Law and Literature

 A short one to shoot out this morning from ‘The law is another form of storytelling’: Philippe Sands in conversation with Juan Gabriel Vásquez | Books (The Guardian)

JGV: In a very important sense, law and literature are opposed, contradictory worldviews. The law pursues certainty, and novels on the contrary thrive in ambiguity. There’s this wonderful letter by Chekhov to somebody who was criticising him for not taking clear moral or political stances in his stories: Chekhov says, You are confusing two things, answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is the aim of the artist. I think, as a lawyer, you have to come up with the answers. Novelists are trying to formulate the questions correctly, and these are two different endeavours.

PS: Could we not think of the law as operating in a different way? It’s simply another form of storytelling. I stand up before the International Court of Justice. What am I doing? I’m doing what you do in another form. My audience is the judge rather than the reader, but the process bears similarities. I used to talk about this a lot with John le Carré, and it was he who explained to me the importance when you’re writing of complex matters not to impose upon the intelligent reader the perspective, the viewpoint, the conclusions of the writer, but leave it to the reader to form their own view. And I said to him, but that’s exactly what we do in court. We would never say to a judge, this is what you must do. We lay out the material. We do it strategically. We do it as advocates to perhaps lead the judge to a conclusion in which the judge says to herself or himself, this is the right answer, but it hasn’t been imposed upon me, and I’m acting with autonomy as a judge. Is that not, in a sense, what you want your readers to do as they read your works?

JGV: I do feel that there’s an opposing impulse between the judge and the novelist. The law is about establishing guilt or innocence, whereas good literature follows the impulse to create a space when we go beyond judging.

Think about it. I believe any commentary on my part is pointless, but I do wish I had thought more along these lines when I was  a lawyer.

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