“Making up Stories”: Law and Imagination in Contemporary Canada

“Making up Stories” : Law and Imagination in Contemporary Canada Lorraine W eir University of British Columbia “Adeimantus,” I said, “you and I are not making up Stories at the moment; we’re founding a community.” Plato, Republic, Book n I n Plato’s c a v e, as we know, representation was already a problem and troping of representation—art—even more so. The “distortions” produced by written words occasioned “danger” and potential “harm,” a particular concern in the establishment of a “well-regulated community” where “at least for the general rank and file, obedience to those in authority and establishing one’s authority over the pleasures of drink, sex, and food” were paramount (Republic Book hi). In Canada since R. v. Sharpe and R. v. Malmo-Levine we appear to be less concerned with drink and food and more with sex and drugs but the concern with representation remains and I suspect that Plato would feel right at home. In this paper I want to consider some of the things that happen when the Court thinks about making up stories, especially when the artistic merit of those stories is at issue, and what happens when the Court thinks about harm and the public good in the context of art. I am going to suggest that in this hall of interpretive mirrors, art runs a great risk of going up in smoke just as individual freedom recently did in Malmo-Levine. Given that the Court has maintained that in certain contexts the perceiver, the perceived and the maker are all liable, I am also going to maintain that teachers have a vested interest in this debate and should prepare accordESC 29.3-4 (September/December 2003): 25-33 Lorraine Weir, Professor in the Department of English at u b c , served as an Expert Witness for the Defence in R. v. Sharpe (B.C. Supreme Court, 2002) and was also involved in the Little Sister’s and Surrey School Board cases. A writer and theorist, she is currently working on a book on the literary theory of the Canadian courts. ingly. But let's return to Plato briefly while bearing in mind that this inter­ disciplinary approach situates the law in the context of theory ancient and modern rather than undertaking the rigourous analysis of precedent and the rigourous distinction between obscenity and child pornography which a longer paper and the conventions of legal scholarship would require. Sex, Lies, Plato, Aristotle For Plato, the rhapsode’s gift was inseparable from the underworld of Orphic cults, Dionysian frenzies, and, as we would say now, sex and drugs. The requirement that art depict and serve “the good” was the cor­ ollary of the rejection of art produced by “possessed or crazed” hysterics disseminating their misleading and seductive messages so harmful to the young and vulnerable. In the Ion, the rhapsode is mocked as an ignorant singer of Homeric verses, devoid of social responsibility and intellectual acumen, inciting the equally ignorant and misguided to delusion and potential riot. The poet, as a well-known passage from the Republic puts it, disseminates artistic “lies” which have no “redeeming” value and must be banned since if the young men of our community hear this kind of thing and take it seriously, rather than regarding it as despicable and absurd, they’re hardly going to regard such behavior as despicable in human beings like themselves and feel remorse when they also find themselves saying or doing these or similar things. (Republic Book 111) Under these circumstances, “making up stories” becomes serious busi­ ness indeed, fraught with anxiety and obsessed with the production of the “good use of language, harmony, grace and rhythm [which] all depend on goodness of character” (Republic Book 111). “Goodness” becomes the entry ticket for art into the republic and the only context in which “making up stories” can be justified. Where, as Luce Irigaray puts it, “[r]e-semblance is the law,” “founding a community” requires the elimination of any further levels of “distortion” (149-50). Aristotle’s response in the Poetics is to undertake a redaction of rhetorical analysis, formalizing Plato’s delusion as catharsis, embedding transformation at the center of...

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