ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights a key literary text of the 1980s, and links that text to an exploration of some influential jurisprudence of the same decade. Broadly, the chapter has echoes in other texts of disparate purposes and times: as will be seen, the chapter begins, not with a 1980s text, but with an odd, true tale of texts echoing back from modern times to previous centuries. Specifically, the chapter begins with a text apparently far from the 1980s – a State Trial of 1663. What ensues is a kind of ‘doppler effect’ rippling between the ‘facts’ and ‘fictions’ of literary, political and legal theory – an effect which markedly undermines the conventional distinction between fact and fiction. The State Trials, sensationalist pamphlets and biographies link to classical political treatises, novels early and late. Whilst the question of identity – especially gender identity – arises overtly only in the novel of the 1980s, it brings sharp focus to the latency of the issue in all the texts. In the latter part of the chapter, this heightened awareness of identities, latent and patent, and especially the fragile line between fact and fiction, assists when considering the claim to disinterested analysis implicit to legal and political theory in general, and the jurisprudence of the 1980s in particular. The frailty of such disinterest becomes more evident when considered specifically (via a section entitled ‘Interpretation and linguistics’) and generically, in terms of the narrative drives of theory itself (‘“Big” theory and messianic need’). In terms of intertextuality, the chapter is clearly complex – with State Trials, pamphlets, novels old and new, political treatises, linguistic theory and jurisprudence interlinked. Yet this very juxtaposition reveals the intimacy of texts in the creation of cultural beliefs and identities, an intimacy which alerts theory to its own ethical plane.
