Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Le mot juste
- 2 Life plus ninety-nine years: the fantasy of legal fictions
- 3 Time's desire: the temporality of justice
- 4 One touch of nature: literature and natural law
- 5 The course of a particular: justice and singularity
- 6 Truth, justice, and the pathos of understanding
- 7 Conclusion: legal fictions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Le mot juste
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Le mot juste
- 2 Life plus ninety-nine years: the fantasy of legal fictions
- 3 Time's desire: the temporality of justice
- 4 One touch of nature: literature and natural law
- 5 The course of a particular: justice and singularity
- 6 Truth, justice, and the pathos of understanding
- 7 Conclusion: legal fictions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
in justice is every virtue comprehended
(Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 108)justice: Never worry about it
law (the): Nobody knows what it is
written: “Well written”: a hall-porter's encomium, applied to the newspaper serial he finds entertaining
(Gustave Flaubert, The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas 55, 58, 91)Flaubert's mockery of bourgeois indifference to justice and legality contrasts his own devotion to justice as the supreme literary value, the virtue in which all others are comprehended. The just word – le mot juste – is a phrase expressing his ideal of linguistic precision associated with painstaking craft seeking exactly the right word to express exactly the right idea to convey exactly the right impression to his readers. Writing well, he claimed, is more than a matter of verbal felicity, although felicity is its reward. “[T]o write well is everything,” a writer's first duty, he told George Sand (Flaubert, Letters 2.231), but it is not an end in itself. Although he once proposed writing a book “about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style” (1.154), his letters reveal that he was not satisfied with style for its own sake. It should be an avenue to illumination and “exaltation” (2.80). The wrong word is an affront not just to harmony, but to clear-sightedness and clear thinking.
For the moment a thing is True, it is good…When I come upon a bad assonance or a repetition in one of my sentences, I'm sure I'm floundering in the False. […]
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- Information
- Poetic Justice and Legal Fictions , pp. 1 - 23Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010