The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War by Caleb Smith (review)

In The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War, Caleb Smith reconstructs the “public culture of justice” that developed in the early United States (159). In an important and beautifully written book, Smith considers how early US writers understood “the capacity of the printed word to call readers to a side in a struggle over justice” (3). Drawing from novels, poems, legal treatises, execution sermons, court opinions, trial reports, confessions, and convict narratives, Smith sheds new light on early American conceptions of “the conflict between human law and higher law” and “the juridical public sphere where it was waged” (4). As the United States neared civil war, opponents of slavery used the press, the pulpit, the lecture platform, and the courtroom to appeal to a “higher law” in relation to which earthly laws could be judged and condemned. While antebellum judges typically rejected such appeals, Smith argues that judges and higher-law activists shared a reliance on forms of “oracular address” whose history he sets out to write (xi).

Smith reevaluates early US legal and print culture in terms of the figures, or rather the styles of address, that he calls the oracle and the curse. As styles of prophetic address, the oracle and the curse disavow personal expression and claim to transmit a power that comes from beyond the speaker’s self. Smith traces the term “oracle” to William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), where judges are cast as oracles giving voice to a national spirit. A curse is an instance of oracular address, but one “spoken from the other side of legal authority,” say by a convict, a woman, a pauper, a martyr, or a militant (4). If oracle names “a style of domination,” curse names “a style of protest” (xi).

In keeping with a commitment to the task of “critical genealogy,” Smith emphasizes that in the early United States “there was no single, fixed relation between modes of address and power relations” (4, 130). His book reframes and complicates a familiar narrative of secularization that moves from a theocentric colonial judiciary to an increasingly rationalized antebellum legal system. It is not a question of denying “the statute-centered rationalism of the mid-nineteenth century,” but of understanding what this legal rationalism has in common with the period’s “fantastic carnival of riots, rabble-rousing, revivals, jeremiads, exhortations, sentimental appeals, and literary experiments” (10, 9).

From the Revolution to the Civil War, print circulation expanded rapidly in the United States. Smith’s study shifts attention from the printed word’s role as a medium for rational debate to its capacity to provoke a public’s assent or protest through “nonrational” means (9). The category of the nonrational is central to what Smith terms a “historical poetics of justice” (218n10). Acknowledging the fragility of distinctions between the rational and the nonrational, Smith defines “nonrational persuasion” in terms of “modes of address and affirmation which involve not the critical evaluation of propositions but the affective and aesthetic response to justice’s performative invocation.” In other words, he is less interested in forms of suspicion than in “styles of conviction,” especially when conviction involves “the feeling of taking a side in a collective conflict” (9). I take it that “poetics of justice” names, first of all, a way of constituting, analyzing, and drawing stories from an archive—in short, a way of reading. Crucially, Smith’s historical poetics seeks to shift scholarly attention from questions of subjectivity and agency to varieties of address that perform the negation of individual volition and personal interest.

Smith’s archive certainly extends beyond well-known writers and works of imaginative literature. But Smith finds in literary texts the most ambitious accounts of oracular address, often given in attempts to manage its power. So his chapter on...