Poetic justice : a few reflections on the interplay of poetry and justice

Abstract

Poetic justice is one of the most contentious literary issues. On the one hand, it has been seen as a fulfilment of the demand that literature should be ethical, useful and instructive, and, on the other hand, it is said to show the inappropriateness of such a demand. Salman Rushdie aligns himself with the latter school when he, in his acceptance speech of the Hans Christian Andersen Award on August 17, 2014, says about storytelling:The good can lose, and fables can have anti-heroes instead of heroes. In the Indian animal fables of the Panchatantra, the two jackals at the heart of the stories are anything but good. One of them is devious, even Machiavellian, and the other, much more devious. Right does not always triumph. In fact, in these stories, it rarely does. [...] The story's amorality makes it more attractive to us than a clear moral message would.But poetic justice still has its defenders, too, especially when it is not restricted to awarding virtue but comprises the influence of literature on concepts and practices of justice. Martha Nussbaum, for example, in her reflections on Poetic and the proposed turn1 refers to the classical concept of prodesse and docere.2 Accordingly, literary texts are supposed to expose and present moral concepts in a manner that enables the reader to engage with the events presented.These first observations lead to the question whether poetic justice and aesthetic quality can go together. Does the success of a literary work perhaps even depend on the fact that it does (not) cater to our feeling of justice? These questions are answered in different ways when the claim is made that literary texts contribute to judicial thinking (Kertzer 2)3 or when poetic justice is called unpoetical, even trivial.4 They are moreover linked to literary genres: Zach, for instance, argues that a poetically just ending is incompatible with tragedy (4-5), while Ebbs regards poetic justice as a concept that allows for a didactically effective ending only in tragedy (65) .5 Nussbaum, conversely, does not consider drama at all in her study and regards the novel as the most apt paradigm of ethical reflection because of its interest in the ordinary (9).6 Another question concerns literary periods: are there times in which the concept of poetic justice is prevalent? Rushdie seems to think so when he refers to the modernity of relinquishing justice in literary texts7; Kaul and Zach in their monographs on poetic justice also seem to show this view when they link its rise and fall to religion and secularization and claim that the poet's ideal of justice is based on a concept of divine order (see Zach 436; Kaul 12).8 But then evidence for its ongoing relevance is found, for example, in the fact that the summer season 2015 at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London was titled Justice and Mercy,9 two concepts which are intricately linked to the topic of poetic justice.Given these reflections, it does not appear to make sense to simply argue either in favour of or against poetic justice as such but rather aim at gaining a more sophisticated understanding of the concept. How can it contribute to the poetics and aesthetics of a literary text and, at the same time, to its relation to reality?1.A Short Historical Overviewif we look at the history of the term and the concept of poetic justice we find that, although Rymer coined the term as late as in 1677/78, the idea is much older. We find first reflections in Plato's Republic, where he complains[...] that what the poets and prose-writers [orators] tell us about the most important matters concerning human beings is bad. They say that many unjust people are happy and many just ones are wretched, that injustice is profitable if it escapes detection, and that justice is another's good but one's own loss. I think we'll prohibit these stories and order the poets to compose the opposite kind of poetry and tell the opposite kind of tales. …