“Written in the Black Letter”

Abstract

This article considers, from a deconstructive perspective, the tension between the ideal of “law-as-Logos” within the Western legal tradition and an unstable, transgressive textuality that undermines that ideal, and which may be related conceptually to Derridean notions of différance and supplementarity. Within this context, the ambiguous status of the preface as a marginal space that is seemingly both redundant and essential to the text or discourse that it supplements assumes theoretical significance. The article examines the relation between what Plato terms “law pure and simple” and that which exists at the margins of law, supplementing and subverting law’s claim to pure self-presence. It goes on to consider a particularly ideologically potent prefatory narrative that supplemented the theory and practice of English law in the eighteenth century: the fiction of the Gothic origin of English law. This article examines the destabilizing effects of the law’s fictions of origin within the specific historical context of the emergence of legal and literary “Gothicism” in eighteenth-century England; it does so in particular through an analysis of and comparison between Blackstone’s Commentaries and the deeply ambivalent fictions of literary origin presented in the famous prefaces to Horace Walpole’s Gothic “original,” The Castle of Otranto.