Work and Read

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading about restorative justice, an alternative justice theory to criminal justice. Restorative justice focuses on the interpersonal aspects of crime. I’ve been reading a lot of victim testimony too. The thing that comes through over and over again is that victims feel poorly represented in the criminal system, constrained by the law. The thing they say over and over again is Why me? Context, story, matters when the things we normally believe in, the ways we normally behave, are disrupted.

I’ve finished reading Vargas’ Bad Girl a little while ago. The story is about a man’s lifelong obsession with a woman. Objectively, the woman is a kind of con artist; she sheds identities in pursuit of material wealth, status. But to our narrator, she’s more than human; she is a shape shifter, a goddess. He meets her for the first time when they are both children. Over the course of his life, the woman, the ‘Bad Girl,’ appears many times, usually out of the blue. In 1960s Paris, she reappears as a Communist revolutionary; then as the wife of a French diplomat; the wife of a wealthy Englishman; the mistress of a Japanese businessman. Each time, the protagonist is unable to resist her although each encounter reveals unflattering things about her. As readers, we see a composite kind of Bad Girl. She is self destructive and mercurial on the one hand; on the other, she is an object of adoration and it doesn’t matter whether she is worthy of adoration or not.

At one point in the story, the Bad Girl falls ill. A doctor advises the narrator, “…she, and all those who live a good part of their lives enclosed in fantasies they erect in order to abolish their real life, both know and don’t know what they’re doing. The border disappears for a while and then it reappears. I mean, sometimes they know and other times they don’t know what they’re doing. This is my advice: don’t try to force her to accept reality. Help her, but don’t force her, don’t rush her…”

The advice seems essential. To understanding the needs of another person. In reading. And writing. The stories we tell, fantasy or truth, give shape to a belief system and to our actions. Clearly the Bad Girl is not in the same situation as victims of crimes who seek institutional validation and redress. Perhaps she is better likened to someone who cannot face the reality of their crimes, who refuses responsibility. Vargas' novel has nothing to do with restorative justice objectively. The two are not at all comparable except in the faith both place in the transformative power of narrative. We are a public roiling in intensely personal experiences. The law upholds shared ideals, cultural norms. But its legitimating power can also be anathema to the singular experience of a crime. The Bad Girl reminded me of the challenges in finding and facing objective truth; and it reminded me that truth-seeking itself might not be so objective after all.