  Letters Archive
Team-Teaching:
"Political Trials and Trial Narratives"
Vanderbilt University Professors James A. Epstein,
of the History Department and Laurence D. Lerner, of
the English Department, taught a joint seminar on
"Political Trials and Trial Narratives" to fifteen
selected graduate students at the Humanities Center
last May. In this article, Lerner reflects on what he
learned from the experience.
Jim and I were both at the University of Sussex,
which pioneered jointly taught courses in the 1960s:
I taught there from 1962 until I came to Vanderbilt
in 1985, and Jim was an undergraduate there in the
late sixties. We never met, but when we became
colleagues here we soon realized how much our
academic interests overlapped: Jim specializes in
English history of the last two centuries, and has
made a particular study of radical movements in the
years after the French Revolution, and I have a
strong interest in placing 19th century literature in
its social and political context. The chance for us
to teach together came through the graduate program
in Social and Political Thought; Jean Bethke
Elshtain, who directs it, was very supportive of our
project.
We received 27 applications for the 15 places, and
choosing was very painful. We had to reject some whom
we knew to be very good students. In the end, we took
six from English, four from history, two from
comparative literature, one from German, and two from
law. One of the students of English also had a law
degree, and one of the lawyers had majored in
political science. A thoroughly interdisciplinary
group. For the most obvious definition of
interdisciplinary study says that the teachers, and
if possible the students, will come from different
departments. This is the definition that will
naturally occur to an administrator, and it is a
clearly useful one, but I think it possible to
suggest another. The great interdisciplinary movement
of the mid-20th century has been structuralism—the
search for deep structures that link together
disparate social and intellectual activities: as in
Levi-Strauss's comparison between the exchange of
women in marriage customs and the exchange of goods,
or Chomsky's search for deep structures of grammar
that speakers of a language use but cannot formulate.
The structuralism, explaining social actions through
the analogy of language, is automatically
interdisciplinary—as is the post-structuralist,
seeing deep structures as inherently unstable, or as
political strategies that ought to be destabilized.
The difference between the traditional literary
historian and the post-structuralist, both operating
in the same department, may be more profound than
between the former and the historian, or the latter
and the deconstructive philosopher.
This points the way to another and perhaps more
valuable conception of the interdisciplinary,
deriving from the intellectual activity itself, not
from who performs it. Interdisciplinary study, I now
suggest, occurs when the same text is examined for
different purposes, or when the same question is
explored through different kinds of text. After
reading the death warrant of Charles I and seeing the
obstinate, legalistic integrity with which he refused
to recognize the court, we looked at Marvell's
Horatian Ode about Cromwell, which compares him
to a force of nature ("Then burning through the air
he went,/And palaces and temples rent"), and
Charles upon the scaffold to an actor playing his
part flawlessly among a set of real life groundlings
("While round the armed bands/Did clap their bloody
hands"). This was the perfect opportunity to see what
poetry can and cannot do in a political situation:
it can compress a complex political argument into a
balanced sentence—carefully not taking sides in a
life-and-death struggle—and beyond that it can
reflect on the interconnections between action and
contemplation.
What did the seminar actually do? We met for three
hours every morning, Monday to Friday, the students
had been told to regard the course as a full-time
occupation, and there was enough reading to fill the
rest of the day. I found it perhaps the most
strenuous teaching experience I had ever had, and I
had read most of the material beforehand; for the
students who came to it all for the first time, it
must have been exhausting. We were aware from the
beginning of the danger of joint teaching, that it
can become a dialogue between two professors arguing
with each other from two ends of the table, while the
students turn their heads from side to side like the
spectators at a tennis match. Our students were so
lively that there was in fact no danger of this, but
we nonetheless built in what we thought of as a
safety device: one of us would take charge of each
session, and the other would not be allowed to speak
until after the coffee break. This quaint device
worked well enough though the self-imposed restraint
sometimes proved too much for the passive partner—to
the occasional amusement of the students.
And what did we read? We were determined to range in
time, so we began with the trial and execution of
Charles I, along with the contemporary trial of the
Leveller, John Lilburne: trying the king and trying
the subject. We read contemporary reports of both
trials, along with material on the Divine Right of
Kings, and Shakespeare's Richard II. Then
we leapt forward to England in the 1790s, to study
the treason trials of radicals in the panic following
the French revolution, along with William Godwin's
novel Caleb Williams (1794), and some
discussions of the rule of law in 18th-century
England. Then another leap forward, to two prominent
examples of the modern political show trial: the
Moscow trials of 1938 (along with Arthur Koestler's
novel on the subject, Darkness at Noon), and
the trial of Klaus Barbie in France in 1987. Then we
turned from politics to domestic violence to look at
the trials of women for murdering their husbands,
both in 17th-century England and in 19th- and
20th-century America, in order to ask, among other
questions, how far these too should be seen as
political. In between all this we had two interludes,
to look at two brilliant plays that center on a trial
scene, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, by Brecht,
and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. (There
is an inherent parallel between trial and theater
that thrust itself on us all). Finally we looked at
our own methodology, by comparing the study of
literature and the study of law, an area of
interdisciplinary exploration that has recently
become lively and fruitful. We decided that it would
be much better to put this theoretical discussion at
the end rather than the beginning: there is no
shortage today, in the intellectual world that these
students inhabit, of discussions of post
structuralism and literary theory, of whether history
is a text and whether language is inherently
unstable, and our seminar would have lost much of its
individuality if it had begun by inviting everyone to
take up positions about familiar issues and defend
them with familiar arguments that would have made few
converts. Furthermore, theory, in my view, takes on
its fullest meaning only when applied, and the fact
that when we came to the methodological discussions
we already possessed a body of common reading to
draw on made the theorizing richer and more fruitful.
And what is there to learn by studying such political
trials from the past—what, that is, besides
satisfying our curiosity (which ought to be
insatiable) about what human beings have done to one
another in the course of history? Here I must speak
for myself: it would be presumptuous to try and say
what the students learned, but I know that I learned
a great deal. I will start with John Lilburne, a
17th-century radical who had always been one of my
heroes: a democrat in the age of absolutism, a
colorful opponent of tyranny, a believer in the Inner
Light (he became a Quaker at the end of his life).
Reading the transcript of his trial, I kept feeling
thankful that I didn't have Lilburne in my class; his
constant legal quibbles (accompanied by fulsome
insistences that he was no lawyer), his questioning
of the authority of the court on the most trivial
pretexts, reminded me of the worst moments with
rebellious students in the heady days of 1969. I
found myself identifying with the judges (am I
getting old, I wondered), realizing how infuriating
they must have found his readiness to identify
himself with Christ, and his constant insistence on
the Inner Light, until finally one of them burst out,
"Never talk of that which is within you; God is in
us, as well as in you.
The English civil war often looks like the womb of
the future: the sudden outburst of pamphlets in the
1640s that questioned every human and divine
institution seems to throw up the entire political
philosophy of the ensu ing three centuries. A good
deal of the future (that is, of our present) can be
found in Lilburne: proto-Marxism (property is
antecedent to magistracy, he claimed), or Hobbesian
views of the state of nature ("If you take away the
law all things will fall into confusion"). The
students, I found, had more sympathy than I had with
the legal quibbles, and I wondered if it was because
they were American, and had a constitution.
The treason trials of the 1790s, too, spoke directly
to me. John Frost, tried for sedition in 1793, was
defended by Thomas Erskine, one of the leading
lawyers of the day. Erskine dealt only with the law,
not with politics: he ignored the arguments for and
against Frost's egalitarianism and republicanism, and
confined himself to showing that some of these
opinions had been held by Pitt before he became Prime
Minister, or that when Frost declared "I am for
equality, I am for no kings," it could not be proved
that he was speaking about the king of England.
Joseph Gerrald, tried the following year, conducted
his own defense, stating his political opinions and
defending them at length: "Every nation has a right,
not only to preserve the form of government which is
actually established; but also, by the peaceful and
calm operation of reason, to improve that form of
government, whatever it may be." Gerrald's reasoned
statement of the case for democracy made him seem a
heroic figure in the history of political
controversy, especially when he said to his obviously
hostile judges, "Reason alone and not assertion can
convert me. Frost and Gerrald were both found guilty.
It has become a commonplace among radical
deconstructionists today to interrogate the
traditional liberal doctrine of the autonomous
subject: the very idea of the individual capable of
free and rational decisions, it is claimed, conceals
the degree to which we are socially constructed. This
argument leads to the claim that asserting one's
belief in reason is a way of upholding the status
quo, and that true radicalism must involve the
subversion of the social codes themselves, the
deconstructing of the idea of the subject (a
"subject," after all, according to a piece of
wordplay now widely cited, is subjected to a
sovereign). As a good liberal, I have never accepted
this argument; and I felt strengthened in this
resistance as I read Gerrald and his fellow radical
Daniel Eaton and saw how strongly the belief in
reason and individual autonomy has in the past been
used against the status quo. The true
conservative position does not respect the subject,
but dismisses the possibility of serious criticism
from the "swinish multitude." If authority is to be
subverted, then belief in the possibility of free
judgment is not self-deception but the necessary
basis for criticism.
One of our students—a historian-expressed himself
passionately on this issue. "You are the only one,"
he declared, "who can constitute your own
subjectivity." Existential authenticity, he claimed,
is so important that it must not be "objectified into
an idea." Our most committed post structuralist, on
the other hand, was a literary student, willing to
deconstruct the individual into the social pressures
exerted on him or her—of which he or she might not
even be aware. It seems worth remarking on the irony
that the discipline which has traditionally thought
in terms of movements and tendencies is history,
whereas literary scholars, reading poetry concerned
with the growth of the individual mind, used to be
the ones who asserted the importance of subjectivity
and the autonomy of creation.
Finally, a word on the twentieth century. As long as
we have totalitarianism, we shall have show trials
and rigged evidence; so that the trial of Bukharin
and his associates, though not all that many living
memories go back so far, seemed to be about the pre
sent. It came to life startlingly when our Russian
student mentioned that her grandparents had been
convinced that Bukharin was guilty. The great enigma
of the Moscow trials is of course why the accused
confessed to monstrous and often ludicrous crimes of
espionage and wrecking. As we read the transcript we
came across passages like this: "I once more repeat
that I am guilty of treason to the Socialist father
land, the most heinous of all possible crimes, of the
organization of kulak uprisings, of preparations for
terrorist acts and of be longing to an underground,
anti Soviet organization.... In reality, the whole
country stands behind Stalin; he is the hope of the
world; he is a creator." How could a man of such
integrity and intelligence say such things? Many of
the seminar members were certain that Bukharin was
speaking in code, declaring to those that had ears to
hear that he had committed none of these crimes, that
the accusations themselves were the crime.
Totalitarianism can certainly lead to such codes, but
I am inclined more to the explanation so brilliantly
put forward in Koestler's novel, that the accused
were still communists, uninterested in individual
good intentions, in what is contemptuously referred
to as "cricket morality," concerned only with the
"objective" political impact of their confessions,
and therefore willing to fabricate absurd confessions
if persuaded that it would be in the interests of the
party. Both these explanations seem to be startlingly
alive today: in a world of spreading fundamentalism,
the interests of the movement prevail over truth; and
public statements are often enough turned into code,
even in a democracy.
I would like to let a student have the last word, and
I shall do this on a question that we had not thought
of much importance, that the course was not taken for
credit, and so not graded. During our post-mortem on
the last day, one student remarked that he had
thought he was fairly relaxed about grades, and able
to concentrate on the work for its own sake; but he
had been astonished at the relief he'd felt in this
course, and the ease with which he'd been able to
concentrate on the issues. At the same time, this
ease may have made everything seem to us all the more
existentially urgent. As, whenever I think about—it,
it still does.
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