Formalist, Cultural and Reader - Response approach analysis to "Before the Law"

My group took a Marxist and Psychological approach to understanding and explaining “Before the Law,” leaning on the relationship between the guard and the man to mimic how economy rules over a society. The guard being in a high power of authority and being the barrier between the man and the law is similar to how the economy (i.e. money) holds a lot of power in society. Then, the man is under the guard’s control in the same way that money controls society. The last piece of the story is where the Psychological approach appeared. It conveyed a mind game response to the man’s question of why he is the only one trying to access the law. The guard replied “‘Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you.’” This questions the entirety of the story, does the story take place in an actual reality or does it take place within the man’s mind? My group discussed that if it happens within the man’s mind, the story illustrates how embedded the economic structure is within a person’s consciousness, which is an individualist representation of Marxist’s theory.

I took a Formalist, Cultural, and Reader – response approach towards explaining my interpretation. Beginning first with formalism, looking at the word “law,” it is used nine times throughout the text in an out of context manner. Using “law” repeatedly and in singular form causes a disconnect from its common knowledge meaning and brings awareness to it. Apart from that the text gives a detailed description of only the guard, drawing him as having a “fur coat, large pointed nose and [a] long, thin, black Tartar’s beard”. This description causes the involvement of the cultural approach, specifying what type of beard the guard has allows it to be traceable. By googling the word “tartar’s beard” the background of Turks and Russian regions popped up, adding the fur coat description one can infer that the cultural background of the guard can be Russian. The ambiguity of the word “law” with the ambiguity of the location coupled with the inference of the guard presented gaps that allowed for the text to be read through a reader response approach. The reader being a modern-day person who lives in a democracy (i.e. myself) to make sense of what these gaps are meant to illustrate.

            The first gap is addressing what the word “law” is supposed to mean. Laws are always meant to be known because they are rules that dictate what a person can or can’t do, in the text the law acts contrary to this meaning making it an intentional gap because it must be a place holder for something else. The form in which “law” is spelled in the text is always in singular form which also falls out of alignment to how countries recognize laws. First countries don’t just have a law they have several laws, plural, given that the law the story refers to is a secret that the man feels everyone should be entitled to draws to the conclusion that this law is more of a right that is meant to hold the weight of a law. To explain the meaning of what “law” stands for, an explanation to the second gap, the setting of the text, needs to be done. By figuring out and assuming the background of a Tartar’s beard answers what country the guard is from and gives the text a geographical setting, Russia. Within Russia there are many rules placed upon the people, since it is widely known as an autocratic government. Coming back to the word “law,” it becomes even more confusing because what law within Russia is unknown, yet should be entitled to everyone as a right and is searched for by everyone? In answering this last gap, which also answers the question the man from the story seeks, is the meaning behind what the word “law” is standing in place for, knowledge through freedom. Knowledge and freedom are a right people in democratic nations are entitled and encouraged to possess to keep their government in check, within an autocratic nation like Russia people aren’t so free to know everything about their government which makes the working within it less clear. In a democratic society reporting on government affairs is public through newspapers, broadcast and podcast etc. that is all not filtered through the government, in Russia it is opposite the government has influence over the press which makes their affairs more secretive. Applying this conceit aligns with the story because at face value the story has a tone of repression and the opposite of repression is freedom, in order to gain freedom once must be knowledgeable.