A Culture of Rights: Law, Literature, and Canada by Benjamin Authers

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Culture of Rights: Law, Literature, and Canada by Benjamin Authers Jon Kertzer Benjamin Authers. A Culture of Rights: Law, Literature, and Canada. University of Toronto Press, 2016. 192 pp. $27.95. The word "rights" is a semantic swamp. It designates a range of social sanctions from the universal (human rights), to the inspirational (right to life, liberty, and security), to the practical (adult residents' right to vote in a municipal election). Rights have limits and compete for priority. Some exist by being exercised (right to vote), others may be forfeited if used irresponsibly (right to drive a car), and the word is used metaphorically to extend the scope of responsibility (animals have rights only when people respect them). Benjamin Authers stays afloat in this swamp by focusing on how English-Canadian novels written in light of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) stage a series of contests between forensic and fictional needs: 1. Law is conservative (respecting precedent, tradition, "original" intention), whereas unprecedented literary forms may serve a transgressive poetic. 2. Artistic licence flouts the competing authorities of legality and morality. Vicious laws (apartheid) are not only legitimate [End Page 192] if properly enacted but can be aesthetically exciting (Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will). 3. The Enlightenment legacy proclaims universal rights yet allows exceptions (women, aliens, "enemy non-combatants") and tolerates privileges based on class, race, or wealth. 4. Classic liberal ideology must reconcile individual rights free from state interference (J.S. Mill's account of liberty) with the conformity imposed by nationalism ("Canadian values") or by ethnic communities, which saturate individual identity. Authers does not claim to resolve these contests, nor does he endorse the easy dialectic whereby literature humanizes law, while law gives judicial fibre to literature. Instead, he shows that any fashioning of identity based on rights is intrinsically political and therefore open to dispute. Rights may be revered as "more than law" (10, citing Michael Ignatieff), but no matter how universal, natural, or God-given, they can only thrive within a jurisdiction that articulates the individuality they protect. In his introduction, Authers documents how rights have officially been proclaimed essential to "Canada's distinctive rights identity" (13). This noble ideology he treats skeptically by investigating how it is applied inconsistently in legal judgments and disputed in the novels examined. Ultimately, his subject is unruliness—political, judicial, textual—as revealed by the "troubling twinning" (71) of law and literature. Both are concerned with making and breaking rules, but whereas the former promises closure through rectifi-cation, the latter is harder to pacify. Legal and literary forms sometimes offend, sometimes befriend each other, in each case generating what Authers variously calls ambivalence, aberration, or inadequacy: "an excess of meanings, a surfeit of consequences" (103). There is always something that eludes legal or poetic discipline, yet is essential to both. To aid his analysis, he summons two agents of disclosure. First is the painful recognition that rights become most salient when violated. Even if we cannot explain precisely how rights function, we suffer when they are infringed. This drama offers two literary possibilities. Novels may expose our failure to respect rights that continue to provide a valid standard of correction, in which case "rights themselves remain the privileged way of determining fictional and legal meaning" (27). Or more distressing, novels may expose rights, no matter how formulated, as inherently problematic. With the exception of Indigenous authors, Canadian novelists usually prefer the former but allow a vigilant reader like Authers to detect [End Page 193] the latter. Applying "a suspicious legal hermeneutics" (84), he reads legal and fictional texts both with and against their grain, aided by his second critical agent: a "strange temporality" (26) arising from the performative nature of founding legal documents like the Charter. When it declares that Canada is a multicultural nation based on rights, it thereby creates the conditions it affirms. It does so by invoking Canada's legal heritage, which endures because the Charter says it does; by proclaiming our duty to maintain that proud legacy; and by projecting its aspirations into the future, since ideals always beckon from afar. In response, Authers detects other "temporal rhetorics...