4. The Crime and Punishment Story

The story of crime or error leading to punishment is understood as a way of representing and making sense of suffering: a story grounded in the need for witness, and one which tragedy frequently both adopts and unsettles. It depends upon the idea of a justice mechanism that operates through a reactive cosmos; where this idea grows weak it is replaced by that of psychological functioning (character flaw), or by the reflexes of revenge tragedy. The ‘painter scene’ in The Spanish Tragedy crystallises the crisis of representation which drives the need for the crime and punishment story. The chapter then turns to readings of three works: Racine’s Phèdre, Kafka’s The Trial, and Yaël Farber’s Molora. Insofar as the punitive cosmos in Phèdre and The Trial is co-terminous with the protagonist’s subjectivity, genuinely external witness is unimaginable; this casts light on the salience of witnessing in Molora, through which the story of necessary retribution can be rewritten.