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ISLL Italian Society for Law and Literature

Il presente volume stato realizzato con il contributo della Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna, www.fondazionecarisbo.it

diritto e letteratura
prospettive di ricerca

a cura di

Carla Faralli Maria Paola Mittica

Copyright MMX ARACNEeditrice S.r.l. www.aracneeditrice.it info@aracneeditrice.it via Raffaele Garofalo, 133/AB 00173 Roma (06) 93781065 isbn 978885483666-2 I diritti di traduzione, di memorizzazione elettronica, di riproduzione e di adattamento anche parziale, con qualsiasi mezzo, sono riservati per tutti i Paesi. Non sono assolutamente consentite le fotocopie senza il permesso scritto dellEditore. I edizione: novembre 2010

Indice

7 Presentazione 9 Introduzione

15 The Reality of Fiction. Lectio magistralis di Jerome S. Bruner parte prima IL DIRITTO TRA REALT E RAPPRESENTAZIONE 29  Verit ontica e verit processuale. Il diritto come fatto e come rappresentazione Domenico Corradini H. Broussard 75 Finzioni giuridiche e letterarie: possibile una teoria unificata? Giovanni Tuzet 109 La costruzione narrativa dei significati giuridici. Il fatto nel processo Flora Di Donato 123 Costituzionalit e narrativit Alberto Vespaziani 139 Le nozze di Pelopia. Il mito come narrazione giuridica Maria Paola Mittica 177 Creativit e diritto: il giurista inedito Felice Casucci
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Diritto e Letteratura

parte seconda IL DIRITTO NELLA LETTERATURA 195 Il Processo di Kaf ka tra diritto e metafisica Luigi Alfieri 221 Riforme e satira del diritto penale nella letteratura Mario A. Cattaneo 229 Dove la precisione del linguaggio giuridico aiuta linterpretazione letteraria. Un esempio da Heinrich Heine Alberto Destro 239 Limiti della legalit e limiti del visibile in 24 Veronica Innocenti parte terza I PRODROMI 251 Il concetto del diritto nel pensiero letterario di Dante Alighieri Vittorio Capuzza 299 Diritto e letteratura tra Medioevo e primo Umanesimo. Lopera di Coluccio Salutati Gian Mario Anselmi 311 Giuristi, letterati e dispute dei saperi in et moderna. Il caso della scienza dellonore Marco Cavina 321 La finzione pi vera. Studi sugli archetipi letterari della devianza nel pensiero penalpositivistico italiano Daniele Velo Dalbrenta 341 Gli autori

Diritto e Letteratura isbn 97888548-32145 DOI 10.4399/97888548321451 pag. 7-8

Presentazione

Nel giugno 2008 per iniziativa di Enrico Pattaro nata lISLL Italian Society for Law and Literature (Societ italiana di diritto e letteratura SIDL). Suo principale scopo promuovere e incoraggiare gli studi riconducibili allambito di ricerca denominato Law and Humanities, quindi non solo diritto e letteratura in senso stretto, ma anche diritto e cinema, diritto e arte, diritto e musica. La Societ ha sede presso il CIRSFID Centro Interdipartimentale di Ricerca in Storia del diritto, Filosofia e Sociologia del Diritto e Informatica Giuridica, centro che da oltre venti anni ( nato nel 1986) raccoglie le competenze interdisciplinari di docenti e ricercatori dellUniversit di Bologna. La presenza di tali competenze ne ha fatto un luogo di incontro tra discipline diverse col fine di superare la rigida specializzazione e distinzione degli indirizzi accademici, che caratterizza le moderne Universit e che era, invece, sconosciuta alle origini, nella convinzione che le grandi sfide del mondo contemporaneo possano trovare una soluzione solo attraverso lincontro, lo scambio e la discussione tra le diverse discipline in un rapporto paritario. Forte di questa convinzione il CIRSFID nei suoi primi anni di vita si dedicato prevalentemente a far crescere linformatica giuridica, disciplina nuova in Italia a met degli anni 80 aprendo il dialogo tra giuristi e informatici. Negli stessi anni in cui la rivoluzione informatica entrava nella vita di tutti noi a vari livelli unaltra rivoluzione stava maturando, quella
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Carla Faralli

provocata dallutilizzo sempre pi avanzato di sofisticate tecnologie in ambito medico. Gli studiosi del CIRSFID non sono rimasti insensibili a questi problemi e hanno aperto un altro filone di ricerca, la bioetica, in dialogo con medici, filosofi, psicologi e giuristi. Questi due filoni di ricerca si collocano sullo sfondo di una concezione del diritto come fenomeno storico culturale che nasce dallinsegnamento di Guido Fass al quale il CIRSFID dedicato. Su questo stesso sfondo trovano spazio anche gli studi di diritto e letteratura, intesi nel senso ampio sopra accennato, che, nelle loro diverse declinazioni, richiedono un confronto interdisciplinare tra storici, comparatisti, sociologi, letterati, filosofi. In questa prospettiva ulteriore obiettivo della Societ facilitare i contatti tra gli studiosi italiani e stranieri interessati, da diverse angolature, a questo settore di studi, creando un network in grado di rafforzare le ricerche e le iniziative scientifiche e istituzionali soprattutto in Italia, ma operando anche come veicolo di comunicazione e di diffusione delle diverse esperienze che emergono nel quadro internazionale. Per raggiungere tale obiettivo la ISLL si proposta di organizzare un convegno annuale che permetta lincontro e il dialogo tra gli studiosi. Il presente volume raccoglie gli atti del primo di tali convegni tenutosi nel maggio del 2009. Sono molto grata a Paola Mittica, coordinatrice scientifica della Societ, e a Martina Di Teodoro e Francesca Faenza, incaricate della segreteria, per il loro prezioso lavoro, senza il quale n il convegno n i relativi atti sarebbero stati possibili. Carla Faralli
Presidente ISLL

Diritto e Letteratura isbn 97888548-32145 DOI 10.4399/97888548321452 pag. 913

Introduzione

Il 27 e il 28 maggio del 2009, presso la Facolt di Giurisprudenza dellUniversit di Bologna, si tenuto il primo convegno nazionale della Italian Society for Law and Literature ISLL (Societ Italiana di Diritto e Letteratura SIDL), dal titolo Diritto e letteratura. Prospettive di ricerca. Il convegno ha visto unampia partecipazione tra i soci e altri studiosi interessati a questo tema, realizzandosi come unoccasione importante per confrontare posizioni, metodi, ambizioni; per discutere, in definitiva, di ci che ci si attende dal dialogo tra le diverse arti: sul piano conoscitivo e nella prospettiva di una didattica critica, soprattutto per ci che attiene al diritto. Non facile presentare in una cornice unitaria i numerosi contributi che hanno reso possibile il convegno e la collazione degli atti che presentiamo. Ma un profilo sembra interessarli tutti, e riguarda lapertura allinterdisciplinariet che ha interessato i lavori. Sebbene non siano state esaurite, le tante anime che impreziosiscono la Societ sono state ben rappresentate. Al convegno si sono alternate, infatti, le voci di studiosi del diritto (filosofi, sociologi, comparatisti e storici del diritto), della letteratura (germanisti e italianisti), e di materie assai vicine a queste come la filosofia della politica e lo studio della rappresentazione di temi giuridici attraverso canali di produzione culturale di massa, nello specifico la televisione. Il maggiore problema che linterdisciplinariet pone quello della comunicazione tra le diverse prospettive e i loro linguaggi. Lal9

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Maria Paola Mittica

to grado di specializzazione dei saperi rende spesso estremamente difficoltosi gli scambi tra i vari sistemi di interpretazione. Sono diverse le terminologie e i codici di significazione, le metodologie, le tradizioni culturali e scientifiche entro cui ogni sistema di sapere si andato formalizzando. Si tratta di un processo tipico di riduzione della complessit a fronte della complessit crescente dellepoca moderna, si usa dire in una delle tradizioni della sociologia generale, ma il punto che alla complessit intima della condizione umana e delluomo come essere sociale, un sapere isolato nella propria specializzazione per quanto raffinato non riesce pi a rispondere in modo soddisfacente. Non pu essere un caso che accada sempre pi di frequente, quando si affrontano temi complessi, di sconfinare in altri saperi. E non un caso che una societ per vocazione interdisciplinare come la ISLL abbia raccolto intorno a s in poco pi di un anno quasi centottanta studiosi. Evidentemente tempo di tradurre questa tensione in teorie e strumenti meditati e condivisibili. Linterdisciplinariet, di cui portatore lapproccio Diritto e letteratura e meglio ancora Law and the Humanities, un punto di inizio consapevole di questo percorso. Certo ci muoviamo su un terreno affatto nuovo, che ha dato e continua a offrire notevoli frutti in Paesi in cui questo approccio consolidato. Tuttavia, pur guardando con la dovuta attenzione ai lavori di coloro che soprattutto dagli anni 70 in avanti negli Stati Uniti hanno sviluppato notevolmente questa metodologia, da questo primo convegno emerge forte lesigenza di scavare nella tradizione culturale europea per riscoprire non solo le radici antiche di una diversa visione del sapere e della sapienza, ma per individuare auspicabilmente una chiave anche originale attraverso cui immaginare altri mondi possibili. Cos, di volta in volta, pur prendendo in esame oggetti diversi, attraverso differenti prospettive, con proprie metodologie, i saggi che presentiamo invitano, in modo pi o meno diretto, a una riflessione sulle finalit e sullapproccio interdisciplinare di Diritto e letteratura, non mancando di delineare ognuno, forsanche soltanto sullo sfondo, lintensa tradizione culturale che in Europa pu supportare questa metodologia, sulla via di una rinnovata sensibilit scientifica.

Introduzione

11

Il volume si apre con un saggio di Jerome S. Bruner, The Reality of Fiction, oggetto della lectio magistralis che il prof. Bruner, socio onorario della ISLL, ha accettato di tenere a introduzione dei lavori del convegno, al quale ci lega un profondo sentimento di gratitudine. Nel riorganizzare i contributi nella loro versione finale abbiamo distinto tre parti. La prima, Il diritto tra realt e rappresentazione, si pone in continuit con la relazione di Bruner e raccoglie i saggi degli autori che utilizzano laccostamento della letteratura al diritto per ragionare intorno alla realt del diritto come costruzione simbolica (Corradini, Verit ontica e verit processuale.Il diritto come fatto e come rappresentazione), raffrontando analiticamente le finzioni giuridiche con quel le letterarie (Tuzet, Finzioni giuridiche e letterarie: possibile una teoria unificata?), offrendo lanalisi di casi concreti di costruzione narrativa dei significati giuridici tanto nellambito del diritto positivo in processi ordinari, nel corso della definizione del fatto (Di Donato, La costruzione narrativa dei significati giuridici. Il fatto nel processo), o al livello dei discorsi e della giurisprudenza costituzionali (Vespaziani, Costituzionalit e narrativit) quanto nellambito della juridicit, laddove anche il racconto mitico pu essere considerato una narrazione giuridica (Mittica, Le nozze di Pelopia. Il mito come narrazione giuridica). Chiude questa sezione un saggio su creativit e diritto, dove la letteratura banco di prova di sensibilit per il giurista teso verso unetica del mondo della vita (Casucci, Creativit e diritto: il giurista inedito). Specialisti del diritto si servono della letteratura e delle sue categorie per corrodere la dogmatica giuridica, desacralizzare e riportare il diritto alla propria misura e alla misura delletica, osservandolo per quello che : arte di artefatti, per quanto necessaria. Diverso il ricorso al diritto compiuto nellambito della letteratura. Nella seconda parte, dedicata per lappunto a Il diritto nella letteratura, sono raccolti gli interventi in cui ci si interroga sui contenuti veicolati dalla letteratura attraverso la metafora giuridica, spesso utilizzata per esprimere la relazione delluomo con il sacro, come nel caso de Il Processo kaf kiano (Alfieri, Il Processo di Kaf ka tra diritto e metafisica); ovvero, per esaltare la forza critica della letteratura nella sua opera

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di denuncia, sia che implichi direttamente il diritto e le condizioni di disparit sociale (Cattaneo, Riforme e satira del diritto penale nella letteratura), o che venga utilizzata per rendere pi efficace il linguaggio e il giudizio di pubblicista e poeta, com nel caso di Heine (Destro, Dove la precisione del linguaggio giuridico aiuta linterpretazione letteraria. Un esempio da Heinrich Heine). Sebbene si tratti di un diverso linguaggio artistico, si colloca a pieno titolo in questa sezione lanalisi della serie televisiva 24, in cui la rappresentazione di una violenza necessaria che travalica quella legittima delle regole, in nome della sicurezza come bene comune svolge una precisa funzione nella cultura americana, indirizzando il giudizio e forse anche alcuni comportamenti dei cittadini/spettatori del dopo 11 settembre (Innocenti, Limiti della legalit e limiti del visibile in 24). La letteratura anche testimonianza del diritto e del sentimento giuridico che meglio si colgono in unopera poetica che non in corpus legis, quanto pi unepoca lontana dalla sensibilit culturale dello studioso immerso nella propria contemporaneit. In questa direzione viene letta lopera di Dante che apre la terza e ultima parte del volume dedicata ai Prodromi di Diritto e letteratura. Qui, oltre allintervento sugli scritti danteschi nello specifico la Commedia in cui si riflette la cultura giuridica dellepoca medievale (Capuzza, Il concetto del diritto nel pensiero letterario di Dante Alighieri), sono riuniti gli interventi interessati dalla ricerca della relazione tra Diritto e letteratura (ma anche del diritto e altre arti o saperi) in particolari momenti della storia europea e italiana. Allanalisi della figura di Coluccio Salutati, come tramite per la comprensione del delicato clima di contaminazione, tra le lettere e la riflessione civile maturata attorno allo studio delle istituzioni del diritto romano, in cui comincia la stagione umanistica (Anselmi, Diritto e letteratura tra Medioevo e primo Umanesimo. Lopera di Coluccio Salutati), segue la ricostruzione critica di alcune dispute tra giuristi e letterati sulla scienza dellonore nella prima modernit. Lonore oggetto comune delle diverse riflessioni scientifiche su cui convergono gli interessi e i saperi di giuristi, filosofi della morale, letterati e non di meno nozione che permette di entrare nel cuore di in una cultura investita da un profondo mutamento (Cavina, Giuristi, letterati e dispute dei saperi in et moderna. Il

Introduzione

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caso della scienza dellonore). Chiude la sezione sui prodromi lanalisi di parte della letteratura che emerge dagli studi del positivismo penale italiano, allinizio del Novecento, in cui si evidenzia la consapevolezza del valore dellarte nellindividuazione forsanche per via intuitiva e nella forma di archetipi di quei tipi che diverranno modelli nella scienza penalistica (Velo Dalbrenta, La finzione pi vera. Studi sugli archetipi letterari della devianza nel pensiero penalpositivistico italiano). Nel concludere questa breve presentazione un particolare ringraziamento va a Stefano Canestrari, preside della Facolt di Giurisprudenza dellUniversit di Bologna che ha ospitato il convegno, ai relatori e a coloro che hanno presieduto le varie sessioni di lavoro, tra cui Vincenzo Ferrari, attuale presidente della Societ Italiana di Filosofia del diritto. Il convegno non sarebbe stato possibile senza il consiglio e lesperienza di Carla Faralli, Enrico Pattaro, Marco Cavina, e lopera di Francesca Faenza e Martina Di Teodoro che hanno gestito con efficienza e garbo la segreteria organizzativa. Maria Paola Mittica
Coordinatrice scientifica ISLL

Diritto e Letteratura isbn 97888548-32145 DOI 10.4399/97888548321453 pag. 1526

The Reality of Fiction1

1. Our topic provides us with an opportunity to discuss something that has been puzzling the human race for a very long time, provoking wonder, sometimes even fear. How can something known to be makebelieve seem real: a tale, a novel, a pice de thtre? How can there be truth or reality in the makebelieve of fiction? And why, indeed, do we say of great fiction that is even more real than life itself ? Perhaps we should begin our quest with a quick look at what Reality has, over the ages, been taken to mean. We quickly discover, of course, that Reality is a notion that has always been in contention, realists and nominalists at war with each other, even at war within their own ranks, about whether Reality is to be found out there in some world independent of us, or whether it is made, constructed by us collectively for purposes of utility and to assure likemindedness in the communities where we live. And of course, there have also been those socalled idealists who follow Platos view that the world is an idealized set of essences to which we have but clouded access through those shadows that the ideal world casts on the cave wall through the cave door. Today, of course, the official or professional philosophical view is that Realism naive realism is dead, misleading, childlike. We smile condescendingly at Newtons naive formula that Man
1. Il presente saggio ripropone, leggermente rivisto, quanto scritto dallautore sotto il medesimo titolo in McGill Journal of Education, 40, 1, Winter 2005. 15

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sets forth on a sea of ignorance and simply discovers the islands of truth: Hypotheses non fingo. We even mock at Aristotles old formula in the Poetics arguing that convincing literature seems real because it imitates reality, mimesis: how do we know the reality that something is supposed to be imitating? In one feel swoop, Realism and Idealism have been swept into the trashbin of historical error. Reality, we now prefer to say, is a product of disciplined imagination, shaped and guided by conventions for selecting, organizing, and testing experience against agreedupon criteria. As in science reality is now taken to be the child of a provable hypothesis derived from some paradigmatic conception of the world the provable hypothesis lending credence to the paradigm from which it was derived. But then bang! A new paradigm is invented or imagined, other hypotheses are generated and proved and a scientific revolution offers us a new reality. Divine intervention gives way to Darwins evolution; the humoral theory of disease gives way to the world of germs. I have started our discussion with scientific realities because I want to make plain at the outset that while such realities are obviously different from literary or fictional ones, they bear an important family resemblance to them both are constructed, a matter that will be clearer presently. 2. So we come now to literary, fictional realities, those grippingly credible episodes like the restless domesticity at the opening of Albert Camus The Stranger, or the compelling maritime routines in Joseph Conrads Secret Sharer. The first and most obvious thing about all such fictional realities is that they are products of language, not just of the artistry of language, but of language itself. For just as language created a visualaudible world for the blindanddeaf Helen Keller, so language speaking to the imagination, creates a real world for us when we read or hear compelling stories. Reality is always in the imagination imaginations most compelling product. But it is not just language per se that is reality creating, but rather one particular power that language makes possible the power of narrative, the power to create and to comprehend stories. With-

The Reality of Fiction

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out that gift of narrative, without some virtually innate access to it for shaping the world, there is no reality of fiction. So lets explore what narrative is, what it takes to create a story. That will start us on our way. A story requires, first, the presumed existence of some initial canonical state of things in the world some stable ordinariness to which, as it were, our habits of mind are tuned. Stories begin in ordinariness. Marcel Proust (1992, Combray, 3) catches our proneness to this initial canonical state with this telling passage:
Perhaps the immobility of things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, made so by the immobility of our conception of them.

That is the start. The very next step in a story is, of course, to bring this takenforgranted steady state of things into question: to undermine its selfevident ordinariness, to put it at risk, even to turn it on its head. Take the young captain in Conrads Secret Sharer (1982), unsure of himself on his initial ships command. He has decided to weigh anchor early nextmorning and to give his crew a good nights sleep, he is standing a oneman night watch. All is well, and he toutinely does a round of the ships deck. He notices that a boarding ladder has been carelessly left hanging over the side, and routinely he goes to pull it up. Then, out of the blue, he sees a man in the water hanging on to the end of the ladder. Laggatt, the soon tobe secret sharer, has shattered the familiar routine of a ships departure a disturbing stranger in a strange sea on a strange coast. Ordinariness demolished! Proust, in his unique way, liked to disrupt ordinariness in a more philosophical way, as in the passage, again from Combray (1992, 8) impeccably designed to smash the takenforgranted distinction between the real and the imagined:
For a long time, I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself Im falling asleep. And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me. I would make as if to put away the book which

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Jerome S. Bruner I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was still asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I was the immediate subject of my book. [...] This impression would persist for some moments after I awoke; it did not offend my reason, but lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the (fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a previous existence must be after reincarnation.

Lets use Aristotles wonderful term, peripateia for these violations of the expected and ordinary, this second step in narrative. The term literally means adventure in classic Greek. Next in narrative, is the action: efforts to undo the peripateia, to restore the canonical state of things. Narrative action is constrained, of course, by genre, by tradition, by culture. The adventure tale features outward acts, psychological novels inner ones, all intended to cope with the dislocations created by the peripateia. If action restores or renews the canonical state of things with which the story began, or replaces it with another, we speak of the storys resolution and again it may take many shapes or, indeed, remain ambiguous. Te return to Conrad, the young captain brings Leggatt on board and hides him in his own quarters. The next moming, anchor up and sails set, he brings his ship dangerously close in on shore in treacherously light air, so that Leggatt, the secret sharer, whom he has hidden overnight, can escape secretly over the side, a proud swimmer, as the young captain says of him. The ship is saved from going into stays, losing way and drifting ashore, thanks to Leggatts floating hat, that had been thrown to him by the young captain in compassion and sympathy. That is the resolution. A wellformed story, finally, has a coda, whether stated or implied: its normative stance, the moral of the story as we used to call it. Explicit codas, of course went out with Aesop, but though we dont expect A stitch in time saves nine, we still search for a storys normative twist, whether the author intended one or not. Why a secret sharer on the young captains first and unexpected command, for example? Why the need to hide him? Why the episode of the hat?

The Reality of Fiction

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Initial canonical state, peripateia, action, resolution, coda: that is the skeleton of narrative. As Ive argued elsewhere, a grasp of such narrative structure seems virtually inborn: young children grasp stories structured in this way as soon as they have the language needed te follow it and even before that in the form of pretend play. You do not have to instruct them in the nature of story! It is our way of organizing even the most minimal extended experience into an orderly form. The narrative form seems to be our uniquely human way of making sense of the world with a minimum of experience, even in the absence of experience. Again to the young Helen Keller. She tells us that, once she had grasped the nature of story soon after her teacher had given her a first sense of what words were she was even able to make stories about the visible and audible worlds to which she had no direct access at all. Note a few gifts that narrative bestows. It provides a form for recognizing departures from ordinariness a genre for sensing and categorizing possible variations in the world as ordinarily encountered. And it endows one with the means of recognizing sources of disruption and who and what is needed to restore normalcy. In a deep sense, narrative is also our simplest mode of imposing a moral structure on experience. For the peripateia is a disruption of the valued customary, and a storys action is a stance with regard to such disruptions. It is no accident that we teach morals through stories. In the deepest sense, then, a principal function of narrative is to explore alternative versions of the human condition, possible worlds as it were. It is the vehicle par excellence for exploring troubles and the possible ways of coping with them. It is no accident that the peripateia is the engine of narrative, as Kenneth Burke once called it. Nor is it an accident that we frame accounts of our own existence in the world as the story of my life, troubles included as landmarks. 3. Let me turn now to a theme I have neglected. It has to do, of course, with the believability of fictional realities, the form of credence we place in them. In what way is our belief in fictional reality different from our belief in the realities we encounter in

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our daytoday encounters with the world? Let me begin with a thoughtful quote from a recent book, Michael Riffaterres Fictional Truth (1990). He approaches fictional realities from a fresh perspective.
Readers need not be familiar with the reality that the text is about in order to believe it true. The only reality against which they need to rest the narratives truth is language (Riffaterre 1990, 8).

Stories, as he puts it further along, must, in some way, be axiomatic beyond testability. To demonstrate he offers this scene from Prousts Contre SainteBeuve (1954, 120):
Il ny avait encore personne devant lglise, sauf la dame en noir quon en voit sortir rapidement toute heures dans les villes de province. / No one yet was to be seen in front of the church except for the lady in black one sees leaving hurriedly at any given time in provincial towns.

There is no detail to be verified in Prousts brief account, indeed there is virtually nothing about her not the ladys widows weeds (if she is a widow), not her imminent transition from lonely prayer to the bustle of a waiting household, nothing to individualize her. She is pseudoperson, a type an actant rather than an actor, in Riffaterres terms. For him, fictional truth is syntagmatic, inherently undeniable, axiomatic, possible rather than just there. So what do stories do to us, then? For Riffaterre (1990, 10), stories parallel in language the cognitive processes we use in everyday life. Commenting on a passage from Henry James,
To recognize the truth [of this particular passage], neither experience nor previous reading are needed, only linguistic competence: truth [in fiction] is nothing but a linguistic perception.

But note that the soidisant nothing but of syntax is the cradle of the semantically possible. Stories provide templates for possible worlds, models for seeing the quotidian in a new perspective. We do not confuse fiction with life. Yet, we trave1 back and forth

The Reality of Fiction

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on a twoway street between the two, between life and literature. They, stories, provide us with the means of knowing possible worlds without having to experience them just as the language gifted Helen Keller could imagine the visible and the audible without being able to see or to hear. And, indeed, we become better able to understand the real world of experience by seeing it in the light of fictional worlds of possibility. It is this comparison process that gives fiction its most compelling reality There but for the grace of God goes life. But, by the same token, we are also enabled to say of life experience as we live it, Am I getting this right? Is there another, a better way of telling this story? The well examined life, in a word, is one in which life emulates art and emulates life, which in turn emulates art which emulates life which emulates art, ad infinitum. Small wonder, then, that fiction often has a reality like life itself ! And indeed, we can easily encourage travel on this twoway street between life and literature. Let me sketch out a little experiment that a colleague and I carried out in facilitating such backandforth travel. 4. It took place this last autumn at new York University, a Freshman Honors Seminar that I shared with my colleague, Anthony Amsterdam, a law professor renowned for his civil rights litigation, including his current battles to restrain the Bush administrations overzealous reactions to the threat of terrorism. We admitted only fifteen students, and the announced topic was how one balances individual liberty and state security in times of trouble, as in a so called war on terrorism such as we are living through today a real enough topic, with our classroom only a kilometer from the demolished World Trade Centre. Our group read both legal and literary texts. The former were briefs submitted to, as well as subsequent decisions reached by, the United States Supreme Court in cases involving libertysecurity conflicts, including ones currently pending (and much in the news, like the Guantanamo prisoners and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld). The literary texts dealt with parallel themes, including two versions of Antigone one by Sopho-

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cles, the other by Jean Anouilh (1951), two millennia apart. At the end of term each student wrote two sets of imagined dialogues. One was between a present member of the Supreme Court faced with our current problems, and a justice who had sat on the Court when it upheld the internment of JapaneseAmericans during World War II, and later apologized for their bad judgment. The other imaginary dialogue was between members of the Choruses of the two Antigones reflecting how Creon and his niece Antigone had got into their tragic confrontation: what had gone wrong? Im going to tell you only about the latter, for the former risks being too technical. Recall first the deadly struggle between Antigone and Creon, she with her sense of moral duty to bury her slain brother Polynices, and he, Creon, with his sense of kingly duty to maintain order and security in Thebes by denying burial to the slain Polynices, who had been a leader in a revolt against the city. Polynices and his brother Etiocles, recall, had killed each other in mortal combat at the gates of Thebes, battling over how they should take turns on the throne of the city. King Oedipus, their recently dead father, had decreed that the two should share the throne of Thebes. Their uncle, Creon, now King, orders a heros funeral for Etiocles but decrees that Polynices be left to lie unburied, prey to dogs and crows. Antigone, enraged, tries to bury Polynices and for doing so is condemned to death by Creon, whereupon Creons son, Haemon, betrothed to Antigone, stabs himself to death in her tomb. Euridice, Creons wife, then takes her own life in grief. It is a tragic tale. So what did our students make of it, this tragic tale? Let me tell you first that, not surprisingly, they easily and eagerly travelled between Antigone and real life. They went about it in one of three ways. In the first of them, the whole mess was human nature writ large as familiar in ancient Thebes as among us today. Antigone and Creon needed a good psychoanalyst, one said another suggested they both needed a friend. Creons a real Bush, a third remarked, preoccupied with his own power. The emphasis was on the personal both in life and in the drama. In the second approach, the nature of the state was writ large any state, whether ancient Thebes or contemporary America.

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Individual liberty and state security were virtually incompatible in troubled times. Look at us! one said. Society creates its own nightmares when liberty and security collide. In the third approach, the villain was destiny mythic themes working their way through life, this time with Creon and Antigone their victims. But it was the reverberation of an ancient tragic fate, with origins in the incestuous union of Oedipus and his mother Jocasta, the parents of the ill fated Antigone and her brothers Polynices and Etiocles. Weve got things like that too: thats life. Look at those powercrazy Bushes! Or look at the illfated Kennedys! Our freshman were doing what we all do, travelling from literature to life to literature, back and forth. One student even suggested that Antigone be made obligatory reading for any judge sitting in a civil liberties case! You might even say our freshmen were reading judicial holdings like novels and novels like judicial holdings. Reading great fiction (and talking about it) encouraged them to look at the real world as a possible one among many that might exist, and to look at fictional worlds as possible models of what the real world might be.

5. So what does all this have to do with education? God forbid that each time a student reads a novel or a story she should have to dissect it into its initial canonical state, its peripateia, its action, outcome, and its coda. Yet, unpacking literary fiction is a powerful way of teaching us not only about the subtleties of story but about the possible forms that life takes, particularly about lifes dilemmas. Perceptive novelists know this implicitly, and transform their intuitions into fiction. Take this paragraph from Marcel Proust as a case in point. Again Combray (Proust 1992, 15), the same young narrator recounting his mothers Good night visits at bedtime:
Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I longer to call her back, to say to her Kiss me just once more, but I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession that she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to give me this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such rituals absurd, and she

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Jerome S. Bruner would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow the need, the habit, of having her there at all, let alone getting into the habit of asking for an additional kiss when she was already crossing the threshold. And to see her look displeased destroyed all the calm and serenity she had brought me a moment before when she had bent her loving face down over my bed and held it out to me [] like a host for an act of peacegiving communion.

Should our students be more exposed to the fictional truths of literature? Should instruction in literature cultivate the backand forth between fiction and life? Think how Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman made newly vivid the deadening effect of commerce on American life? Or how the Oresteia has livened the world to the always desperate struggle in life between vengeance and forgiveness. Of literary works of such quality it can indeed be said that they are bigger or realer than life itself artful models of possible life, particularly of lifes inevitable dilemmas. Literature provides a vehicle for teaching about possible worlds and not just in literature faculties. My colleague Tony Amsterdam and I, for example, used Herman Melvilles Billy Budd in a seminar devoted to legal procedure, along with the usual legal stuff, of course. Its effect was electric. It wasnt just the gripping moral anomaly that Melville portrays in that moving drama. Rather, Melville teaches the dilemmas of justice in possible lives, and yes, as they pose themselves in courts of law in the real world. I learned to read in a new way, one student told me several years later. I think he too (like those freshman in our Seminar) came to read law cases for what they were, bur to read them as literature as well. Or perhaps even more important for their careers as lawyers, they also learned to read literature as a source of insights into the law and its arcane ways. (I should explain, perhaps, that in AngloSaxon common law, appellate courts hand down not only their final holding in a case, but also the reasons for having reached their verdict, including obiter dicta on their mode of interpreting legal precedents from the past. Anthony Amsterdam and I tried to illustrate in a recent book, Minding the Law, for example, how often legal decisions are framed and shaped by narrative conventions. Though Continental courts do not reveal their

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rationale in so explicit a way, it hardly seems possible that their judges could proceed differently.) So why not use literary works to help us teach sociology, psychology, pedagogy, even (or especially) history? Why are we so reluctant to widen the twoway street between the possible and the actual? Why do we, indeed, go on thinking that the reality of fiction is more suspect and illusionary than the fiction of reality? Indeed, I even think that our law student might have been right about learning how to read when he became adept in going back and forth between Melvilles Billy Budd and the opinions of the United States Supreme Court. And besides, it also makes them more aware of the medium of story telling, not just its message the very language of literature. Let me illustrate with an anecdote, again from that Freshman Honors Seminar, a conversation with one of our students. We were walking toward nearby Washington Square after the last seminar meeting in midDecember the same Washington Square, of course, as in the Henry James novel. I asked him had he noticed how many more subjunctive verb forms there were in Jean Anouilhs Antigone than in Sophocles. Subjunctives? he replied, Why that? So I told him that Henry James his old house now directly across from us had cultivated the subjunctive as a way of portraying the inner doubts of his fin de sicle characters. He paused, and then, Hey, you think lifes become more subjunctive, more full of might bes for us in our times? Thats interesting. He paused again, and then, Hey, why didnt we talk about that in class? That would have been really interesting. A good question and probably the first time the subjunctive had ever taken on any reality for that young man. In my view, were still only beginning to appreciate how teaching literature takes us beyond the literary. For the reality of fiction challenges conventional reality itself. It is a beckoning entryway into possibility: present, past, and future.

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References
Anouilh, J. 1951. Antigone. L. Galantiere, Trans. London: Methuen. Amsterdam, Anthony G. and Jerome Bruner. 2000. Minding the Law. How Courts rely on storytelling,and how their stories change the ways we understand the law and ourselves. Cambridge: Harvard U.P. Conrad, J. 1982. The Secret Sharer (1910). New York: Bantam. Proust, M. 1992. In search of lost time (19131927): Swanns way; Combray. New York: The Modern Library, Random House. . 1954. Contre SainteBeuve. Paris: Gallimard. Riffaterre, M. 1990. Fictional Truth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P.