Imagining Justice and Cancel Culture Through Iris Murdoch’s “enchanter” Characters

In The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremburg, Lyndsey Stonebridge weaves a multi-faceted reminiscence of how twentieth-century literary and philosophical authors like Hannah Arendt, Rebecca West, and Iris Murdoch “forge[d] new literary idioms of judgment in their post-war encounters with the law.”

Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg 3 (2014).

Living and writing during the Nazi war crime trials, these astute female authors gave unique voice to the unprecedented juridical dilemmas of their time. Presciently, they each sensed an entire new world whose inhabitants were quite literally unable to imagine a form of legal justice adequate enough for the unspeakable crimes against humanity that the Adolf Eichmann and Nuremburg courts were attempting to adjudicate. In this article, which is an interdisciplinary examination of how literature can reveal solutions to the problems faced both in law and our broader societal forms of justice, I will examine how one of these writers—British novelist Dame Iris Murdoch—imagined this new genre of post-war evil as emanating principally from the acts of her characters in the everyday modern world. I will show how Murdoch saw modern evil not only as existing in the intentional acts of the murderous tyrants and dictators of the twentieth century, but also within our day-to-day egoistic actions in which we routinely—and largely unconsciously—fail to pay attention to the lives and needs of other people. My aim is to demonstrate how today’s extra-juridical trend known as “cancel culture” is a direct consequence of the inattention and lack of love we often exhibit towards others, which Murdoch repeatedly decried in her literary and philosophical works, as well as a continued failure in our contemporary ability to imagine this modern brand of evil and the appropriate methods of justice for its consequences. By applying Murdoch’s metaphysics regarding both the individual and collective task of achieving true moral growth—as exemplified by the complex plots, themes, and evil “enchanter” characters in her novels—to the trend of cancel culture, one can achieve an historically informed understanding of why the practice is alluring yet ultimately dangerous to both the legal system and our contemporary societal structure writ large.

Langue:: Anglais

Périodicité:: 2 fois par an
Sujets de la revue:: Droit, Histoire, philosophie et sociologie du droit, Droit international, droit étranger, droit comparé, Droit international, droit étranger, droit comparé, autres, Droit public, Droit public, autres

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Imagining Justice and Cancel Culture Through Iris Murdoch’s “enchanter” Characters

Tracy Reilly

Publié en ligne: 17 févr. 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/bjals-2024-0004

Mots clésIris Murdoch, enchanter characters, cancel culture, modern evil, post-critique, law and literature

© 2024 Tracy Reilly, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Mots clés
Iris Murdoch, enchanter characters, cancel culture, modern evil, post-critique, law and literature