Life Plus Ninety-Nine Years: W.S. Gilbert and the Fantasy of Justice

Abstract

Gilbert and Sullivan's operas are satires about law illustrating how judicial reasoning stretches into fantasy to fulfill a logical demand for a symbolic, redemptive accord between crime and punishment. The disjunction between and law provokes confusion resolved imperfectly but delightfully through legal absurdities and musical harmonies of romantic comedy. ********** By the fantasy of justice I mean reasoning that leads to bizarre yet fair judicial punishments such as three life sentences to be served concurrently, or life plus ninety-nine years in prison. Ninety-nine is a magical number whose efficacy is rather than practical. It illustrates how summons imagination to satisfy a logic of atonement by calculating extraordinary punishment commensurate with an appalling crime. The judicious merges with fantastic, not in defiance of reason, but in fulfillment of it; or, as Pierre Bourdieu observes, the most rigorously rationalized law is never anything more than an act of social magic which (42). My purpose is to investigate how works in literature by drawing on Savoy operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. Gilbert, who was called to Bar in 1863 and appointed of peace in 1891 (Stedman 20,281), was fascinated by impudence of jurisprudence. He sensed, as Max Keith Sutton perceptively remarks, that the law had some primal connection with humor (23), because its theatricality (wigs, woolsacks, Latin phrases) inspires reverence in all-too-fallible authorities. Virtually every opera satirizes abuses of British legal system: its maze of incomprehensible regulations, its courtroom solemnities concealing bias or incompetence. My concern is less with abuses of a just system, however, than with inconsistencies evident within system when and legality are at odds--an oddity that Gilbert elaborates by lampooning conventions of romantic comedy with its promise of poetic justice. More specifically, I argue that a logic of proportional substitution whereby crime is matched symbolically with a punishment that achieves atonement through suffering forces reach of to exceed its grasp. Justice reaches upward to divinity and downward to nature but cannot find a secure foundation in either because it relies on unruly discourses of legality, which are guilty of very crimes they mean to correct. For Bourdieu, magic of law is its quasi-divine power of command, which compels faith in judicial authority and assent on matters of life and death: Legal discourse is a creative speech which brings into existence that which it utters. It is limit aimed at by all performative utterances--blessings, curses, orders, wishes or insults. In other words, it is divine word, word of divine right (42). As a divine word, law can project itself beyond death (life plus ninety-nine years), but only by drawing on resources of art. To explore interdependence of reason and magic I first call witnesses from three sources: theological, sociological, and literary. First is Moses Maimonides, who explains in The Guide for Perplexed that laws are never self-sufficient but must derive authority from a prophetic angel bearing word of God: Even Moses our Teacher received his first prophecy through an angel. 'And an angel of Lord appeared to in flame of fire' (Exod. iii). It is therefore clear that belief in existence of angels precedes belief in prophecy, and latter precedes belief in Law (356). This sequence--God-angel-prophecy-law--anchors legality in morality, and morality in divinity. The law is true and just only because it is God's Law, which, however, is not immediately knowable but requires a line of transmission urged by revelation, recorded in scripture, and sustained by faith. My second witness is Bourdieu, who desanctifies this sequence, which he calls symbolic power, by replacing divine prophecy with human ministry, which is the delegation by virtue of which an individual--king, priest or spokesperson--is mandated to speak and act on behalf of a group, thus constituted in and by him (75). …

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