accounts ‘share sentience’ about painand violence, establishing some understanding of their effects and of the variouscomplex dimensions involved in communicating experience of them.

Secondly, the stories illustrate, with regard to the complexity of painful and violentexperiences, the limits of understanding and reproducing such experiences in textual

106. Ibid, pp 270–271.107. Ibid, p 271.108. Ibid, pp 14–16.109. Ibid, pp 20–23.110. Ibid, p 70.111. Ibid, p 146.112. Ibid, pp 179–212.113. Compare Lane, above n 52, pp 168–174, on Razumov’s counter-intuitive and ultimatelyself-oriented ‘eschatological’ violence.



discourse. Any study of such complex and subjective experiences has to adopt aparticular, constructed version of what they are, but will inevitably be incomplete:they are too complex for any ‘true’ ontology to be formed, with the result that partof it always escapes the epistemology.114 In other words, pain and violence involveelements of ‘excess’, not in a sense of disproportion, but rather elements that escapefrom, or lie outside, perception, understanding and textual representation.

Fiction is as limited by that excess as other textual forms, but Conrad’s fictionreminds us of the excess beyond the text as much as it shows us pain and violencethemselves within it, in their varied and limited forms of expression. Conrad’s nar-ratives demonstrate ways in which accounts of violence and pain may involve morethan just unreliable words – the structure of a narrative account, disjunction, the‘speaking body’ – but, significantly, the unreliability and incompleteness of thosevery narratives’ words are the stories’ only certain features. Conrad’s fiction thusillustrates how pain and violence (or indeed any experience) are incompletely reduc-ible to textual narrative, but nevertheless manages to make a world in which they canbe glimpsed and their effects imagined. Through these imperfect glimpses andglimpses of imperfection, Conrad sought to make his readers see:115 without theillusion of complete understanding and, just as the clearest sight is sometimes fromthe corner of the eye, Conrad gives the reader a sharper picture of a fleeting shadow.116

Jurisprudence can draw from this literary discussion a valuable reminder of what,in relation to pain and violence, cannot be explained or textually contained and the(con)textual conditions and implications of that non-containment. Despite Cover’sreservations about the tensions between violence, violent law and the sharing ofmeaning, and between law and literary analysis, a gateway has been opened herebetween his theoretical foundations and fiction, which it has been suggested cancontribute – in circumscribed and abstract ways – to an experiential jurisprudence ofviolence, such as that outlined by Sarat and Kearns in response to Cover’s work. Ifsuch a jurisprudence is ultimately to explore and understand the impact of law’sviolence in experiential terms on law’s relationship with justice, it can usefullyinclude consideration, in broad and interdisciplinary ways, of the various dimensionsand, crucially, the expressibility of pain and violent experiences. In that respect, thisdiscussion has outlined ways in which a turn to selected and relevant fiction can betheoretically supported and informative. It has not sought to put fiction on a par withlaw: the two domains are distinct. Nevertheless, relevant fiction can assist legal theoryin imagining the boundaries of what it may hope to understand and what it may needto consider, not forcefully or directly, but illustratively and allusively, as a glow bringsout a haze.

114. Compare Nordstrom, above n 19, p 116.115. Conrad famously declared this aim in his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897).116. J Hillis Miller Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1966) p 19. Hillis Miller argues at p 27 that Conrad sought ‘to make the truthof life, something different from any impression or quality, momentarily visible. Not coloursor light, but the darkness behind them, is the true reality’.

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