INTRODUCTION

In his essay ‘‘Nomos and Narrative” the late legal scholar Robert Cover offers an image of law as ‘‘a system of tension or a bridge linking a concept of reality to an imagined alternative - that is a connective between two states of affairs both of which can be represented in their significance only

Toward a Critique of Guilt: Perspectives from Law and the Humanities Studies in Law Politics and Society Volume 36.

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31 through the device of narrative” (Cover 1993, p. 101) Cover’s understand­ing of law conceives of it as a forward-looking enterprise in which the ‘‘imagined alternative” exists in the future - a future that, with thoughtful legal steps can be transformed from a dream into a reality.

But law is characterized not only by a prospective vision: its function in the most practical and immediate sense is to respond to and judge the past. Regarding law as a practice to shape the future often - and tragically - amounts to a kind of wistful hindsight a backward glance at what might have been avoided had law accounted for the future This is particularly the case I would suggest, in the aftermath of war when the lingering question, ‘‘Could it have been prevented?’’ haunts the survivors of a shattered world. It is a question echoed by Robert Jackson in his opening statement during the first Nuremberg trial on November 2) 1945:

I am too well aware of the weaknesses of juridical action alone to contend that in itself your decision under this Charter can prevent future wars Judicial action always comes after the event Wars are started only on the theory and in the confidence that they can be won Personal punishment, to be suffered only in the event the war is lost, will probably not be a sufficient deterrent to prevent a war where the warmakers feel the chances of defeat to be negligible (International Military 1947, vol 2, p.

It is in the context and aftermath of the Nuremberg trials that I would like to situate Cover’s comments - to consider a specific narrative bridge that crosses over into history and shapes the postwar juridical imagination I focus specifically on this imagination as it unfolds in Albert Camus’s novella The Fall (La Chute, 1956) a story consumed with the meaning of law and justice after the Holocaust.

For if Cover’s vision of law sees it as clearing a path to the future this realization cannot begin to materialize when this future cannot even be imagined For Camus this was precisely the situation confronting the world in the aftermath of the Second World War ‘‘What is indeed most striking about our world is that most men (with the exception of true believers) are cut off from the future’’ he wrote in the Resistance newspaper Combat in 1946. But since he also believed that ‘‘Life has no validity unless it projects itself toward the future unless it promises growth and progress’’ (Camus 1991b p 117) Camus recognized that it was necessary first to take stock of the brutal legacy of the past in order to imagine the future It is this reflective move of confronting history that Camus allegorizes in The Fall. I propose to consider the stakes of this allegory in order to conceive of Cover’s bridge to an ‘‘imagined alternative’’ as it exists not in the future but in the past as the alternative to what might have been Indeed this is precisely the option that haunts the narrator of The Fall, in the form of a bridge that might have been crossed but was nob and that now separates the dead from the living.

Camus’s narrator introduces himself as Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a former French lawyer who now lives in Amsterdam Approaching an unnamed and silent listener in a bar called Mexico City Clamence - who refers to his newly chosen profession as that of a ‘‘judge-penitent’’ - traverses the metaphorical bridge between past and present recounting his past offenses to his mute companion in a proud and glib manner: his thoughtless treatment of women, the water he drank from a dying man the stolen painting stashed in his apartment Actual bridges however he cannob or will nob cross: ‘‘I never cross a bridge at night,’’ Clamence resolutely declares ‘‘It’s the result of a vow Suppose after alb that someone should jump in the water’’ (Camus, 1991a p- 15) His pledge never to cross a bridge at night relates to a past event which he recalls at the very epicenter of the narrative Clamence took this vow it turns out because he is haunted by the memory of a woman in Paris who jumped to her death as he turned his back and did nothing:

I had already gone some fifty yards when I heard the sound - which despite the distance, seemed dreadfully loud in the midnight silence - of a body striking the water I stopped short but without turning around Almost at once I heard a cry repeated several times which was going downstream; then it suddenly ceased The silence that followed ^as the night suddenly stood stilb seemed interminable I wanted to run and yet didn’t stir I was trembling I believe from cold and shock I told myself that I had to be quick and I felt an irresistible weakness steal over me I have forgotten what I thought then.

The rest of the narrative reveals Clamence’s attempt both to return to and to avoid this moment, to cross this bridge to the imagined alternative of saving the woman’s life It is fitting in this spirit of perpetual self-reckoning that Clamence chooses Amsterdam as his new home: as a city of bridges running over canals Amsterdam’s architecture ensures that the suicide will not be forgotten - that it will remain structurally before him