In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

158 ARRAYS
Christianity, two "Eskimo boys" who, more than seventeen years ago,
killed the American explorer Ross G. Marvin in the icy wastes of Greenland,
come forth with the truth, although the public had been entirely
persuaded by their made-up story of Marvin's drowning (New York
Times, September 25). [see Polarities] Johannes Spruch, who has stolen
a million dollars' worth of precious stones from a Berlin jeweler, turns
himself in to the police with an almost frivolous air-only to regret his
decision and call himself "a blockhead and an idiot" the very next
morning (8 Uhr-Abendblatt, October 2). Such blatant contempt on the
part of thieves and murderers undermines the authority of the police and
the legal system-doubly so if the situation turns out to be a setup: "A
young man who admitted his guilt yesterday in a bar, and who repeated
his 'confession' before the authorities, had to be released because it was
revealed that, under the influence of alcohol, the 'murderer' had 'confessed'
simply in an effort to make himself interesting" (Berliner Volks­
Zeitung, May 14).
Cases like this evoke widespread existential fear that any stable
ground for cognitive certainty has been lost. [see Uncertainty vs. Reality]
In his first successful film, The Lodger, Alfred Hitchcock leads the audience
to believe that his main protagonist must be a new Jack the Ripper.
As a mob is about to lynch him, the information spreads that the true
murderer has been found-and the lodger's life is thus spared at the very
last moment. Using a similar narrative strategy, Agatha Christie, in The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd, lets the detective Hercule Poirot solve a crime
on the basis of evidence that is unavailable to the reader-for the murderer
turns out to be the first-person narrator. One conclusion from such
fictional and nonfictional examples is obvious: if the existence of ultimate
truth can no longer be taken for granted, the law and the State risk
losing their authority over the individual-because their authority is
based on a truth-claim.
This crisis of truth converges with the shift toward a clinical view of
criminal behavior: both problematize legal and governmental authority.
Early in the year, the attention of everyone in France becomes focused
on a trial in which the question of agency has never been subject to any
doubt. In Bombon, a small village near Melun, members of a sect known
as "Our Lady of the Tears" flog-and almost kill-the parish priest. For
three years they've been convinced that the priest has bewitched Marie
Mesmin, the founder of their community. As a legal case, the incident
offers no ambiguities. The sect's accusation is absurd-not least because