Trying Emotions

"Tomorrow" and "Smoke" address several related issues. Both stories present Faulkner's well-known and recurrent character Gavin Stevens as working lawyer and professional individual, as young defense counsel in "Tomorrow" and experienced County Attorney in "Smoke." Both stories are legal dramas(1) in which notions of justice, law, legal strategy, ethics, community, personal pain, truth, and language and silence are examined. Though sharing several aspects and structures, the stories are also opposites of sorts: in one a possibly unethical legal victory, in the other a possibly unethical but temporary legal defeat. Intense and privately held emotions are central to each story but function to the opposite effects of victory and defeat. The relentless but formally unacknowledged presence of individual emotion unexpectedly disrupts the legal space and its presumptions, protocol, and proceedings in "Tomorrow" but is calculatingly used to create the possibility for continued legal proceedings and the corroboration of phantom evidence in "Smoke." Hidden and encoded emotion thus defies and temporarily explodes in "Tomorrow" that use of law and its procedures that it establishes in "Smoke." The collision on the one hand and alliance on the other of legal procedure and emotional energy suggest Faulkner's concern not only with law and its supposed objectivity and dubious improvisations but with the status of truth and justice in the midst of community and in community's most contentious arena, the court. Certainly Faulkner seems to challenge the notions that law and emotion are separable. While he demonstrates in these two stories that each has claims and limiting effects on the other, he also suggests their endless, never fully discerned or discernable interaction.