On the Genealogy of the "Judicial Error" (1983)

Abstract

The inception of my study on judicial error was most atypical. Its very medium indicated a quest for my sources: I wanted to try my hand at writing my mother language for the first time since the age of twelve. I found that German runs much more smoothly under my pen than English, but this alone could not explain my pace. I am a slow and deliberate writer, but this text progressed in a downright somnambulistic way. It came right on the heels of a bulky, laboriously systematic investigation of Andre Gide's theory and practice of the novel, which had occupied me for six years. I embarked on a sabbatical term with a list of distracting and regenerative readings, to be preceded by a minor essay on some little matter that had struck my attention. When I looked up from my typewriter, the term was almost over, and my small essay turned out to be a monograph on the judicial error in certain representative modern narratives. I should have recognized my "little matter" as a genuine Ansatz one of those intuitive points of departure destined to be broadened and deepened into the exposition of a historical era or a comprehensive problem, as I knew them from the critical theory and practice of my teacher Erich Auerbach. If I failed to make the connection, it was because I still mistook the Auerbachian expansion of points of initiation for a prescriptive method; I did not yet realize that this procedure, for one who had just spent years to broaden his horizon, is less methodical than it is mimetic: it merely formalizes the way intellectual insight naturally comes about. My particular Ansatz was Dmitri's murder trial in The Brothers Karamazov. Critics had treated it as an outgrowth of Dostoevsky's journalistic activity, and as a satire of Alexander's judicial reform, but I had always felt that such marginal discussions did no justice to the true meaning and importance of the scene. Of course, I was predisposed to this recognition by a longstanding fascination with the rich repertory of detective and trial themes in literature, going back to The Eumenides and the