Abstract
The thesis deals with three American narratives from the second half of the nineteenth century: Herman Melville´s Bartleby, the Scrivener, Billy Budd by the same author, and William Dean Howells´s An Imperative Duty. In each of these texts, the language of law(s) is made the material of literary fiction. Melville as well as Howells transfer normative claims of the law into the literary realm, where the obligation to factual validity is suspended.
When, as is the case here, literary language includes normative claims of the law into this suspension of factual validity, the law thus called into question can take this only as a literary act of provocation. Melville and Howells call forth the law and simultaneously deprive the law of the chance to do its duty, which is to decide authoritatively. The pressure upon literature to justify itself for challenging the law by literalizing its normative claims is high in American culture. American culture, especially in the nineteenth century, defined itself as legitimized through its vital connection to the normative claims of democracy.
Melville and Howells are sensitive to changes within the law: in accordance to the legal theory of their contemporary Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., they confine the workings of the law to visible appearances. Thus, the law no longer regards the personal abjection of the delinquent or the intrinsic value of a certain action. It merely asks if an occurrence has gained legal relevance by entering a chain of cause and effect prescribed by the law.
However, as the interpretation of Melville and Howells proceeds, beauty turns out to be the most poignant challenge which the language of the law faces when it is made the material of literary self-assertion. Bartleby´s formula sets the example. Within the daily legal business into which Bartleby settles himself, his formula takes up a structural position comparable to the disturbing function of nature in law. But before that, at first site, the formula plays out its self-sufficiency as an arabesque of syntax and plain words. As to this aesthetic self-sufficiency, the question of legitimacy or justification arises only as a politically motivated afterthought. |
