Dream of the Legal Monograph

Abstract

This article returns to a law and literature classic, Peter Goodrich’s Oedipus Lex (1995), for its contribution to the field’s ongoing reorientation to the materials and media of law. Read alongside Sigmund Freud’s “Dream of the Botanical Monograph” (1899/1900) and in terms of the psychoanalytic dream-work, Goodrich’s book holds out a vital promise for text- and media-oriented studies in law and literature.

Introduction

As part of the present journal issue on Peter Goodrich’s oeuvre, this article returns to Oedipus Lex (1995), a classic in law and literature, for its contribution to the field’s ongoing reorientation to the materials and media of law. ¹ Taking heed of Michel Foucault’s remark on the necessity of revisiting works that initiate discursive practices and their immanent differences, ² we read Oedipus Lex and its oneiric interpretation of the postal rule in contract law for what it reveals about the relationship between critique, media, and law. My suggestion is that Goodrich’s book, read alongside Sigmund Freud’s “Dream of the Botanical Monograph” (1899/1900) and in terms of the psychoanalytic dream-work, holds out a vital promise for law and literature. ³ Goodrich’s bewitching dealings with law incites us to exploit the critical possibilities inherent in the printed book and other media technologies, thereby anticipating vital futures for text- and media-oriented studies in critical jurisprudence.

In what follows, we first review the field’s growing attention to the materiality and mediality of law, which prompts our reopening of the Goodrich classic. After outlining Goodrich’s (il)legal transposition of the psychical unconscious, we foreground some of the key medial-material conditions on which his anamnestic jurisprudence proceeds, before discussing his channelling of the feminine offeree that haunts the landmark Anglo-American decision Adams v Lindsell (1818). ⁴ Guided by Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and other media-theoretical contributions, our return to Oedipus Lex reckons with the fate of the legal monograph, and that of books more generally, in law and literature studies.

Medial-Material (Re)turns

I had written a monograph on a certain plant. The book lay before me and I was at the moment turning over a folded coloured plate. Bound up in each copy there was a dried specimen of the plant, as though it had been taken from a herbarium. ⁵

In Freud’s dream of the botanical monograph, the printed book surfaced as an index of its centrality to his psychical life and system of valuation. The presentation of a book in recline; the act of turning over a page with a coloured plate; the recognition that there were multiple copies of the same work; and the description of its pages as bound to a spine; all suggest the monograph to be a print publication of Freud’s time. Indeed, Freud attributed the dream’s manifest content to an actual monograph on the cyclamen plant that he had seen behind the window of a book shop in the morning before the dream. ⁶ The dream-book was traced further back in time to another book with coloured plates, one concerning a journey through Persia, given by Freud’s father to him and his eldest sister as children to tear apart. ⁷ The printed book, an artefact that could be touched, loved, and destroyed, had closely accompanied Freud as an object of leisure since he was around five years old. ⁸ Freud’s profound attachment to the textual artefact, the predominant communicative medium of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Europe, would subsist despite the evolution of new media technologies such as phonographs and film. ⁹

In over a century since the first publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, the printed book has ceded priority to a variety of acoustic, optical, and multimodal communicative media, ranging from television and audiobooks to podcasts and computer graphics. While the field of law and literature has traditionally centred upon books and other textual forms, its range of focal objects for interrogating the transmission and limits of law has widened to include other technical channels and aesthetic practices. The field’s expansion in scope and related diversification in method has been frequently observed, and often demonstrated, by its leading practitioners. ¹⁰ For instance, in Greta Olson’s assessment of law and literature’s “proliferation” ¹¹ (made in opposition to extant pronouncements of its “demise” ¹² ), she notes the field’s broadened sense of the literary beyond books and the nineteenth-century realist novel in particular, now encompassing other visual, spatial, medial, affective, and pop-cultural phenomena. As Goodrich himself notes, under present media-technological conditions, the law has superseded “the old conception of the text as a linear, scriptural and bounded item in carefully guarded archives and libraries,” ¹³ necessitating our study of new modes of relay in the digital infrastructure that have afforded the “dissipation and pluralization. . .fragmentation and scintillation of law’s social presence and performances.” ¹⁴

Perhaps what we are witnessing in the field as part of its co-evolution with communicative media is its reorientation to the materials and media of law. Recent commentaries on these related perspectival shifts have drawn upon continental theory, especially Cornelia Vismann’s media-theoretical studies of law, to proffer working senses of the “material” and the “medial.” ¹⁵ For Hyo Yoon Kang and Sara Kendall, the material turn in law and humanities scholarship consists in attending to the material a priori of law, that is, the “conditions of possibility in and through which law arises.” ¹⁶ In Vismann’s archaeology of the Western legal archive, she demonstrated how legality, the differentiated quality of law, has been generated through various storage and transmission media federated under the textual category “files” [Akten]. ¹⁷ Vismann’s close attention to the material composition of law in administrative and judicial spaces has shaped other important studies of legal materiality, a distinctive approach in critical legal theory that addresses the interplay between the physical matters and signifying practices of law. ¹⁸ In this discourse, a “discourse on [legal] discourse channel conditions,” ¹⁹ materiality is a cipher for those elements of the historical apparatus or assemblage that constitutes law as such. Likewise drawing upon Vismann’s oeuvre, but further bringing in her grammatico-theoretical formulation of media and cultural techniques, ²⁰ Panu Minkkinen presents Vismann’s media-theoretical approach to law as one involving a focal shift from the abstraction “law” to the mediated operations that constitute it. ²¹ As Vismann put it: “To derive the operational script from the resulting operation, to extract the rules of execution from the executed act itself: that is what characterizes the approach of cultural techniques.” ²² Media are those things that prescribe the permissible human actions surrounding them, the description of these “verbal operations” being the focus of the idiom of cultural techniques. From the perspective of media theory, the mediality of law refers not simply to communication technology, but also to other cultural artefacts that compose the material conditions of law. In this expanded sense of media, the “material” and the “medial” coincide as critical-theoretical figures for the empirically observable, and historically determined, conditions of legal production.

Consider Vismann’s interpretation of Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” (1924), a parable esteemed as “law and literature’s most prized possession.” ²³ Going further than the usual semantic reading of the story as an allegory of the impossibility of arriving at an ultimate centre or origin of meaning, Vismann recognizes its series of gates enabling and denying access to the law to be emblematic of the technologies and techniques on which the law has historically relied upon for its generation and enforcement. “The whole architecture of entries and barriers testifies above all to the technologies of reference adopted by the law.” ²⁴ Kafka’s parable and posthumous novel Der Prozess (1925) (“The Trial”) ²⁵ leads us back to the Kanzleien, the medieval chanceries and modern bureaus, in which Western law has been processed and issued through the varying formats of recording devices that register and delineate the realities of legal administration. “Files remain below the perception threshold of the law.” ²⁶ Overcoming the legal discipline’s blindness to its constitutive tools, Vismann’s media history of law restores to sight one of the material grounds of legality.

The medial-material turn in which we find ourselves invites, even necessitates, our return to law and literature classics such as Goodrich’s Oedipus Lex. While tempting to regard the emergent approaches as having displaced some limits of the rhetorical, linguistic, and hermeneutic paradigm governing the classics, to ignore or dismiss the latter risks overlooking and denying their contributions to the field’s present reorientation. As Foucault has observed, it is part of the power of inaugural works of discursive practices, such as Marx’s and Freud’s, that they clear the space for the introduction of differences within those inaugurated practices. ²⁷ Returning to the classics is precisely what enables the introduction of critical modifications to the field, and thus constitutes “an effective and necessary means of transforming discursive practice.” ²⁸ Looking upon the new materialist transformation of law and literature, Goodrich has recently issued a similar word of caution: “The next generation inherits from the last, but, by turning on its parents, risks looking in the wrong direction.” ²⁹

So let us return to the works of Goodrich and Freud. Film and media theorists have restored to sight the centrality of memory technologies and techniques to the field of psychoanalysis. ³⁰ It is no accident that all four functions of the dream-work were theorized by Freud in reference to the medial tools and practices of his time: the work of condensation was explained in terms of handwritten pages; ³¹ dream-distortion was compared to postal censorship; ³² the visual, acoustic, and sensory dimensions of dreams were emphasized in his discussion of psychical figurability; ³³ while secondary revision was articulated and demonstrated through the techniques of textual inscription and production. ³⁴ If Freud’s dream of the botanical monograph emblematized, and materially indexed, the importance of the book-medium to his psychical life and lifework, might something fundamentally similar not be said about Goodrich’s monograph on the legal unconscious? What might it mean for the field of law and literature to recognize the medial-material contribution of one of its founding works?

From the Psychical to the Legal Unconscious

Goodrich is the witch of jurisprudence. Neither legal doctrine nor legal philosophy emerges unscathed from the witch’s interpretive practice. When legal judgments are read not simply for their binding rules and principles, but rather as thick records of the institution’s forgetting or disavowal of its divisive past, legal experts are quick to disparage these heretical interpretations and their interpreters, invalidating them on the grounds of error or perversion. The key rhetorical form that Goodrich resurrects and repurposes to depict the legal apologist’s exclusion of such sacrilegious speech is the antirrhesis: “a form of speech by which the orator rejecteth the authority, opinion or sentence of some person: for error or wickedness of it. . .This form of speech doth especially belong to confutation and is most apt to repell errors and heresies, and to reject evil counsel and lewd perversions.” ³⁵ In so guarding the rightness, purity, and legitimacy of its decisions, the law and its doorkeepers constitute the legal unconscious: an outside—one also within the law by virtue of its circumscription—where the prohibited figures, subjects and subject-matter alike are consigned to be forgotten.

It is part of the illicit power of legal outsiders like Goodrich the witch—in aphasia, Goodwitch or Goodwich—that they are gifted in the art of dream interpretation. “The witch creates, and that is her sin. In divination she reveals ‘strange things, either past, present or to come.’ She is able to foretell and predict; she is able to read dreams; she can converse with the ‘living dead’; she can charm or enchant nature, raise strange passions, work diabolical wonders with words; through imagination, ‘a strong conceit of the mind,’ she is able to communicate or touch things of the soul.” ³⁶ The threat of witches, and their sorcery of divining the hidden significance of phenomena, is historically evidenced in the gendered laws, print publications, and rhetoric by which women were persecuted for allegedly engaging in devil-worship in early modern Europe. ³⁷ Departures from the orthodoxy of patriarchal and religious doctrine were legally denounced as deviant acts of “dealing with evil and wicked Spirits” ³⁸ and subjected to the death penalty under the 1604 Act against Witchcraft established by James I in Protestant England.

The practice of interpreting dreams, and that of interpreting law as dreams, are not authorized by the predominant streams of scientific and legal discourse, whether in Freud’s or Goodrich’s time. As Freud has noted, accompanying the equation of mind with consciousness in late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century scientific discourse was the supporting view of dreams as corporeal phenomena distinct from, and irrelevant to, the mind: “the scientific theories of dreams leave no room for any problem of interpreting them, since in their view a dream is not a mental act at all, but a somatic process signalizing its occurrence by indications registered in the mental apparatus.” ³⁹ Dreams were not analysable data for they were dismissed as senseless products of bodily processes without any significant relationship with psychical processes.

Though judicial decisions are one of several recognized sources of law, these written texts are only allowed to be read in legal settings—the courtroom, parliament, or the legal-doctrinal classroom—in ways that clarify the state of the law, whether past or present, or contribute to legal reform. No less attached to the rational model of the person as a predominantly conscious, intentional agent, contemporary legal discourse prescribes its own protocols and principles for interpreting judicial and statutory texts, often taking the intentions of the authorial legal actor, or the purposes of the institution, as a basis on which to privilege some interpretations over others. The doctrine of stare decisis, and its central distinction between the judgment’s binding rule (ratio decidendi) and incidental remarks (obiter dicta), imposes a limit on the meaning of the judicial text. Interpretations of the legal judgment that attempt to tie its articulations, silences, actions, and omissions to the institution’s history, written or yet to be written, are devalued as lying beyond the remit of legal discourse.

Yet, the repressed, censored materials of the mind and law, and of dream interpretation and psychoanalytic interpretation of law, return to trouble psychical and legal consciousness. As in every dream, the formation of Freud’s dream of the botanical monograph was, in his view, governed by four psychical processes that happen unconsciously, that is, without the subject’s knowing or will. ⁴⁰ Compressed in the “botanical monograph” in Freud’s dream were interwoven memories of the “botanical” and “monograph,” the latter of which include not only the monograph on the cyclamen and his father’s Persian book, but also his 1884 dissertation on the coca-plant and his then-yet-to-be published monograph on dreams (“condensation”). To elude the censorship imposed by resistances that removed psychically significant materials from the system of the preconscious to that of the unconscious, Freud’s “passionately agitated plea” ⁴¹ for authorial and existential freedom, “to act and to govern [his] life as seemed right to [him] and [him] alone,” ⁴² dissipated into dried plants mutely bound within copies that fulfilled the wish. “This reminds me of the peace that has descended upon a battlefield strewn with corpses, no trace is left of the struggle which raged over it” ⁴³ (“displacement”). By the same token, the embodied instinct or wish for satisfaction obtained perceptible form in the dream-images, affording its expression and fulfilment (“considerations of representability”). The disparate dream-elements were woven together into a more-or-less intelligible whole, one evidencing some narrative logic, that allowed them to be meaningfully experienced and subsequently reproduced in speech or writing (“secondary revision”).

Condensation, displacement, figuration, and secondary revision—as Freud would stress in a footnote inserted into the 1925 edition of the text, these involuntary processes of the “dream-work,” ⁴⁴ more so than the latent content of the dreams disclosed in the course of analysis, form “the essence of dreaming.” ⁴⁵ While the clinical talking cure might necessitate an exhaustive recollection of the dream associations and origins so as to dissolve the unconscious memory’s hold on the patient, for the psychoanalytic theorist dreams evidence unconscious mental processes that disclose the “gaps in data” ⁴⁶ of the predominant conscious model of the mind.

As a legal transposition of the psychoanalytic idiom, Goodrich’s genealogy of law’s plastic and textual imagery thematizes and enacts ‘the return of the repressed within the discourse of law,” ⁴⁷ the possibility of which acts as the basis and subject matter of the author’s critical jurisprudence. Instead of viewing the law as a regulatory institution defined by linear progression, Goodrich reads legal phenomena symptomatically, that is, as if they were the effects of unconscious processes that point to a deeper institutional memory underlying its imaginary order. Not unlike the psychical unconscious, the legal unconscious is a permanent, and potentially limitless, repository of memory-traces that exceed the visible array of practices, texts, images, and other phenomena that might fall within the ambit of law. In line with Freud’s observations about the porous boundary between the psychical systems of perception-consciousness and the unconscious, ⁴⁸ the repressed contents of the legal unconscious resurface in displaced forms within the perceptible phenomena of law, as if evidencing “the return of the repressed within the discourse of law.” ⁴⁹ It is the possibility of an involuntary return of the repressed in law, and that of a patient remembrance of the hidden or forgotten scenes of law, that enables Goodrich’s critical jurisprudence: a mnemonic or anamnestic jurisprudence of difference.

Medium of Legal Anamnesis

Before turning to Goodrich’s bewitching refashioning of the postal acceptance rule in terms of Freud’s dream-work, let us foreground the presence of print in Goodrich’s study of the legal unconscious. The printed book pervades Goodrich’s study, at once assuring its profane circulation in the world of readers and informing Goodrich’s diagnosis on the law’s imaginal repressions, both across the study and in the chapter revising the significance of the landmark decision Adams v Lindsell. The copy of Oedipus Lex that I hold before me declares, in the form of a yellow blade-shaped series emblem pressed against an electric blue front cover, its belonging to the series UC Press Voices Revived. ⁵⁰ Following the guide of the series emblem to the spine, and then to the first back cover across which it cuts, I find a short description of the series and its goal of “reviving formerly out-of-print works that advance knowledge and drive change.” Through print-on-demand technology, a technology of digital printing, the book-copy could be reproduced pursuant to a single order, thereby permitting the reader’s hallucination of Goodrich’s voice. The printed book, as Kant and Kittler understood, is an optical medium that relays some speech, pre-emptively or retrospectively determined to be that of the author, publisher, mother, state, and so forth, to the reading public. ⁵¹ The printed book, reproduced by the digital technology whose invention it had facilitated, is the medial-material condition upon which my present reception of the legal dream-book depends.

Goodrich affirms, exploits, and emphatically draws our attention to the opticality of the text, both in its front matter and substantive chapters. In the verso facing the start of the opening chapter is a curious reproduction of the title page of John Selden’s The Reverse or Back-face of the English Janus (1682), which emblematizes Goodrich’s own project of attending to the unconscious memory of the English common law. This metalepsis recalls and inflects Freud’s adoption of Virgil’s line, Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo (“If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions” ⁵² ), as the motto of The Interpretation of Dreams. A parallel gesture to that of Freud’s study of the underside of the mind against the scientific-philosophical orthodoxy is announced: Goodrich brings to the fore “[the] other scenes of law—its images, its figures, its architectures, its rites, myths, and other relations” ⁵³ —disregarded by doctrinal legal scholars as extraneous to the discipline. By means of a displaced title page set in various sizes, styles, and typefaces, one that includes a framed illustration of the two-faced god and the printed names of various literary actors involved in the text’s production, Goodrich stresses the visuality and historicity of the text, whether legal or psychoanalytic, judicial or scholarly. The manifest content of dreams qua images that were the objects of Freud’s analysis have become the very materials in and through which Goodrich’s study of the legal unconscious presents itself.

Looking backwards into the history of the common law, Goodrich rediscovers the visuality and imagism of the (legal) word as print. “The assertion of the word as the primary legitimate form of knowing became the basic method of science in the age of print [here, Goodrich references the classics by literary theorists Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette; media and print scholars Walter Ong and Elizabeth Eisenstein; and book historians Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin]. . .By the same token that the text became the principal form for the direction of vision, it became a dissimulation, an image that forgot (repressed) that it was an image, a sign that hid its dual function in the abstract linguistic claim that it was no more than a medium, a transparent means of reference.” ⁵⁴ The text’s place in a history of optical media, which Kittler has traced back to the camera obscura and forwards to contemporary computer graphics, ⁵⁵ is demarcated by Goodrich as a site of violent forgetting, in law no less than in science and in culture. The fantasy of the transparent word, one arguably reflected in today’s ascetically doctrinal approaches to law, occludes the visual-corporeality of the text, the very medial-material dimension that allows it to be imagined as a window into the rational soul of the common law. Anticipating Vismann’s study of legal files, Goodrich responds to the law’s iconoclasm by restoring to sight its printed pages, reviewing its constitutive texts and figures as perceptible traces of its effaced past.

Channelling the Feminine Offeree

An exemplary instance of Goodrich’s ethical practice of legal anamnesis is his treatment of the postal exception in Adams v Lindsell. ⁵⁶ From the perspective of legal doctrine, the postal or mailbox rule is understood to be a now-trite, albeit not infrequently criticized, exception to the foundational rule that contracts, as enforceable agreements, instantiate consensus ad idem, that is, a meeting of minds between the offeror and offeree. In an authoritative legal treatise such as Guenter Treitel’s, the general rule that the acceptance of an offer has no legal effect until it is communicated to the offeror is recognized to be subject to the exceptional case where a posted acceptance concludes the contract. ⁵⁷ For the purpose of Treitel’s treatise, which primarily functions as a guide to the field for legal practitioners and law students, it is sufficient to identify the judicial decisions supporting the rule, its underlying rationale(s), and some extant criticisms of it. Accordingly, the early nineteenth-century King’s Bench decision Adams v Lindsell, which posited the necessity of the rule to put an authoritative stop to a potentially endless relay of messages between the offeror and offeree, is acknowledged to be “one of the early leading authorities in support of the ‘general rule,’” ⁵⁸ despite the author’s concerns with the rule’s arbitrariness and its potential prejudicial effects on both parties. Treitel’s objections to the postal rule are advanced in the interest of legal reform, that is, as considerations to be taken into account by the judiciary or parliament when working to improve contract law. No reference is made to Goodrich’s critical-historical evaluation of the rule, nor to the surrounding critical commentaries on its symptomaticity, socio-historicity, and radical potentials, ⁵⁹ as if these were of no value to our understanding of the doctrine and its place in the legal imaginary.

Jurisprudential witchcraft of the psychoanalytic sort turns the juristic text into a montage of dream-images traceable to their ancient sources, which evidences the unconscious processes that constitute legal doctrine. For Goodrich, the compulsion to repeat a rule that has been so severely discredited as illogical and idiosyncratic in the legal literature calls for an explanation in terms of repression or forgetting—“an other scene or unconscious place of judgment.” ⁶⁰ While professing to abandon “the science of the unconscious, the interpretation of dreams” ⁶¹ for a rhetorical analysis of legal anomalies, Goodrich quite slyly (or, better yet, unconsciously) repurposes the four processual elements of Freud’s dream-work to disclose the profoundly gendered significance of the postal rule. In this transposition of Freud, Goodrich turns his own reinterpretation of the law into a dreamscape not unlike his object of analysis. In the zone of indistinction registered by the book chapter, the processes of condensation, displacement, figuration, and secondary revision traverse the juristic and jurisprudential texts, fabricating the one and the other, as if neither could escape the dictates of the legal unconscious.

Allegoria is the rhetorical figure by which Goodrich recasts the postal exception arising in Adams v Lindsell as a site that compresses, and conceals within itself, a gendered legal history: a memory of the feminine offeree, under ecclesiastical law, concluding her marriage contract with a potential spouse by way of post. ⁶² Just as in the modern postal rule, the premodern matrimonial agreement was recognized to be complete upon the woman’s affirmative response to the messenger or letter. ⁶³ That the offeror was not in a legal position to revoke the offer in the period between the woman’s expression of her consent and the time of his receipt of her communicated acceptance. Upon the woman’s messagerial acceptance of the offer, she became sub potestate viri, that is, under the legal control of, and protection by, her husband. “The postal rule, the allegory of the privileged offeree, is the allegory of the law’s somewhat limited protection of women in the formation of spousal contracts. . .It is the woman that benefits from the fiction of continued assent or continuing offer, it is the woman who is protected by the “artificial” or fictive operation of the postal rule.” ⁶⁴ The postal rule, in other words, stands for, and holds within itself, a memory of the legal woman’s ambivalent power to bind herself to a prospective spouse. The apparent strangeness of the modern rule is, in Freud’s terms, an uncanny effect: the unexpected return of a gendered rule that had once been familiar but become unfamiliar in the course of events. ⁶⁵

How does Goodrich recall the hidden memory behind the doctrinal edifice? A review of the thirteen printed pages, both the rich textual body and the referential footnotes, suggests that it is precisely by means of an embodied interaction with literary publications—be they judicial, doctrinal, scholarly, contemporary, modern, or historical—that the author facilitates the return of the unconscious memory in the legal monograph. Having cited the landmark Anglo-American judgment of Adams v Lindsell and other commonwealth cases that accepted and discussed the postal acceptance rule, ⁶⁶ Goodrich proceeds to note Arthur Corbin’s and other textbook authors’ explanations for and positions on the rule. ⁶⁷ He then turns to various critical commentaries on the rule, including Simon Gardner’s “deconstruction” of the rule and attempt to foreground the place of the nineteenth-century postal infrastructure in the public imagination. ⁶⁸ Directed by James Gordley’s legal-philosophical monograph on the origins of modern contract law, ⁶⁹ Goodrich returns to Roman law, reviewing the Digest and the Corpus Iuris Civilis as ancient records of contracts concluded per nuntium et per literas (“through messengers or by letters”) and of the possible dissolution of marriage by letters not received by spouses. This discussion of the Roman influence on the common law of contract paves the way for his subsequent review of treatises on ecclesiastical law such as Henry Swinburne’s A Treatise of Spousals, or Matrimonial Contracts ⁷⁰ , which enables his allegorical reading of the postal rule as a deeply gendered memory of the English common law. Books and other textual matter, and the network of citations that these publications constituted and sustained, prescribed the possibility of Goodrich’s practice of legal anamnesis, that is, his recovery of the lost memory of the privileged woman offeree of ecclesiastical law and its roots in the Roman-legal positions on the mediation of sale agreements and dissolution of marriages. Goodrich’s monograph is, in effect, a palimpsest of the legal intertexts that constitute, surround, and risk being excluded from the history of the postal rule.

If Goodrich’s monograph is a condensation of the law’s memory-traces, it is also perhaps a displaced fulfilment of the law’s own wish to transcend the “pure,” “technical” image given to it by legal philosophers and doctrinal lawyers alike. “Where positivized conceptions of law are concerned to use concepts of logic and system to mask or deny the difference, the power that founds law, a psychoanalytic critique of law is attentive precisely to the differences or other enfolded in law.” ⁷¹ The dated image of the woman offeree caught between the dominions of her paterfamilias and its prospective substitute, a gendered image repressed for its repugnance to the façade of formal equality in contemporary contract law, returns in the form of Goodrich’s symptomatic reading: a bibliographic tracing of the intertextual inheritances on which the postal rule has been founded, including but also over against doctrine. While the positive imagery of law as a rational, principled order of rules might well be “the melancholic lawyer’s projection to cover the law of reason, system and justice,” ⁷² that is, an Oedipal fantasy of reclaiming or becoming the lost father, it could be suggested no less that the law desires to circumvent its own entrapment within a fortress of univocal, universal reason. “Law’s melancholia,” ⁷³ understood to be not only the unhappiness of the individual human agent conducting its study but also that of the collective legal unconscious—the legal machinery of personal actors interacting with the medial objects, technologies, and practices of their time to generate relational norms—drives the production of Goodrich’s ecstatic monograph of the legal dreamscape. In its profound reckoning with the feminine image and other lost objects of law in the guise of a scholarly monograph, the legal dream-book fulfils the law’s wish to displace the limits on its vision imposed by the disciplines. Oedipus Lex, a monstrous portmanteau of the psychoanalytic and legal idioms, materializes the law’s ecstatic self-transcendence.

As regards considerations of figuration, from the foregoing emphases on the visuality of the book, and the reconstitution of the feminine image in Goodrich’s text, it is apparent that the law and its psychoanalytic agent depend upon the perceptible textual medium to depict and satisfy their desires. The “revenge of the image” ⁷⁴ on an iconoclastic model of law, adverted to in the book introduction, is a purposive exploitation of the technical substrate of the book-medium to disrupt the monopoly over its identity and boundaries asserted by its ascetic proponents: the legal expert who sees himself as little more than an advisor to government on policy, ⁷⁵ and the legal philosopher committed to “introversion” in method and “detachment” in disposition, as if the law were but an abstract puzzle to be solved. ⁷⁶ Recollected in the tranquil form of printed letters, not unlike the dried cyclamen in Freud’s dream, the law’s rage against its jailers is allowed to be expressed, to dissipate, and, further, to incite its readers to advance its self-emancipatory project.

Resituated within two apparently self-contained texts with their own paginal margins, the first a judicial text resolving a contractual action for non-delivery of wool, and the second a critical-psychoanalytic text recalling the gendered origins of the postal rule, the heterogenous image of the feminine offeree is doubly disguised as belonging to coherent textual-narrative wholes. In Adams v Lindsell, the manifest image of contractual equals, the wool manufacturers who have posted a letter accepting the wool dealers’ offer to sell some quantity of wool at a certain price, fits within a discourse of contractual law purporting to treat contracting parties even-handedly. In Oedipus Lex and in particular the chapter “Oedipus Lex,” the latent feminine image supports Goodrich’s project of re-staging the unconscious scenes of law. That Goodrich himself might have occupied the position of the feminine offeree, accepting the law’s offer to interpret and expose its constitutive dream-images by letter, is submerged beneath the electric-blue book cover, the epipelagic zone of the abyssal work. Revised and re-visioned in the second and third degrees, the gendered subject of the law is free to fulfil her simultaneously nomophobic and nomophilic desires, to be the witch that upends the legal order, dissolving its pure, ideal image, and conjuring in its place a monstrous vision of its tainted, abandoned objects.

It is perhaps part of the monograph’s sorcery that its visions return to possess and haunt other print publications, including Goodrich’s own. As demonstrated by Freud in his successive reproductions of the dream of the botanical monograph, first in manuscript form, then twice within each printed edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, secondary revision exceeds the initial time of the dream and potentially extends to the entire circuit of literary communication. Twice more would Goodrich reprise the decision of Adams v Lindsell and repurpose his genealogy of the postal rule to intervene in contemporary legal debates. Within a year of the monograph’s publication, the postal rule would return in the form of a trenchant critique of Habermas’ legal transposition of his theory of communicative action, one advanced within a symposium issue of the Cardozo Law Review dedicated to the English publication of Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms. ⁷⁷ For Goodrich, “in turning to law and the discourse of law, Habermas evinces no knowledge of either the specific qualities of legal discourse or of the substantive rules which govern legal communication.” ⁷⁸ Against the ideal speech situations or discursive rationality that Habermas prioritizes, Goodrich presents and demonstrates the hierarchical model of communication presupposed and reinstated by the postal rule, whose analysis requires a close attention to its gendered history and prior privileging of the feminine offeree. Almost a decade thereafter, Goodrich would reinscribe and remediate the itinerary of the postal rule as a contribution to a 2005 book collection on feminist contract law. ⁷⁹ In contrast to the somewhat pessimistic tone on feminine powerlessness adopted in the monograph and article, Goodrich stresses in his chapter the law’s capacity to protect contracting parties in weaker bargaining positions, be they women dependent on marriage contracts or viewer-users of transactional websites. ⁸⁰ “Adams v Lindsell provides the possibility of certain protections for contracting subjects who are vulnerable in virtuality. It does so in principle by incorporating into the common law rules that protected weaker parties in spousal contracts. It does so more specifically by attending to the risks and responsibilities of those who contract at a distance, or in its modern equivalent through a screen.” ⁸¹ In these belated authorial revisitings of the postal rule, in dreams that purposively rework their predecessors, Goodrich renews the law’s other-oriented commitment to justice. “If fictions are genuinely created to effect justice, then the work of the postal rule may hardly have begun.” ⁸² The literary medium assures the vitality of the law, its transgressive communications and irrepressible wish-fulfilments.

Oedipus Lex bears record of its author’s embodied interaction with print artefacts as “conditions of possibility in and through which law arises.” ⁸³ Ahead of current theorists of legal materiality, Goodrich already understood the medial-materiality of legal texts—the dependence of textual meaning on material form. While framed in its chapter on the postal rule as a “rhetorical analysis of. . .legal anomalies,” ⁸⁴ the law and literature classic refuses to be consigned to a now-dated linguistic or hermeneutic paradigm. Recognized for its close attention to the technicity of legal texts, the monograph acts as an exemplary guide for future text- and media-oriented studies in law and literature.

Conclusion

Friends and Colleagues,

We are writing with regard to our upcoming symposium with the Colorado Law Review, What Should Legal Theory Become? ⁸⁵

As jurisprudence returns to matter and media, it is apt to find at the start of Goodrich’s contribution to a recent symposium, originally entitled What Should Critical Legal Theory Become?, an emblematic specimen of the predominant communicative medium of our time: the email. The symposium co-director’s accidental omission of “critical” in the title reference acts as launch pad for Goodrich’s speculation on the future of legal theory. Goodrich’s letter, in which the theorist’s thoughts on armchairs, pages, footnotes, screens, offices, and other apparatuses of theory materialize, is posted to the future, one where law and literature meet unfazed—in the “jurisliterary” ⁸⁶ —to interpret, perform and embody the material existence of terrestrial phenomena. The post-critical future of critical legal theory, critical legal theory “sans critique,” ⁸⁷ far from being a ghostly repetition of its historical defeat in the American law schools, is a scene of wish-fulfilment: critical legal theory is “become legal theory tout court, plain and simple.” ⁸⁸ The crisis of chronic institutional inattention to the matter, materials, and bodies that compose our planetary existence has been resolved. “We play. We laugh. We dream.” ⁸⁹ Electronic channels of relay, and the successes, failures, and promises of digital communication, could well be the medial bases of our contemporary fantasies in and of legal theory.

In the digital present, Goodrich’s 1995 dream of the legal monograph replays from our exposure to the book-artefact, a technology that operates like a lanterna magica to present “[the] other scenes of law—its images, its figures, its architectures, its rites, myths, and other relations.” ⁹⁰ For media-oriented scholars of law and literature, Oedipus Lex reflects the exemplary use of an optical medium to restore to sight the lost image of the feminine offeree. That we have been able to retrieve the image indicates that the book is far from extinct and hardly without value to the present. Our critical postings of the law in the here and now depend on the book, one of the most enduring technologies in which knowledge has been recorded and transmitted, and which continues to rework culture. ⁹¹ It remains for us to sharpen and enact the critical possibilities afforded by our media technologies, a project which Goodrich’s bewitching dealings with the books of law incites us to advance.