Introduction

As even a brief excursion into Google will illustrate, revenge is a subject that is both extensive and debatable. In response to a recent inquiry, “revenge quotes,” the search engine claimed to have millions of entries available. BrainyQuote, CoolQuote, and their competitors offer opinions and definitions by the dozens or the hundreds from a plethora of sources. Moralists, celebrities, religious leaders and sacred texts, philosophers, social scientists, and humorists, all have their contributions-many of which are wise and few surprising. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. did not approve of it, which is to be expected, whereas Joseph Stalin enjoyed it immensely, also not a surprise.1 The Bible famously gives us a choice: “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” (Deuteronomy xix: 21) versus “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6: 27-28). Luke 6 may seem ethically superior by modern standards, but Deuteronomy

xix may be a better plan for evolutionary survival. According to Animal Behavior scientists, some species are so adept at attacking their enemies that they are called “punishers,” a varied group that includes blue-footed boobies, moorhens, elephant seals, and side-striped jackals. Primates, such as chimpanzees, have larger brains and use them to plan their punishments (surprise attacks) and carry on what might be called feuds or vendettas (attacking an attacker’s relatives) (“Revenge Motivates”). Anthropologists study how “blood revenge” is an impetus for feuds, violence, and wars in exotic past and present “tribal societies” in places such as medieval Iceland, the Balkans, New Guinea, and the Middle East. Instead of being an arcane and rather old-fashioned academic specialty, this subject began to seem surprisingly timely when troops from the United States, Great Britain, and other nations were sent to impose peace and/or democracy on nations where tribal loyalties and concepts of blood revenge still seemed powerful or capable of being revitalized despite the veneer of modernity that had been imposed by rulers such as Tito or Saddam Hussein. Hollywood and popular culture publishers have given us hundreds or perhaps thousands of pulp fictions and films whose heroes, more inspired by Deuteronomy than by Christ, return from the dead or escape from unjust imprisonments, like the Count of Monte Christo, to avenge the injuries they have suffered. Major characters in many canonical, high-culture operas, dramas, and novels are just as concerned with avenging wrongs suffered by themselves or by others: Verdi’s Rigoletto, the Greeks’ Orestes cycle, the Elizabethans’ revenge tragedies, most notably Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and of course Cervantes’s Don Quixote who believes his “profession is none other than that of helping those who cannot help themselves, avenging those who have been wronged,” especially ones wronged by “haughty foes” (Cervantes 1951: 179). Near the end of Mystic River there is a scene in which Jimmy Marcus

confronts his erstwhile friend, Trooper Sean Devine of the Massachusetts

State Police, at dawn on a deserted street. This scene dramatizes the theme implied by our choice of the Francis Bacon “wild justice” quote for our title and epigraph and the quotes from Holmes and Mystic River we have selected for this chapter. For what this scene reveals are the conflicts between the extralegal, vigilante, or “wild justice” based upon revenge and driven by passion and grief, represented by Jimmy Marcus versus the tamer, cooler, more rational and institutional legal justice practiced by Trooper Devine. As our table of contents suggests our book does not deal with wrongs or injuries inflicted by kings, queens, windmills, or amorous dukes. Instead, it is focused on nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twentieth-first-century narratives involving modern societies with competent police-such as Balzac’s Detective Gondureau, and Lehane’s Sean Devine. These narratives are located in nations and empires that have courts, judges, and legal systems that can supposedly avenge wrongs and thus make what Holmes called “private retribution” unnecessary. Yet in every narrative there is some flaw in the justice system that is either criticized or must be corrected by some form of extralegal justice. But extralegal justice also can have flaws, and “private” revenges or retributions can be as disastrous as those imposed by corrupt judges or biased courts. Judge Richard Posner has summarized these flaws in his comments on revenge as a motive for seeking justice:

As soon as centralized institutions for the enforcement of law emerge, vengeance … comes to be regarded as an archaic and destructive passion. This is partly because exact retaliation does not work well. It is not feasible for all wrongs. … It is not adequate in situations where the aggressor can count on avoiding retaliation much of the time. … And a commitment to limited retaliation is hard to stick by in the highly emotional circumstances in which revenge is administered. So vengeance falls out of favor, not only in ethics but in law, where taking the law into your own hands becomes a crime.