Staging the Trials of Modernism: Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness by Dale Barleben (review)

Legal matters have long inflected Joyce scholarship, as befits criticism of a subject whose career involved litigations large and small, and who in life and literature repeatedly flagged crime and plotted punishment. The Joyce/legal studies cross-pollination has borne recent fruit, as shown by two 2017 volumes: Joyce in Court by the late Justice Adrian Hardiman and the essay collection Joyce and the Law edited by Jonathan Goldman.¹ That it is part of a wider revitalization of literature and law studies is testified to by twenty-first-century works that include Joyce in re-assessments of literary modernism via legal discourse, including the writings of Sean Latham, Celia Marshik, Ravit Reichman, Paul K. Saint-Amour, and Robert Spoo.²

Dale Barleben’s new book, Staging the Trials of Modernism: Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness, should have been a tremendous contribution to this burgeoning bibliography. Academically credentialed as an expert in legal studies and literature, Barleben seeks to link the two fields by “propound[ing] a limited theory of the poetics of law and literature that brings together British modern thinking and . . . cultural and critical legal studies” (7). Buttressed by a detailed framework of cultural theory of law, the book offers a confident argument:

Modernist writers’ preoccupation with interior mental states [is] . . . analogous to the development of jurisprudence not just at the same time, but decades later. Reading the trials of the British moderns traces the evolution of legal thought and uncovers the ways the moderns helped influence how we understand interior mental states.

(4)

That is, Barleben’s project is to read modernist British (or British-ish) writers’ encounters with the law and attention to trials as shaping legal discourse, with particular interest in the developing ideas of mens rea—the intention or knowledge of wrongdoing—and actus reus—illegal actions–that suggest the legal subject’s culpability. He uses these readings to posit “[m]odernism’s styles . . . [as] closely connected to the discursive shift in thinking about the internal workings of the mind and identity politics” (21). Barleben astutely deploys the law as an aperture through which to view modernism’s mercurial narrative technique, perhaps its defining gimmick, and the link between narration and modern interiority.

Laudable intentions and compelling claims, these. Unfortunately, the argument’s credibility is crippled by an astonishing omission. Barleben includes chapters about Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Joyce. He thus seems almost completely to forget that modernist literature comprises women authors—as do, by implication, his peer-readers and his editor, named in the acknowledgments as Daniel Quinlan. Barleben dedicates several pages to a quick look at Radclyffe Hall; otherwise, his conclusions regarding British modernism, though generally phrased as some variation of “interpretation of the British moderns” (13) are drawn only from men and thus impossible to take as authoritative. Barleben makes frequent use of women critics, especially Shoshana Felman, Linda Hutcheon, and Judith Butler, but this does not remedy the omission of women modernist authors.

Staging the Trials of Modernism starts with a reading of late-nineteenth-century British law as questioning the interior identity of the legal subject, specifically treating the Criminal Law Amendment of 1885 as a prelude to its most famous victim and Barleben’s first male modernist, Wilde. Chapters 2 and 3, the heart of the matter, present an implied teleological sequence of case studies, demonstrating that each male author’s experiences with the law guided his literary production. Of Wilde’s three trials, conviction, and imprisonment, Barleben writes, “The law’s invasion of . . . the interiority of the civil subject . . . shook Wilde’s belief in the justice system” (62). He reads the essay qua letter-from-camp De Profundis as a response to this violation, positing Wilde’s exploration and denial of testimony as a crucial text for modernist interior narratives.³ Segueing to Conrad, Barleben posits the nautical assessors...