Conclusion

The Conclusion restates the book’s four key arguments. Firstly, legal exclusion in various related forms is a tactic of power. Secondly, legal exclusion is an enduring phenomenon, alive and well in disturbing new combinations in the twentieth and twenty-first century West. Thirdly, exclusion from law is a shared concern for the literature of outlawry and the literature of espionage, and hence a key theme in a range of writings about the state and its actions from the Middle Ages to the present day. Finally, the role of literature here is often to offer critique: in offering such critique it shares with law a demand for justice.

Sovereign Outlaws: Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy

This chapter asks whether the sovereign can (and perhaps must) act outside the law in a reading of the second tetralogy of Shakespeare’s history plays. The discussion opens with an examination of the notion of sovereign immunity, contrasted with a competing line of discourse against tyranny. It then argues that questions around the king’s status relative to the law constitute an important set of issues within Shakespeare’s Richard II,where both individuals (Richard and Bolingbroke) and events (Richard’s deposition) may be read as existing outside of the law in various senses. The chapter proceeds to consider the remaining plays in the tetralogy, arguing that Henry V, a sort of quasi-outlaw before gaining the throne, finds as king that he must act outside the law to defend the interests of his state. The discussion surveys a range of legal questions in Henry V, from his claim to the throne of France to his threats before Harfleur and his killing of prisoners at Agincourt. The chapter concludes with a brief glance at espionage in Elizabethan England, and the Elizabethan state’s recourse to methods of invisible power.

Contesting the Virtual: William Gibson

This chapter turns to discuss the contest for the virtual in the twenty-first century as represented in the fiction of William Gibson. In Gibson's earlier speculative fictions of the near-to-distant future, power largely means corporate power, following the posited decline of the nation-state; more recent work, set in the approximate present, place the intelligence agencies in play alongside international corporate interests. In opposition to such power, we find various marginal communities and oppositional groups who occupy outlaw spaces, both real and virtual, with Gibson's protagonists usually occupying an ambivalent position between the powerful and their opponents. The discussion examines Gibson’s contrasting of the Borgesian Aleph (a virtual universe of infinite potential), and Bentham's Panopticon (a virtual prison of total surveillance). It uses the dialectic between these two to ask questions of the contest for the virtual that currently occupies us as we balance the emergence of a potential information utopia against the simultaneous rise of the surveillance state.

The Endurance of Exclusion: Versions of Ned Kelly

This chapter considers the endurance of the practice of outlawry into nineteenth century Australia, and the subsequent endurance of the Australian bushranger in multiple reinterpretations and reworkings, via the figure of Ned Kelly. It considers Kelly as social bandit and homo sacer, Irish rebel and Australian myth, through a variety of versions of the Kelly story, from Kelly’s own Jerilderie Letter up to and including Peter Carey’s quasi-Joycean reworking of Kelly’s life in an Hiberno-English ‘language of the outlaw.’ Again, outlawry as defined in law is read here against other forms of legal exclusion: the exclusions that create the Australian colonies via transportation for convicts, a practice not unlike the previous legal punishment of banishment (akin to outlawry); the non-recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and tenure; and the exclusion of Aboriginal Australians from law, rendering them de facto outlaws.

Introduction

While exclusion from law is often assumed to be an historical phenomenon, the discussion here argues that it is an enduring and important tactic of state power. Such exclusion can occur in two directions – exclusion above the law (as where the state licenses itself or its agents to act with impunity) or exclusion below the law (as where the state excludes an individual or group from the law's protection). This book concerns itself with both, and in doing so, offers readings from two bodies of literature in English not normally read in tandem – the literature of outlawry, and the literature of espionage. This Introduction briefly surveys some influential previous work in this area – in particular Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of the ‘social bandit’ and Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the homo sacer and his related study of the ‘state of exception’ – and sets out the argument to follow.

Outside the Law in the Middle Ages

This chapter begins by looking at what outlawry means in a legal sense in medieval England, drawing comparisons between the characterisation of the outlaw as an excluded figure and Agamben's portrayal of the homo sacer. The representation of the outlaw in the literature of the period, however, gives us a very different picture, akin to Hobsbawm's 'social bandit.' Different again from these representations in both legal and literary texts are the actions of the real outlaw gangs of medieval England, whose behaviour is perhaps more complex than either Agamben or Hobsbawm's archetypal constructions may allow for. Following this discussion of the outlaw in legal, literary, and historical texts, this chapter proceeds to highlight three phenomena. Firstly, it notes the extent of additional forms of exclusion from law within the 'palimpsest of jurisdictions' found in later medieval England. Secondly, it discusses outlawry and its literature as a location where tensions around sovereign authority may be examined. Finally, it considers the use of exclusion from or inclusion within English law as a tactic linked to territorial expansion in later medieval Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and the application of outlawry to the English state’s archipelagic opponents, such as Robert Bruce and William Wallace.

‘We’re Not Policemen’: Espionage and Law in John le Carré

The second part of the book turns to a discussion of extralegality and espionage, beginning with a reading of three novels by John le Carré set against the background of historical events – the construction of the Berlin Wall, the exposure of the Cambridge spy ring, and the practice of extraordinary rendition during the War on Terror. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Alec Leamas is disgraced, abandoned, imprisoned, exiled, and finally betrayed, an abjected figure akin to Agamben’s homo sacer, a figure as excluded as any outlaw. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, George Smiley is a liminal figure, an unconstitutional detective investigating a case of treason within what is, in this period, an intelligence agency unrecognised by law. This chapter concludes with a discussion of extraordinary rendition as outlawry in contemporary form via a reading of le Carré’s 2008 novel A Most Wanted Man. Here we can see the state acting outside of legal constraints via its intelligence agencies, while also seeking to situate particular individuals outside the reach of the law. Together, these forms of exclusion from law constitute new and troubling forms of outlawry that are alive and well in the twenty-first century West.

Unanswered Questions: Ciaran Carson

This chapter examines themes of surveillance, uncertainty, identity, and political violence in the work of Ciaran Carson. If Carson's Belfast poems, written during the Northern Ireland Troubles, have something of a journalistic aspect, they also contain the motifs of surveillance and interrogation paired with uncertainty and doubt. Carson revisits some of these themes in three post-Troubles works. The mirroring sonnet sequences of For All We Know play with the archetypes of spy narrative. The poems are full of dressing up, disguising, cross-dressing, but when you take on a false identity, these poems ask, who are you then? What does uncertainty mean in the aftermath of conflict, when so many unanswered questions remain? And in the context of so many false witnesses, where might truth, or justice, be found? In The Pen Friend, both the realities and possibilities of collusion between security forces and paramilitaries during the Northern Ireland Troubles find an echo in the explosion at the heart of Carson’s novel. Finally, Exchange Place gives us a fantastical take on surveillance, uncertainty, and questions of identity, with a whiff of espionage, in a novel that leaves us, again, with unanswered questions.

‘All Plots Tend to Move Deathward’: Plots and Consequences in Don DeLillo

This chapter considers the place of espionage and its consequences in the work of Don De Lillo. The discussion opens with a consideration of naïveté and danger in CIA intervention overseas as depicted in The Names. James Axton, an American in Greece, is perhaps the last to discover that he is working at one remove for the CIA, a role that may have placed his life, and those of others, at risk. If The Names suggests that American intelligence poses substantial risks for America and Americans, Libra brings that message home to the heart of the state itself in a fictionalized account of the Kennedy assassination. Here, the President's launching of covert operations against Cuba eventually turns back against him when a coalition led by disgruntled former CIA agents mount an attempt on the President's life, co-opting the inscrutable figure of Lee Harvey Oswald as a seeming lone radical. In this chapter’s final section, the discussion returns again to the subject of extralegal action by the state in a reading of Point Omega’s meditations on extraordinary rendition and torture, in a text centred on absences and death set against the backdrop of the Iraq war.