Witness, Testimony, Evidence in Three Contemporary Novels

The current interest in legal issues outside the typical arenas of the law has inspired many interdisciplinary studies, known as ‘Law ands’. Tracing the history of such union, the present work aims at describing the intertwining research of law and culture, where the former is indeed a product of the latter. If culture is a highly problematic concept, at least with regard to its definition, it can be maintained that the law is also a matter of cultural and popular domain, as the current fusion of the law with mass media testifies. By means of a literary analysis of three contemporary novels – Tim Parks’s Judge Savage (2003), John Lescroart’s A Certain Justice (1995) and Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) – this work will compare the law with performance, the traditional realm of the written word with one of the most evident manifestations of culture. With the term performance, in fact, a number of activities can be included, among which the verbal utterance and the physical representation of a process. The first, direct association of the term performance is that with theatre, dance and singing, thus linking the term with cultural entertainment. It will be asserted that the law needs performance, and is performative in its nature, as much as these forms of representation. Ultimately, the law is a cultural artefact and a mise en scène. The present analysis will research in the above-mentioned novels those elements which clearly illustrate the performative nature and task of the law, thus sealing its cultural identity.