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

Abstract

This paper explores connections between jurisprudential discussion of pain and violence and the methodology of law and literature. Starting with Robert Cover’s work on law’s ‘field of pain and death’, it argues that the theory on which he relied in rejecting literary approaches to law can equally justify a turn to fiction in understanding violence. It then considers the experiential dimension of Austin Sarat’s and Thomas Kearns’s jurisprudence of violence and argues that interdisciplinary perspectives, including relevant fiction, can assist in engaging with the challenges of capturing such experience in textual form. Situating the argument in relation to broader law and literature rationales, the paper finds relevant illustrations in Joseph Conrad’sHeart of Darkness, The Secret AgentandUnder Western Eyes. It argues that Conrad’s stories represent dimensions of pain and violence that might otherwise be irreducible to non-fictional textual discourse, whilst also expressing the limits of that representation.