Everything is dislocated: reading (dis)connections in Joseph Conrad and theories of justice and...

Everything is dislocated: reading(dis)connections in Joseph Conrad andtheories of justice and violence

Stephen Skinner*Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus

The relationship between law and justice has long been a concern of legal theory, but thegap of uncertainty, or aporia, between them has been a particular focus of recent juris-prudence. Some theorists, such as Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington, have focusedon the cleavage between judgment and the aspiration to ethical justice to the Other, whileothers, such as Robert Cover, Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns, have worked on the gulfbetween law and justice in the face of violence and pain, within, caused by and before thelaw. This paper suggests that such theories are primarily concerned with problematiseddislocation, as a critical technique and an observed state, which is also to be found inmodernist fiction, especially in Joseph Conrad’s Weltanschauung and literary style. It isargued that examining the disconnections that characterise Conrad’s fiction, throughengagement with his stories and secondary commentaries thereon, and combining thatanalysis with the study of dislocation in legal theory, permit the development of a richerpicture of these shared concerns. On this basis, the paper constructs a distinct concept of‘dislocation’ and suggests how it can supplement jurisprudential discussion.

INTRODUCTION

The argument presented in this paper is that Joseph Conrad’s modernist fiction andsome aspects of recent legal theory about questions of justice and violence share afundamental concern with a state and process of dislocation, that is a disruption orseparation of, and inherent in, their objects, themes and techniques. Although ques-tioning the (fractured) relationship between law and justice has been a long-runningconcern in jurisprudence, the focus here is on elements of recent legal theory, due totheir particular concern with the ‘aporia’, or gap of doubt between law and justice inthe face of ethical obligations to the Other and the disjunctive force of pain andviolence. Dislocation and doubtful (dis)connections were also key features of mod-ernism, a distinctive and critical phase of artistic expression in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries, which involved anxious questioning of gaps and ruptures inhuman understanding and our place in an uncertain universe. More specifically,modernist literature and the work of Joseph Conrad in particular were characterised bythese preoccupations, in terms of both style and subject matter. Critical engagement

* I thank Catherine Dupré, Melanie Williams, Ian Ward, Jeremy Hawthorn and this jour-nal’s anonymous referees for their helpful comments on drafts of this paper. Earlier versionswere presented at the Rights, Ethics, Law and Literature International Colloquium at SwanseaUniversity, July 2007, the Society of Legal Scholars annual conference, September 2007, andthe Sixth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities, Istanbul, July 2008.

Legal Studies, Vol. 28 No. 4, December 2008, pp. 591–609DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-121X.2008.00105.x

© 2008 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2008 The Society of Legal Scholars. Published by Blackwell Publishing,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

with dislocation and doubt has therefore arguably been an ongoing concern in fictionand non-fiction, and a significant area of continuity from modernism to late moder-nity.1 This is not to say that modernist works of fiction are temporally isolated andcannot otherwise speak to the present,2 but simply that reading such works with anawareness of their original context and common ground helps explicate their rel-evance. This paper explores the idea of dislocation in fiction and legal theory and whatreading about the (dis)connections in and between the chosen legal and literaryexamples has to tell us.

The paper begins by revisiting some selected examples of late modern engagementwith law, justice and violence, in order to present the argument that they are centrallyconcerned with a process and state of problematic dislocation. In this regard, the paperexamines the work of Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington on the gap of uncer-tainty between law and justice, which they addressed partly due to experiences in thelate modern or post-war world but also, in an intimately inter-related way, to theo-retical questioning of the place of ethics in legal reasoning.3 The paper then considersthe work of Robert Cover, and of Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns, who followed onfrom Cover and largely situated their work within the critical parameters of Douzi-nas’s and Warrington’s self-consciously ‘post-modernist’ jurisprudential questioning.Cover, Sarat and Kearns, it is argued here, have similarly been concerned with the gulfbetween law and its aspirations to, and claims to offer, justice.4 This gulf, they argue,is the result of violence – within, from and outside law – which in its disjunctiveengendering of physical and emotional pain (itself a dislocating force) shreds thefabric of communication and shared meaning on which law’s claims to bring justiceare said to depend.

The paper subsequently turns to modernist literature, underlining its general focuson disrupted understanding and undertaking a detailed analysis of the fiction of Joseph

1. Although the term ‘post-modern’ is occasionally used here in relation to work thatexplicitly identifies itself as such, the term ‘late modern’ is preferred in order to highlightcontinuities, based on the view that late modern critical writing is closely related to, and inmany ways an extension of, modernist cultural critique, a view also expressed by, eg, M Bell‘The metaphysics of modernism’ in M Levenson (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Mod-ernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) p 9 and S Matthews Modernism(London: Arnold, 2004) p 12 but note C Snipp-Walmsley ‘Postmodernism’ in P Waugh (ed)Literary Theory and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) pp 405–426 atp 410.2. See my earlier comment on this issue: S Skinner ‘ “A benevolent institution for thesuppression of evil”: Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and the limits of policing’ [2003]Journal of Law and Society 420 at 422.3. C Douzinas and R Warrington Justice Miscarried (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994)and C Douzinas ‘Law and justice in postmodernity’ in S Connor (ed) The Cambridge Com-panion to Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) pp 196–223.4. R Cover ‘Violence and the word’ (1986) 95 Yale Law Journal 1601; A Sarat and TRKearns ‘A journey through forgetting: toward a jurisprudence of violence’ in A Sarat and TRKearns (eds) The Fate of Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991) pp 209–273; ASarat and TR Kearns ‘Introduction’ in A Sarat and TR Kearns Law’s Violence (Ann Arbor:Michigan University Press, 1995) pp 1–21; and A Sarat ‘Situating law between the realities ofviolence and the claims of justice: an introduction’ in A Sarat (ed) Law, Violence and thePossibility of Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) pp 3–16. See also S Skinner‘Stories of pain and the pursuit of justice: law, violence, experience and jurisprudence’ in Law,Culture and the Humanities (forthcoming).

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Conrad, well known as a paradigmatic modernist writer.5 Drawing on examples fromhis fiction, with particular reference to An Outcast of the Islands, the paper examinesfour prominent studies of the role of bewilderment, obscurity and solitude in Conrad’sWeltanschauung and literary style. These commentaries, it is argued, show differentaspects of Conrad’s fundamental engagement with doubt and, above all, his prob-lematisation of dislocation in existence and our understanding of it.

On that basis, the paper moves in its penultimate part to draw together these variousaporetic threads, developing and encapsulating them in a distinct concept of ‘dislo-cation’, which is put forward here as a suggested pathway between modernist and latemodern writing, and as a conceptual bridge between literature and legal theory.Drawing on the literary analysis to supplement the legal,6 the paper argues that thisconcept of dislocation, when read across both fields of writing, provides a richerpicture of aporetic analysis and of the aporia of justice in particular. This, it is argued,is especially revealing with regard to the complex connections among law, justice andviolence, and draws attention to the broader context in which justice is cast into doubt.

1. THE APORIA OF JUSTICE AND VIOLENCE IN LEGAL THEORY

Late modern legal theory has focused its attentions on a loss of confidence andcertainty in the institutions, processes and underlying principles of law, as well as ontensions and conflicts in and around law as a means for achieving consensus, peaceand justice. It has contested the meaning of legal texts, and challenged the possibilityof moral positioning and the grounding of truth and value in legal reasoning, continu-ing the long-running jurisprudential debate about the distinction between law andjustice. In what is perhaps one of the best known, but not uncontroversial, expositionsof the concerns and bases of a suggested ‘post-modernist’ jurisprudence, CostasDouzinas and Ronnie Warrington sought to lay the groundwork for incorporatingparticularised ethical value in legal reason and action.7 After discussing the genesis offact-value disassociation in positivist law, these writers concentrated on the need tointroduce an ethical dimension to law. They drew this from the work of EmmanuelLevinas and Jacques Derrida, in order to try to formulate a way of understanding howlegal decision making could attend to the Other, respecting rules but without beingbound by them into insensitivity to the Other’s demands to be heard, as part of anendeavour to formulate a framework for justice-in-law in the critical aftermath ofdeconstruction.8

Douzinas and Warrington built their arguments on a broadly Socratic model of theaporia of justice,9 namely a gap of doubt, uncertainty or perplexity between law andthe just decision, in which justice is an unproved, ‘otherworldly’ aspiration underlyingthe process of legal decision making. They presented the view that, whereas justice

5. See also S Skinner ‘ “As a glow brings out a haze”: understanding violence in jurispru-dence and Joseph Conrad’s fiction’ (2007) 27 Legal Studies 465.6. Ibid: note my caveats at 471 and 485. See also and in particular R Weisberg Poethics andOther Strategies of Law and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), I Ward‘Law and literature’ (1993) 4 Law and Critique 43 and M Williams Empty Justice: One HundredYears of Law, Literature and Philosophy (London: Cavendish, 2002).7. Douzinas and Warrington, above n 3.8. Ibid, p 17.9. Ibid, p 135.

Everything is dislocated 593


demands an original response to the needs of the individual in each and every case,law is bound by universal rules, so ‘law’s inescapable commitment to the rule meansthat injustice is the inescapable condition of all law’.10 In a bare, syllogistic applica-tion, this proposition makes sense in the context and for the purposes of these authors’critical argument, although those who believe in the power of law to address wrong-doing, ameliorate problems or resolve conflicts, may find it rather sweeping. InDouzinas’s and Warrington’s view, justice is always an aporia, a thing of doubt andunknown. In striving for justice in the interpretation and application of a rule, that rulemust be suspended in its prior sense as part of the aspiration to justice at the momentof its reapplication, but as the rule is at the same time followed, justice – in itsotherworldly, perfect sense – remains unknown.

Based on their aporetic understanding of law and justice, Douzinas and Warringtonargued that a post-modernist jurisprudence needs to address this gap. In order to do so,they took their lead from the ethical turn of some late modern philosophy and thesocio-politically engaged, critical legal theory of the 1980s in order to argue for ethicaldecision making, which they presented as being a characteristic demand of the latemodern age – a not unreasonable view, given the continuous struggle to come to termswith the horrors of war, Holocaust and ongoing atrocities and injustices.11 Douzinasand Warrington found the ethical basis for their proposed jurisprudence in the work ofLevinas:

‘Levinas argues that a fundamental consideration of the other must always beundertaken prior to the ethical decision, indeed to any decision; the other in thenakedness of the face always presents herself to us as the irreducible, sometimesinexpressible, ethical demand: “consider me before you act.” And the considerationthat is required by this “total” demand is always to be accounted for prior to anythought of self or own.’12

A decision following the determined rule, these authors then argued, is not the sameas a just sensitivity to the Other, in a Levinasian ethical sense of hearing the Other towhom the rule is then applied, in her demand to be considered. A given judgmentapplying the law and determining the condition of the Other standing before it is notthe same as the doing of justice, which is a process of listening to the Other, in all herparticularity, with an accepted, but impossible, aim of endeavouring to respect herOtherness:

‘This is why we cannot say that a judgment is just. A decision may berecognised as lawful, in accordance with legal rules and conventions, but it cannotbe declared just because justice is the dislocation of the said of the law by the –unrepresentable – saying of ethics . . . Justice seeks the particular at the momentwhen the universal runs the risk of turning to its opposite, and as such it has thecharacteristics of a double bind. The action of justice requires an incessant move-ment between the general rule and the specific case that has no resting place andfinds no point of equilibrium. There is a dislocation, a delay or deferral, betweenthe ever-present time of the law and the always-to-come temporality of ethics.’13

10. Ibid, p 183.11. Ibid, pp 4 and 137. See also Douzinas, above n 3, pp 196–197.12. Ibid, p 18.13. Ibid, p 184 (empahsis added).



Consequently, as the emphasis added to the above extract underlines, the theoreti-cal analysis of Douzinas and Warrington is focused on a problematic and problema-tised disconnection, or dislocation, between law (and legal decision making) andjustice (in the ethical sense they present). This dislocation is double: it is in part adislocation of law and the formal justice that they argued modern law purported toprovide through procedural regularity;14 but it is also an observation of the dislocationbetween the striving to do justice in legal process and the impossible aim of ethicaljustice, a ‘promise made to the future’.15 The former observes a disjunction of the twoconcepts that were deemed to be joined, but which were sundered both by their failure,which Douzinas and Warrington identified in terms of specific failures of legal processin the 1980s–1990s, and by the critical deconstruction of the law–justice relationshipthat these authors undertook. The second dislocation is a critical observation of thefrustrated aspiration to justice in law and legal theory on the basis of an ethics ofalterity, brought into play in the space that that first dislocation opens up: here, joiningthe two concepts that the very purpose of legal decision making assumes to be joinableis unachievable due to the elusiveness of the abstractly perfect, otherworldly justicethat such an ethical approach envisages but cannot attain.16

The gap between law and justice has also been approached by other late modernlegal theorists as being caused and aggravated by violence, that is the contestedcausing of pain in the application, origins and objects of law, and their work similarlyraises questions of problematic disjunction or dislocation. Here, this paper considersthe work of Robert Cover, known for his work on law’s ‘field of pain and death’, andthe subsequent work of Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns, who have built on thefoundations laid by Cover and by Douzinas and Warrington.17

The American legal theorist, Robert Cover, addressed law’s violence on the basisof Elaine Scarry’s landmark work on pain and its effects on understanding andexistence.18 Scarry’s argument was that pain resists expression in language and there-fore resists, or even destroys, language itself. In this light, Cover relied on Scarry’sanalysis to dispute the extent to which law can construct shared meaning throughinterpretation and the constitutive language of judgments when it causes pain. Build-ing a broader argument from a primary focus on the enforcement of criminal law in theUSA, Cover presented the stark opinion that law is inherently violent. Using the termviolence as a dramatic label for the ways in which law relies on force and causesphysical and emotional pain, he argued that where such pain is brought about throughlaw and interrupts communication and understanding, law cannot be said to give

14. Ibid, p 136.15. Ibid, p 185. See also C Douzinas and A Geary Critical Jurisprudence: The PoliticalPhilosophy of Justice (Oxford: Hart, 2005) p 75: ‘. . . while I have to be just to the other as afinite being with specific demands and desires, I can never be fully just, because the infinity ofthe other makes the giving of justice impossible . . . Theories and laws need to be applied; butevery application would turn the uniqueness of the other into an instance of the concept or a caseof the norm, and would immediately violate their singularity. The only principle of justice isrespect for the singularity of the other’.16. Douzinas, above n 3, pp 220–221.17. Above n 4.18. E Scarry The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1985). Cover’s reliance on Scarry is implicit in his wording of arguments, egCover, above n 4, at 1602 and explicit in ‘The bonds of constitutional interpretation: of theword, the deed, and the role’ (1986) 20 Georgia Law Review 815 at 817; see Skinner, above n5, at 467.



generally accepted meanings. If the construction of shared meaning is the constructionof justice, Cover argued, then law’s violence is a barrier to its ability to be just,19 andlegal theory must not forget law’s violence when considering the relationship betweenlaw and justice.

Similarly, Sarat and Kearns also grounded their theoretical work on the gulfbetween law and meaning opened by pain, developing Cover’s fundamental concerninto a more elaborate project to formulate the essential elements of a jurisprudencethat would engage with the violence that they identified within law, caused by law andas law’s object.20 Moreover, their jurisprudential work has been specifically orientedtowards exploring the relationship between law and justice in the face of violence,based on a recognition of the gap opened between law and justice by critical legalanalysis, especially that of Douzinas and Warrington.21 Their work has thereforeinvolved outlining the bases for an experiential jurisprudence of violence, whichwould address the impact of violence on law and explore the gulf between pain andreason, law and justice.22

These works on law and violence are fundamentally constructed, once again, onideas of problematic dislocation. They involve a recognition, or acceptance, of thedisjunctive impact of pain, as examined primarily by Scarry, which disconnects thesufferer from the world around her through the dislocation of language: pain removesthe capacity for expression and mutual understanding, in Scarry’s argument, destroy-ing the sufferer’s world. This dislocation is based on the view that pain is fundamen-tally inexpressible, in terms of relative accuracy in the formulation of descriptions ofutterable pain, and even in absolute terms of the inadequacy of language in the face ofunutterable pain.

Furthermore, this law and violence theory is also fundamentally situated in relationto the particular dislocation of law and meaning, and of law and justice, on which latemodern critical analysis has focused. Although it does not necessarily or explicitlylook to the type of ethical approach called for by Douzinas and Warrington, itnonetheless recognises a need to hear the experience of pain and violence in the gulfbetween pain and reason and between law and its (painful) effects.23 The need to hearis a need to strive for communication and understanding; experiential analysis, argu-ably a form of hearing, seeks to counter the disjunctive effects of violence. However,it nevertheless involves the need to recognise that any attempt to engage jurispruden-tially with pain and violence in relation to law and its distance from justice will requireacknowledgement of the limits of textual representation of painful and violent expe-riences. Although a record of such experience may be approximated, it arguablydisrupts attempts at rational and linear textual reproduction, thereby disturbing cog-nition, expression and textual analysis.24 In other words, this area of theory isgrounded on, but also trapped by the premiss that inter-subjective communication isdisrupted, if not cut, by pain and violence, which disconnects the Other, victim andinterlocutor, or commentator, alike.

19. Cover, above n 4, at 1602. For further engagement with Cover’s work and his reliance onScarry, see Skinner, above nn 4 and 5.20. Sarat and Kearns ‘A Journey through forgetting’, above n 4, p 219 and ‘Introduction’,above n 4, p 2.21. Sarat ‘Situating law’, above n 4, pp 6–7 and 9.22. Skinner, above nn 4 and 5.23. Skinner, above n 4 and compare Skinner, above n 5.24. Ibid.



Ultimately, it is argued here that the central device or formulation of these latemodern legal theories’ problematisation of the law and justice relationship is thisarticulation of a disrupted nexus, or a disrupting process and result, in law’s opera-tions, which demand critical attention. The process is the critical method of challeng-ing and questioning objects of inquiry by undoing their assumed relationships andtheir positions in our landscapes of understanding. The result is the opening up of agap and thereby the creation of a conceptual space, which in real terms may betemporally or physically non-existent, but in theoretical terms is a point demandinganalytical attention and reappraisal. As stated above, this use of and engagement withdislocation is also characteristic of modernist literature, especially the fiction ofJoseph Conrad, and it is suggested here that a study of his works can provide a deeperunderstanding of these issues.

2. DOUBT AND DISLOCATION IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S FICTION

Modernism, in the sense of a distinct phase of artistic expression in the last years ofthe nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries, is well known as aperiod of experimentation, creative tensions and a disengagement from the acceptedcredos and standards of the Victorian age. It was largely stimulated by impressions ofthe individual’s alienation from a growing, increasingly urban and industrialisedsociety, as well as a disorienting decline in faith in the apparent truths and norms –imperial and colonial, gendered, religious and epistemological, among others – of theprevious century, together with a questioning of received values in the light of a‘nameless, faceless anxiety’ engendered by the fin of the old and beginning of the newsiècle.25

Within this movement, Joseph Conrad’s works are emblematic of modernism’sengagement with doubt, loss of faith and perhaps, above all, the conflicting tensionserupting in the artist’s observation and representation of individual being in soci-ety.26 For Conrad especially, the themes of individual and community, isolation andcommunication, the feasibility and role of belief and hope, and the fragility andcontingency of meaning are particularly important.27 These themes are approachedin Conrad’s work, it is argued here, through and around a predominant preoccupa-tion with doubt and disjunction; that is, the disruption of meaning and confidencecharacteristic of modernism’s general concerns, as well as in the precise predica-ments of Conrad’s characters and, to a certain extent, of Conrad himself. The fol-lowing discussion explores the ways in which Conrad’s work involves these ideasand their significance therein, in terms both of the anxieties of modernism and, asDaphna Erdinast-Vulcan has argued, of a resistance to modernism’s nihilistic ten-dencies.28

Before exploring Conrad’s works more generally, it is informative to begin with aspecific example, namely his second novel, An Outcast of the Islands, published in

25. Matthews, above n 1, p 4; M Levenson ‘Introduction’ in Levenson, above n 1, pp 1–5 andD Erdinast-Vulcan Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) pp9–14.26. Erdinast-Vulcan, ibid.27. For further discussion of these issues see Skinner, above n 5.28. Erdinast-Vulcan, above n 25, pp 14 and 21.



1896.29 In this work, Conrad focused on the aporia of justice and its relationship withviolence nearly a century before the legal theories outlined above, prefiguring them instriking ways. Although not without its negative aspects, this novel already clearlyshows Conrad’s concerns with doubt and disjunction, and with solitude and commu-nity in particular, as well as his determination to disrupt the reader’s expectations ofcertainty in the narrative.30

An Outcast of the Islands is the tale of the rootless Willems and his relationshipwith Captain Lingard, who gives Willems two chances to earn an honest living as atrader, but who Willems ultimately betrays, leading Lingard to abandon him to hisdoom in the forest. While the novel could of course be approached in terms of violenceand justice in colonial exploitation, a major and well-known theme in Conrad’s workand critical studies thereof, it has been chosen as the introductory example here due tothe interpersonal dynamic of its central section, in which themes of justice andviolence are played out in a series of tense and disturbing scenes. These occur in partIV of the novel, in which Lingard seeks to bring Willems to account for his betrayal.Whilst the fictional Lingard is not in the same position as a judge in a court of law, inthat he is simultaneously complainant, judge and enforcer, the story’s problematisa-tion of justice and violence is arguably nevertheless illustrative of these issues withregard to the above theories.

Against a melodramatic background of meteorological portents of conflict, Conradintroduces Lingard’s desire for justice. Although initially distinguished from ven-geance, this appears to be linked with a suggestion of violence:

‘Justice only! Nothing was further from his thoughts than such a uselessthing as revenge. Justice only. It was his duty that justice should be done – and byhis own hand. He did not like to think how . . . What was the good to think aboutit? It was inevitable, and its time was near.’31

Despite Lingard’s initial confidence in the justice he feels it is his duty to bring,sure that it will be fair, the narrator gradually increases the suggestions that Lingard’sdesired justice will involve violence, making their distinction uncertain. That connec-tion is, though, apparently not ignored by Lingard and holds him back, revealing thebeginnings of doubt in his chosen course: ‘[t]he doer of justice sat with compressedlips and a heavy heart, while in the calm darkness outside the silent world seemed tobe waiting breathlessly for that justice he held in his hand – in his strong hand: – readyto strike – reluctant to move’.32

Subsequently, Lingard is said to consider his pursuit of justice to be a ‘sacredduty’,33 but the narrator again introduces an alternative view. The reader is remindedthat ‘[h]e had removed an enemy once or twice before, out of his path; he had paid offsome very heavy scores a good many times’ and that his ‘enmity was rather more than

29. Reference here is to the Oxford World’s Classics series: JH Stape (ed) An Outcast of theIslands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).30. Following Almayer’s Folly, published in 1895, An Outcast of the Islands marked Conrad’sdecision to commit himself to a life as a writer and is clearly an early work, with someover-elaborate prose, crude scene-setting and a similarity to simpler adventure stories: seeStape, ibid, ‘Introduction’ pp xvi–xix and xx–xxiii; see also A White Joseph Conrad and theAdventure Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) pp 134–150.31. An Outcast of the Islands, above n 29, p 172.32. Ibid, pp 172–173.33. Ibid, pp 180–181.



any man single-handed could easily manage’.34 The reader is also told that ‘a mandoes not live for years beyond the pale of civilised laws without evolving for himselfsome queer notions of justice’.35 This contrast between Lingard’s view and thenarrator’s increasing notes of caution effectively come to undo the assumed connec-tion between Lingard’s judgement and justice, problematising them through the linkwith violence. This disjunction and its effect on the reader are increased by a weak-ening of Lingard’s resolve when faced with the enormity of Willems’s betrayal and byLingard’s fears that he may not in fact be able to bring such treachery to justice afterall.36

In the long-awaited confrontation with Willems, Lingard comes to realise thatjustice and violence are not the same, because violence is both less than and at thesame time destructive of the justice he seeks. Initially, Lingard feels that simplyshooting Willems on the spot would not be enough and that ‘the violent delight of acontact lingering and furious, intimate and brutal’ is what he desires.37 However, whenhe gives into that blood lust, Lingard learns that violence cannot achieve justice.Waiting vainly for the passive Willems to say something that will let him believe hisattack to be justified, Lingard is horrified by the blood spurting from Willems’s face:

‘[Lingard] looked at it, looked at the tiny and active drops, looked at what hehad done, with obscure satisfaction, with anger, with regret. This wasn’t much likean act of justice. He had a desire to go up nearer to the man, to hear him speak, tohear him say something atrocious and wicked that would justify the violence of theblow.’38

When Willems tells Lingard that he will not fight back, and had earlier restrainedhimself from shooting at Lingard, the latter is again struck by the gulf betweenviolence and justice, and the very elusiveness of justice itself:

‘ “If I had wanted to hurt you – if I had wanted to destroy you, it was easy.I stood in the doorway long enough to pull a trigger – and you know I shootstraight.”

“You would have missed,” said Lingard, with assurance. “There is, underheaven, such a thing as justice.”

The sound of that word on his own lips made him pause, confused, like anunexpected and unanswerable rebuke. The anger of his outraged pride, the anger ofhis outraged heart, had gone out in the blow; and there remained nothing but thesense of some immense infamy – of something vague, disgusting and terrible,which seemed to surround him on all sides, hover about him with shadowy andstealthy movements, like a band of assassins in the darkness of vast and unsafeplaces. Was there, under heaven, such a thing as justice? He looked at the manbefore him with such an intensity of prolonged glance that he seemed to see rightthrough him, that at last he saw but a floating and unsteady mist in human shape.Would it blow away before the first breath of the breeze and leave nothingbehind?’39

34. Ibid, p 181.35. Ibid, p 181.36. Ibid, pp 181–182.37. Ibid, pp 199–200.38. Ibid, p 201.39. Ibid, p 204.



Here Lingard is horrified at his realisation of the gulf between his desire for justice,his ‘sacred duty’, and the brute reality of his bloody attack on Willems. Just as hecomes to doubt the existence of justice, he comes to think of Willems as intangible andinsubstantial: at the moment of judgement, he realises that the Other fades out of hiscomprehension, becoming otherworldly and unknowable. Even so, Lingard condemnshim to stay in the forest and dismisses him as nothing but a painful memory.40

These scenes in An Outcast of the Islands are usefully illustrative of Conrad’spreoccupation with uncertainty, showing how he erodes confidence in meaning andaction, and disturbs assumed narrative and conceptual certainties. Lingard’s expecta-tions are disrupted by Willems’s lack of resistance and by his own descent into bruteforce, leading him – and the reader – to question his ability to deliver justice andindeed its very existence. As in Douzinas and Warrington’s critical view, justice isalways ‘to come’ at the time of Lingard’s judgement, both as his hope and as hisunattainable objective, given his violent approach and ultimate doubt in justice’sattainability. As in the work of Cover, and of Sarat and Kearns, violence in judgementputs justice beyond reach, with pain obliterating the hope of justification, understand-ing or closure. The disruption of judgement and justice and their disorienting connec-tion with violence is thus a central problem in Conrad’s story. Ultimately, in truemodernist style, meaning and appearances are completely subverted, with Willemsdissolving under Lingard’s gaze into insubstantiality, becoming just a thought or ashameful memory. After part IV, the novel ends with a lack of narrative closure, asAlmayer’s drunken account of the events fades into the indefinite and the openness ofan echo, calling into question the reliability of the whole story.41

However, there is more to Conrad’s fictional approach to doubt and disjunctionthan his second novel alone indicates. Reading his work more broadly and examiningsecondary commentaries on it enable the development of a more sophisticated under-standing of his aporetic writing, which can supplement the readings of later legaltheory. As would be expected for one of the leading writers of English fiction of thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the secondary literature on Conrad isvast, with his place in modernism and his various works, individually and together,generating innumerable significant studies. Many such studies focus on his represen-tations of characteristically modern problems, in terms of both fictional content andstyle, but four of these are selected and discussed here due to the ways in which theyapproach, from different angles, this paper’s central concerns. These studies are PaulArmstrong’s 1987 work on bewilderment,42 Allon White’s 1981 work on obscurity,43

and Adam Gillon’s 1960 work and Ursula Lord’s 1998 work on solitude.44 Theargument outlined here is that all of these are fundamentally concerned with the waysin which Conrad engages with disjunction, separating and disrupting meaning andunderstanding, and with the isolation of his protagonists from the world, disturbingtheir relations with and comprehension of others, disrupting their experiences ofexistence, and perhaps above all exerting a dislocating effect on the reader through a

40. Ibid, p 212.41. Ibid, p 280 and commentary at p xx.42. P Armstrong The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation inJames, Conrad and Ford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).43. A White The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism (London: Routledge andKegan Paul, 1981).44. A Gillon The Eternal Solitary: A Study of Joseph Conrad (New York: Bookman Associ-ates, 1960) and U Lord Solitude versus Solidarity in the Novels of Joseph Conrad (Montreal:McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998).



sophisticated manipulation of the usual indicators of sense and certainty. As will beshown, these approaches can be read as one, through the concept of ‘dislocation’.

Armstrong’s study examines the ways in which Conrad, together with two otherkey writers of the same period, experimented with and disrupted fictional represen-tation, arguing that these ‘literary impressionists explore how we construct reality byinterpreting it’.45 Armstrong’s chosen central concept here is bewilderment, used toindicate both an active process on the part of the writers and a sensation on the part ofprotagonists and readers. Bewilderment, for Armstrong, is the result of a disruption ofexpected meaning: it ‘throws into question the interpretive constructs we ordinarilytake for granted, as our ways of knowing the world’.46 This process and sensation ofbewilderment are both a technique for defamiliarising the world and questioning thesignificance and veracity of experiences, but also a reflection of common experience:‘defamiliarization is not a distinguishing feature of art; it is a recurrent aspect of life’.47

Conrad in particular was concerned with this contingency and constant disruption ofmeaning and the familiar, seeking to represent them, to suggest an approximation offundamental essences, yet always simultaneously representing the limits or impossi-bility of any deeper understanding.48

Conrad’s fiction in almost all cases involves events that disrupt the protagonists’lives, or ‘dislocating moments’ in Armstrong’s analysis.49 Armstrong cites theexamples of Marlow’s disorienting journey in Heart of Darkness, Haldin’s irruptioninto Razumov’s life in Under Western Eyes and the unsettling order to Verloc to bombthe Greenwich observatory in The Secret Agent. For Armstrong, all of these ‘instancesof disorientation’ serve to:

‘demonstrate Conrad’s abiding sense of the power and ubiquity of contin-gency. Victims of bewilderment in Conrad experience with devastating force theabsence of any guarantee to the order, meanings, and beliefs they had taken forgranted. The dislocations in his fictions reveal the frailty of the constructs weordinarily trust without thinking much about them – our beliefs about our identity,our situation, or the nature of the world. Conradian bewilderment insists that thesense of security such trust provides is illusory and precarious precisely because itis a matter of faith . . . Conrad portrays bewilderment as a challenge to the naturalattitude of unquestioned understanding – a dislocation that reveals this attitude ismade up of unexamined, unnoticed beliefs.50

In Conrad’s stories, Armstrong argues, the representation and sense of dislocationis also achieved through narrative disruption and the use of different perspectives andtechniques of disclosure; through internal challenges to the certainty of narrativevoice; through temporal disjunction; and the way Conrad questions the relationshipsbetween individuals and others and the limits on communication among them, includ-ing the reader.51 Consequently, a Conradian story plays on and emphasises a funda-mental questioning of our confidence about our place in the world and our abilityto make sense of it. His dislocation of narrative and understanding, and his

45. Armstrong, above n 42, p 1.46. Ibid, p 2.47. Ibid, p 4.48. Ibid, pp 9–12.49. Ibid, p 109.50. Ibid, p 110.51. Ibid, pp 17–25.



representations of the dislocating effect of the new and strange on the already knownand expected52 open a critical space between assumptions of truth and fragile reality.This method and effect of dislocating bewilderment, then, closely parallel the funda-mental techniques of the jurisprudential questioning outlined above, in challengingthe associations among law, justice, violence and meaning through a disconnectionand a problematisation of that very process and state of disruption.

Dislocation of meaning and certainty is also central to White’s analysis of theconcept of obscurity in Conrad’s fiction.53 Here, White explores the ways in which thefiction of early modernism was marked by obscurity, made difficulty a key character-istic and sought to resist meaning. For White, this was due to the tectonic disruptionof ‘certain deep, discursive regularities (clarity, coherence, sincerity, objective repre-sentation)’54 in the late nineteenth century, largely due to the influence of psychologi-cal awareness and the readiness to seek hidden depths in texts, to which White refersas ‘symptomatic reading’.55 The ‘obscurity’ in White’s analysis is both a difficultywithin the fictional texts of this period, including perhaps above all Conrad’s stories,and the unclear nature of the deeper significance hinted at by authors and sought byreaders: it is an obscurity that both produces and conceals meaning.56 Consequently,obscurity is the ‘indispensable word for a literature which begins positively to adoptdarkness as a primary organizing metaphor, an ‘écriture d’ombres’.57 In White’sanalysis, this obscurity is epitomised in the ‘not said’ of the stories, which gives thema ‘distinctive incompleteness’:

‘This “not said” . . . is not an absence to be supplied, some insufficiencywhich the reader must replenish. It is not a provisional “unsaid” that one canpermanently eliminate, it is rather the necessary not-said of the text, it is on accountof its not being clearly articulated that the novel establishes its distinctive powerand reality.’58

This idea of obscurity’s centrality, it is suggested here, again shows the significanceof dislocation in Conrad’s work. In White’s theory, obscurity, as well as beingsymptomatic of dislocation in Conrad’s private life,59 is both the object and effect ofConrad’s writing, the focus and result of his concern with the disjunction betweenappearances and understanding, and between authorial representation and the reader.Referring particularly to Heart of Darkness, White argues that Conrad’s developmentof obscurity in his fiction:

‘defies the reader to remain at the literal level of the story. This means that thefiction opens to a wide range of interpretive possibilities. The obscurity arises fromthis fact, that the narrative often disclaims that it is “just a story” and suggests

52. Ibid, p 25.53. White, above n 43.54. Ibid, pp 1–2.55. Ibid, pp 2–6.56. Ibid, p 16.57. Literally a ‘writing of shadows’: ibid, p 17. Compare R Roussel The Metaphysics ofDarkness: A Study in the Unity and Development of Conrad’s Fiction (Baltimore: John HopkinsPress, 1971) and J Hillis Miller Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1966) p 27.58. White, ibid, pp 28–29.59. Ibid, pp 30–43. White emphasises Conrad’s alienation in the late 1890s, due to his mentalhealth problems and sense of separation and isolation as an exile and from his audience.



insistently that its true meaning is elsewhere: yet this “elsewhere” is never located,it is a lost domain of symbolic resonance and enigmatic suggestion alwaysglimpsed just beyond knowledge.’60

Obscurity, therefore, is the shadowland at the heart of dislocation and at the edgesof the text. When being and understanding, text and meaning, intent and expression,story-as-told and story-as-read are separated out and their connections undone, thefiction that does this ultimately becomes an embodiment of that problematised dislo-cation. In this perspective too, Conrad’s fiction illustrates and also explores theproblematic space opened by critical engagement with the world.61

The third approach to dislocation in Conrad’s fiction considered here involves twoworks, written almost 40 years apart, which both focus on one of the defining traits ofConrad’s work: solitude. Solitude, being alone and usually isolated from humankind,is a recurrent theme in Conrad’s stories. It is an archetypal representation of disloca-tion as it involves the ruptured connections between individual and community,between humans as social animals and human beings alone, and also the fracturing ofcommunication and understanding. In Conrad’s works, all of these split binaries areshown to have had a place together, and are generally represented as requiring areconnection: in the dislocated space between, in which the isolated protagonist exists,lie uncertainty, problematic disengagement and frequently death. Consequently, Con-radian isolation is a particularly powerful representation of dislocation and the criticalspace it opens, in which fundamental issues are examined and played out, includingthe vulnerability and finiteness of life itself.

In Gillon’s analysis, isolation is the dominant theme in Conrad’s life and works.62

Conrad’s protagonists are nearly always isolated in some way, cut off from the rest ofhumanity, either physically on ships (for example The Nigger of the Narcissus,Typhoon), on islands (for example Lord Jim, Victory and An Outcast of the Islands),in the alienating bustle of a large city (especially The Secret Agent), and frequentlyalso through a lack of understanding and failed communication (as in Heart ofDarkness or The Secret Agent). For Gillon, Conrad’s ‘isolato’ is:

‘. . . a man incapable of living the kind of life he wishes to live, throughadverse circumstances or through his own faults. If he is a man of achievement, hecannot bring it to consummation; if he has failed in his projects, he cannot forgethis weakness; if he has committed an act of treachery, he is tortured by a morbidsense of remorse, and lives only to redeem his crime or what he considers to be acrime. Often he is overwhelmed by the contrast of what he is and what he dreams

60. Ibid, pp 108–109.61. Compare M Wollaeger Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1990), who examines Conrad’s philosophical engagement with the limits onrepresentation and understanding through the prism of skepticism; P Whiteley Knowledge andExperimental Realism in Conrad, Lawrence and Woolf (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer-sity, 1987), who examines Conrad’s testing of the limits of rational understanding of the worldand the tensions among reality, impressions, knowledge and imagination; and M LevensonModernism and the Fate of Individuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), whodiscusses Conrad’s focus on a ‘radical disorientation that obliterates any stable relation betweenthe self and the world’, p 5.62. Gillon, above n 44, pp 7 and 56–57: ‘The isolatoes of his novels and stories are, in manysenses, avatars of Conrad’s own life’. Compare White’s argument, above n 59.



of being. Thrown upon himself, the isolated man forever faces an impassable wallthat separates him even from the people who stand closest to him.’63

Isolation in Conrad’s fiction, therefore, is both a reflection of Conrad’s view thatloneliness is a fact of life, and a portrayal of the recurrent modernist theme ‘ofman’s insufficiency, alienation and guilt’.64 As the above extract shows, it is anisolation marked by dislocation, between expectation and reality, and between selfand others. In this dislocated state, the self, for Conrad, is ultimately all that hisprotagonists have to fall back on, with all the uncertainties in self-knowledge andcommunication that that brings; yet at the same time, in his fictional worlds, theisolated self is the most fragile, and solidarity and community suggested to be thenecessary, inevitable conditions for existence.65 For example, in Victory, Heyst’sphilosophical detachment from the world and self-imposed isolation on his islandare the key factors in his downfall when the violent outside world drops in on himin the form of Mr Jones and his cronies.66 In An Outcast of the Islands, bothLingard and Willems are undone by their isolation from the civilised, law abidingworld. While problematising the state of dislocation, Conrad also considers itscauses and implications.

Finally and along similar lines, Lord’s analysis also focuses on the tensionsbetween solitude and solidarity in Conrad’s stories.67 Echoing the refrain of the abovestudies, Lord emphasises how Conrad’s narratives both reflect and express the isola-tion and alienation of the individual in modern society. In particular, Lord’s studyhighlights how Conrad’s use of language and narrative technique reflect this sense ofisolation and the uncertainty engendered by the growth in critical reflection on thehitherto accepted certainties of knowledge of others and the world. With particularreference to the elusiveness of Marlow’s narrative in Heart of Darkness, Lordobserves that:

‘. . . in the very failure of language and narrative sequence to disclosemeaning may be found a deeper, more essential if pernicious truth. Languagefunctions as both symptom and indicator of the alienation of man from himself andothers, and of the absence of a workable notion of community.’68

Again, in Lord’s analysis, text and meaning, narrative and sense are dislocated inConrad’s fiction, due to his reflection of ‘the alienation and fragmentation of themodern experience’.69 In this dislocated space of doubt, contingent meaning andshattered communication, solitude is a cause and the inevitable result, calling intoquestion the possibility – and value – of community. As Lord concludes, whenConrad’s tragic heroes remain isolated, they ‘remain true to themselves, but at thecost of their lives and the impoverishment of the creative potential of society, since

63. Gillon, ibid.64. Ibid, p 58.65. Ibid, pp 118 and 167.66. One of Conrad’s last works, Victory, was published in 1915 and arguably represents theclearest distillation of his concerns with self-knowledge, the unreliability of engagement withthe factual world and the tension between solitude and community: M Kalnins (ed) Victory(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) ‘Introduction’ pp xiii–xxxviii, especially pp xv–xvii.67. Lord, above n 44.68. Ibid, p 65; compare her confirmation of this view at p 96.69. Ibid, pp 63–64.



they represent its best element’.70 Thus whereas Gillon highlights Conrad’s apparentcommunitarian turn, Lord suggests that Conrad offers no solution in either. Ulti-mately, in Lord’s interpretation, the state of isolation in Conrad’s fiction involvesrecognition of the need to problematise dislocation, but involves no hope of recon-nection: whilst it is apparently inevitable and the only true state, it is endless andprofoundly sad.

These approaches to Conrad’s fiction, through the prisms of bewilderment, obscu-rity and solitude, all serve to show ways in which his stories are in many ways deeplyconcerned with a process and condition of dislocation and with the need to expressand engage with them. The disconnected elements causative of that dislocation aremultiform, but responses to it similar. Overall, dislocation is a state of uncertainty, acondition of doubt and rupture, brought about by bewilderment and isolation, evenalienation, involving a doubting, anxious questioning of the world and the individual’srelationship to others.

Whilst strongly representative of the modern age and modernism’s concerns,Conrad’s work has also been argued to show resistance to the negative tendencies ofmodernism. Erdinast-Vulcan has examined Conrad’s portrayal of heroic struggles, hisimplicit endorsement of the value of solidarity and community, and his self-consciousawareness of the unreality of his textual worlds, but at the same time his persistencein creating them.71 On this basis, for Erdinast-Vulcan, the tensions in Conrad’s workdemonstrate both his engagement with and defiance of modernism:

‘Conrad’s relationship with modernity is, then, a complex one. There can belittle doubt of his temperamental constitution: an exile who had sought out andexplored the condition of “extraterritoriality” . . . fully aware of the ultimate impli-cations of epistemological and ethical relativism, and afflicted with a suspicion ofthe futility of art, Conrad was very much a man of the post-Nietzschean age. Buthe was, at the same time, deeply hostile to the spirit of modernity, precisely becausehe understood it so well. He had no share in Nietzsche’s exhilarated sense ofliberation from the metaphysical bondage.’72

In other words, Conrad’s struggle to provide glimpses of ungraspable meaning andimpossible solidarity is both an indicator of his modernist concerns and his desire tooffer something more than a merely nihilistic rejection of certainties. In this light,Conradian dislocation is arguably doubly significant: it is a dislocation in a clearlymodernist sense, but also a dislocation from the dislocation of modernism, represent-ing modernist issues but revealing Conrad’s anxieties about modernism and hisresponses to it. Consequently, even a more hesitant reading of Conrad’s modernistapproach can be seen to involve, fundamentally, a concern with dislocation. Takentogether, all of these perspectives on Conrad’s work elucidate his world view, themesand technique. They also provide a valuable supplement to understanding the aporeticapproach of modernist and late modern writing. With these issues in mind, a syntheticanalytical concept can be constructed in order to draw together the common threads ofthese various works of law and literature.

70. Ibid, p 305.71. In chapters 2, 3 and 4 of her book, above n 25, Erdinast-Vulcan discusses these ideas interms of Conrad’s responses to failures of myth, of metaphysics and of textuality, supporting heranalysis with examples drawn from nine of Conrad’s stories.72. Ibid, p 21.



3. A CONCEPT OF DISLOCATION

At the core of the legal theories, fiction and commentaries explored above is a senseof disruption and disconnection, engendered by and engendering doubt and a loss ofcertainty in the conditions of existence, and, more specifically, the ability of humanlaw and judgement to achieve justice. This is particularly so where pain and violenceare involved, being themselves forces that disconnect and disrupt existence, as rec-ognised by the legal theories and Conrad. The different forms of disruption identifiedas being central to, and occurring in different guises in the fiction and theory addressedhere can, it is argued, be encapsulated in a concept of ‘dislocation’. The idea ofdislocation, and often the term itself, recur in both the legal theory and the secondarycommentary on the works of Joseph Conrad discussed above. Its senses of brokenconnection, but suggestion of a hope, or possibility of re-establishing a connectionbetween the phenomena in question mean that it is particularly suitable as the pivotalterm to encompass the ideas that this paper has explored. To this end, it is essential tobegin with a closer consideration of the term’s meanings.

Dislocation signifies the act of displacing, or disconnecting, or the state of beingdisplaced or disconnected.73 It indicates the existence of a state of discontinuity or,more strongly, disruption, which involves a shifting out of place or position. In itsgeneral sense of displacing or disconnecting, the word ‘dislocation’ indicates aninterference with, or ending of, a pre-existing connection or relationship between twoor more phenomena. Its prefix, dis-, signals a reversal, negation or deprivation of thatwhich the root word represents.74 Dislocation’s more specific sense therefore conveysthe idea of a negation of location or situating of phenomena (things, people orconcepts). It conveys the ending of a positioning that has existed, but also, thenegatory sense of its prefix can be taken to suggest a positioning that ought to, or canbe expected to, or perhaps at least can be hoped to exist.

However, this is of course contingent. A dislocated skeletal joint has a true,biologically determined position which has been ended and to which its restorationcan be aspired to in concrete ways. In contrast, theoretical positing of a dislocationbetween individual and community, law and justice, or law and meaning in thepresence of pain, whilst indicating the ending of a connection and suggesting thepossibility of reconnection, is not based on the same awareness of an absolute or trueposition. Instead, it can arguably only signify a shift from a previous and contingentposition and a concern about a possible future positioning that is much more fluid anduncertain.

In this way ‘dislocation’ is a space in which the elements of the undone relation-ships are thrown into sharp relief, and their past and potential location called intoquestion. Yet dislocation represents both the resulting aporia, in which critical reap-praisal can occur, and the means for opening it up. As such, dislocation is also anaction or a technique, a bewildering undoing or challenging of connections in order tocall their positioning into question. It is a vital feature of all forms of modernist criticalwriting, for it runs through early twentieth century modernism, with the latter’s senseof alienation, fragmentation and discontinuity, and its critical drive to confront and beconfronted by those ruptures in understanding, as well as late modern critical and

73. Collins English Dictionary 21st Century Edition (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 2000).74. Ibid.



aporetic theories, of which it is an essential tool.75 By highlighting the portrayal,process and result of dislocation in the works selected here, the aim has been to recasttheir objects in terms of their problematised relationships, and the problematisingthereof, in order to consider the opportunities that this provides for thinking aboutthem in new and critical ways.76 On this basis, three aspects of dislocation areconsidered here in particular: the concept’s suggested hope of reconnection, thesignificance of isolation and the issue of obscurity.

First, the hope of (re)connection is a key aspect of engagement with dislocation.For Douzinas and Warrington, the dislocation between law and justice requires a turnto ethics to try to fill the aporetic gap, in the hope that the ethics of alterity can closeit, even whilst recognising that such closure is impossible. For Cover, the gap betweenlaw and justice as meaning in the presence of law’s violence has to be addressed, inorder to recognise that such a gap exists and frustrates law’s role in building commu-nity. Going further, Sarat and Kearns propose an experiential approach for under-standing the gulf between law and its impact, that is, between reason and pain. In theirview, experiential analysis can clarify the nature of the dislocation between law and itseffects in the presence of violence, in order to try to re-imagine ways of reconnectinglaw and justice. In Conrad’s works existence and isolation, pain and death, justice andviolence are represented in ways that suggest the dislocation of conceptual certainty,individual will, solidarity and – as with Lingard and Willems – intersubjective under-standing. Yet, whilst not asserting a clear-cut world view, Conrad suggests that,imperfect and doubtful as they may be, social solidarity and faith in others may be ourbest, albeit fragile hope for holding things together. In essence therefore, all of theseapproaches arguably signal faith in turning to the Other, or others, to understand themand through that understanding correct the dislocation; yet each approach embodies afrustrated humanism, recognising more or less explicitly the limits, even the unattain-ability, of this goal.

The second aspect of dislocation considered here is the significance of isolation.For Douzinas and Warrington, the Other is isolated in her ethical unknowability, whilefor Cover, Sarat and Kearns, the linguistic disruption of pain and violence is arguablyan isolating force. However, in Conrad’s work the dislocation of individuals from theworld and each other, that is issues of isolation and solitude, are of deeper and furtherreaching significance. Existence and community are questioned and presentedthrough a film of shadow in Conrad’s works, but consistently the fate of his isolatedcharacters is apparently aggravated by the rejection of society, the hope to whichConrad clings, but doubts. Willems, who thought himself above the norms of society,brings about his own ruin through his self-isolation, only to have isolation, his ultimatedoom, imposed on him.77 Lingard, who has lived ‘for years beyond the pale of

75. With explicit reference to ‘post-modernism’ Snipp-Walmsley, above n 1, pp 424–425,refers to ‘a principle of critical vigilance: a means of opening up the contradictions and aporiasin the master narratives and power discourses’.76. Compare L Moran ‘Law’s diabolical romance: reflections on a new jurisprudence of thesublime’ in M Freeman (ed) Law and Popular Culture (Current Legal Issues vol 7) (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2004) pp 226–242. Moran draws parallels between Gothic literatureand contemporary jurisprudential engagement with justice and the Other, in order to suggestthat such jurisprudence, like Gothic art, is inherently concerned with the ‘sublime’, understoodas ‘the void, the infinity, the awesome nothingness against which boundaries and borders ofcurrent meanings and the possibility of meaning are both made and enforced, transgressed andtranscended’.77. Stape, above n 29, p xii.



civilised laws’ also comes to realise that his isolation from society has not given himsuperior judgement, but a sort of sentimental naïvety: his kindness to Willems isrepaid by betrayal and even in the final moment of judgement he is swayed by areluctance actually to complete what he set out to do. Yet whilst his inability to killWillems is in part merciful, he nevertheless causes his death. Just as the isolatedWillems is reduced in Lingard’s mind to ‘a bitter thought’ to be hidden from the world,so Lingard himself is diminished and soon to fade, having lost his ship, his power andhis resolve.78 Whether we consider Willems and Lingard, or Heyst in Victory, or theisolated bubble worlds of Verloc in The Secret Agent or Razumov in Under WesternEyes, for example, in Conrad’s fictional worlds, isolation is a powerful force, as bothconsequence of and influence on his protagonists’ actions.

In this light, it is suggested here that Conrad’s focus on isolation, read in conjunc-tion with the above legal theories, can be taken to signal a need to look beyond themoment of judgment, the effects of law and its relationship with pain and violence, tothe nature and effects of the individual and social conditions in which life is lived, andtherefore in which law and violence are experienced. More specifically, reading theidea of a jurisprudence of violence in Sarat’s and Kearns’s work, for instance,alongside Conrad’s fiction, it is arguable that the already limited prospect of experi-ential understanding and justice will perhaps be even more remote if those before thelaw are isolated from it and from each other, if no shared meaning and communityexist in the first place. In other words, the dislocating effects of pain and violence,from or outside law, are significant barriers to justice, but may be worsened by, ormerely secondary to, pre-existing isolation and dislocation from law. The dislocationsin Conrad’s fiction therefore remind us of the broader contextual significance of(dis)connections among the issues that legal theory examines through dislocation.

Lastly, it is important to underline the idea of obscurity, the third key dimension ofthe concept of dislocation considered here. Obscurity, it was suggested by AllonWhite, involves both the production and concealment of meaning, the dimension ofthe ‘not said’ and what is ‘glimpsed just beyond knowledge’.79 Just as dislocation wasshown above to be a central aspect of White’s discussion of obscurity in Conrad, so itis suggested here that obscurity, as an écriture d’ombres and a recognition of the realmof the unsaid and unsayable, is central to the concept of dislocation. This concept, asstated, is a critical technique and space, capturing a mood and a critical concern. It cangather and suggest, but cannot provide definitive answers. It recognises the limits ofknowledge, indicating a dislocation in understanding and always suggesting a domainof meaning still to be approached, beyond the veil between text and object, law and theOther, pain and language, and between the individual and the world. For legal theory,exploring dislocation through a turn to literature – in itself a dislocation of orthodoxlegal analysis – can assist in glimpsing something more, but also in recognising thatthat something is inevitably limited.80

CONCLUSION

As the above discussion shows, it is possible to find the idea of dislocation at the heartof modernism and Conrad’s fiction, but also at the heart of some aspects of late

78. Ibid, p xiii.79. White, above n 43 – see nn 58 and 60 and related text.80. See also Skinner, above n 5, at 485 on the excess beyond the text.



modern legal theory. In all cases dislocation serves the same purpose: to displaceunderstanding and confront us with the need to reconsider connections and relationsamong the objects of inquiry. Significantly, dislocation is both a critical technique anda critical outcome, in which possibilities for re-location, or reconnection, need to beassessed. Turning from legal theory to fiction and back again in this way shows, at thesimplest level, continuity in critical technique through modernist to late modernengagement with the world and how Conrad’s literature in particular can illustrateboth that critical technique and its use to problematise similar issues. Beyond mereillustration, however, this movement between fiction and theory can also serve tosuggest alternative views on the relative significance, context and interaction of theircommon themes. This is a useful reminder when considering recent critical jurispru-dence and, in particular, the idea of a jurisprudence of violence, that the experientialdimensions of law and violence need to be assessed in their broad existential setting,and not themselves in isolation. Finally, the dimension of obscurity in dislocationindicates and acknowledges the limits of analysis and the silences at the edges ofdiscussion. The concept of dislocation, explored through theoretical and literaryapproaches, it is argued, is a valuable tool for raising and (re-) assessing these issues.



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