Troubling Humanities: Literary Jurisprudence and Crimes Against Humanity in Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day and McEwan’s Atonement

Abstract

This commentary poses the question of the human by asking how the “human” of crimes against humanity relates to the “human” of the humanities. It does so by first considering Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961) as a text that establishes the representational aporias of banality and ineffability raised by crimes against humanity, not just through its analytical content but also through the use of literary form. The commentary then offers a close reading of two novels, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) and Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), tracking the ways their “literary jurisprudence,” or engagement with problems of judgment, emerge from the representational cruxes located by Arendt. Rather than read these literary texts as desirable substitutes for legal forms, or as providing ways out of legal aporias, I argue that their literary jurisprudences reveal the challenges of facing the afterlife of judgment, particularly for a humanity left in the wake of ambiguous forms of condemnation and restitution.