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In the Age of Lawspeak: Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and American Litigiousness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
When, on his way back to Manhattan from Kennedy Airport where he has picked up his girlfriend Maria, Sherman McCoy, the protagonist of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, takes a wrong exit, he gets lost and ends up in the Bronx. This is Sherman's first meeting with the Bronx, and it turns out to be nothing less than a catastrophe. A wealthy Wall Street stockbroker with a very WASP background, Sherman McCoy has lived his life under conditions as remote from those of any child growing up in the Bronx as can possibly be. The distance between McCoy's Manhattan – that of his business address, Wall Street, as well as his private one, Fifth Avenue – and the Bronx may not be great in geographical terms; in economic and psychological terms, however, it is enormous. In the Bronx, McCoy encounters “the other” America, the poor, non-white, and violent America from which his sheltered background has successfully shielded him until he is well into his thirties. He, or rather his girlfriend Maria, runs down and mortally wounds a young black man – an accident for which later Sherman gets all the blame and is put to trial. Puzzled and frightened, Sherman does not quite know how to relate to the Bronx and to the accident, and it is Maria who finally has to enlighten and explain to him what it is all about:
Sherman, let me tell you something. There's two kinds a jungles. Wall Street is a jungle. You've heard that, haven't you? You know how to handle yourself in that jungle…. And then there's the other jungle. That's the one we got lost in the other night, in the Bronx…. You don't live in that jungle, Sherman, and you never have. You know what's in that jungle? People who are all the time crossing back and forth, back and forth, from this side of the law to the other side…. You don't know what that's like. You had a good upbringing. Laws weren't any kind of a threat to you. They were your laws, Sherman, people like you and your family's…. And let me tell you something else. Right there on the line everyody's an animal – the police, the judges, the criminals, everybody (p. 275).
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991
References
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3 I have chosen this phrase with an eye to George Orwell's phrase, “newspeak,” from 1984. It refers to the very important role played in American society by the letter of the law, the legal system and lawyers. This role is so pervasive, I would argue, that it not only affects people's everyday lives, but also their consciousness, their way of thinking about and formulating social, political, moral, and cultural issues.
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