William MacNeil, Faculty of Law, Griffith University
This paper will pose the question: why is "critique" sacrificed in A Tale of Two Cities? That is, why is it the critical legal lawyer, Sydney Carton who must mount the scaffold, decrying that "It is a far, far better thing that I do". This highly charged, even melodramatic turn in the narrative complicates the received wisdom of Dickens as a critic of the law, himself all too willing to proclaim its "politics" (as in, e.g, Bleak House) and points to a far more problematic position on his part. For if bourgeois-liberal legalism is critiqued in A Tale of Two Cities as a kind of "hall of mirrors" of misrecognitions (literalised in the mirror which hangs over the Old Bailey courtroom in which Charles Darney is tried for sedition), then social experiments attempting, as psychoanalysis would put it, to "foreclose the Law" are condemned outright. Nowhere is this more clearly exemplified than in the trial of Charles Darney in France at the height of the Terror, this time for counter-revolutionary activities.
The principal difference between the two trials is, of course, efficacy: revolutionary justice is far effective than bourgeois-liberal liberalism, exposing the repressed "truth" of the text: the "primal scene" of the rape in the barn of Therese Defarges's sister, and the subsequent destruction of her family by Darney's aristocratic relations, the St. Evremondes. But, oddly, it is the very success of the revolutionary tribunal's forensics which mark its failure, for the truth which it tells, also unleashes the Real of enjoyment which washes over Paris, and ultimately engulfs all its inhabitants--the Defargeses, the Vengeance, Barsad, etc... Interestingly, only those who escape to England survive to tell the tale, culminating in, so Carton prophesises, his namesake, Charles and Lucie's son, an eminent Victorian judge whose career will redeem Sydney's sacrifice, endorsing what he had mocked and manipulated: the Law of the Symbolic-Imaginary.
This is not to say, however, that Dickens is wholly on the side of the liberal legalism over revolutionary justice-though the latter murders us while the former only misrecognises us--because the Law itself carries out its own Terror, making a victim of none other than critique. And that is why Carton is sacrificed at the end of A Tale of Two Cities,because he embodies the very paradox of critique: he cannot live with or without the law.