Winter 2001
Volume 28, Number 2

Balzac's novel, Colonel Chabert, first published in 1832, opens with a peculiar scene: the reappearance of a soldier who is known to have died in battle but who most improbably and unexpectedly returns to the office of a lawyer to reclaim his property. Disfigured and unrecognizable, the stranger insists that he is actually the famous colonel and asks the lawyer to help him to obtain a form of legal recognition that will restore to him his lawful identity, his property, and his wife. In this strange reincarnation of his own dead self, the character appealing to the lawyer hopes to become legally, and therefore humanly, alive. Unfolding from this haunting encounter, Balzac's story dramatizes the attempt by a man who is legally dead to come alive before the law and the capacity and limits of the law to respond to this attempt at legal resuscitation.

Set in post-Revolutionary France during the Restoration, this ghostly return of a Napoleonic soldier clearly echoes the historic repetitions that were taking place during this period: the return to the pre-Revolutionary past during the Restoration, itself ruptured by the return of Napoleon during the 100 Days; the protracted waves of revolutionary socioeconomic shocks to France in the wake of the French Revolution. What is remarkable in Balzac's text is the

See Also Sandy Petry: The Reality of Representation Between Marx and Balzac (Spring 1988) Saree Makdisi: Laying Claim To Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere (Spring 1997) Shoshana Felman: Forms of Judicial Blindness, or The Evidence of What Cannot Be Seen: Traumatic Narratives and Legal Repetitions in the 0. J. Simpson Case and in Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata (Summer 1997)

singular perception that this haunted repetition, this return, takes place not simply in the realm of history, politics, or war, but rather and specifically on the site of the law. What is at stake in Balzac's novel is a legal claim that turns the law itself into the place par excellence of historical memory. This appeal to memory and history through law emerges in Balzac, moreover, not simply through the return of a living revolutionary hero, but, far more unexpectedly and enigmatically, through a return of the dead. What does it mean, Balzac's text seems to ask, for the dead to speak--and to speak before the law? And what does it mean, moreover, for the law to listen to this claim coming, as it were, from the dead? It is through these unsettling questions, I will argue, that Balzac reflects on the complexity of the relationship that, in the wake of the French Revolution, emerges as an entanglement and as an indissoluble bond between the law and history.

It is not by chance, I will suggest, that this literary story takes place as a scene of haunted memory. I will argue that in giving center stage to the return of the dead and to the singular encounter between the survivor and the law, Balzac's text grasps the core of a past and of a future legal haunting and identifies as central to historical development a question of death and of survival. This question will indeed return to haunt the twentieth century, not simply in the central role of Holocaust survivors in the postwar war crime trials, but, even more uncannily, in the current legal claims made by individual survivors for restitution of their past property, and, more fundamentally, for restitution of their property rights. Through its strange tale of a ghostly claim to property, Balzac's text thus prophetically foretells, I would propose, what it means for the law to grapple with its own traumatic past.

Cathy Caruth is professor of comparative literature and English and director of comparative literature at Emory University. She is the author of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud(1991) and of Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History(1996). She has coedited, with Deborah Esch, Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing(1995) and has edited Trauma: Explorations in Memory(1995).