Selah Lively, known in Italy simply by his title of “judge,” having managed to rise above his modest social origins by way of various jobs, including that of lawyer, and having at last become “Your Honor,” is able to fulfil his dream of avenging himself on the nature that halted his height at one metre fifty-eight.
When I think of a judge, of those men (many) and women (few) that literature has portrayed as such, the first who comes to mind is that repressed and dissatisfied man who hands down sentences rather than ascertaining the truth.
In an age of sounds and images, to tell the truth, rather than a literary description I think of the musical or visual portrayals of those judges. And it is no accident that instead of Mr. Lively I think of the song by De André. In those figures of judges, depicted in novels, in crime fiction, in films, in television series, in songs, the trait that strikes me most is their perpetual indecisiveness, the inner side of society’s need for a decision that is certain and shared.
Montaigne reflects on jurists and judges, and in the last chapter of his Essais, the thirteenth of the third part (“De l’experience”): “how many innocent people have we known to be punished, through no fault of their own, by judges: and how many are there whom we have never discovered?” and from here the recollection of those ancient opinions according to which “human justice is shaped on the model of medicine, by which everything that is useful is also just and honest,” with the conclusion that “no judge has yet, thank God, spoken to me in the capacity of judge, in any case whatsoever, whether my own or another’s, whether criminal or civil.”
An atavistic mistrust of the representatives of earthly justice, or a petty envy of a fellow human being who is allowed to judge? A mistrust nourished not only by rogues, who understandably harbour some reason for resentment towards judges, but also by those who, in perfect good faith, believe in a higher divine justice.
One may recall what the Bible already taught, in the Book of Daniel, with the episode of Susanna. This beautiful young woman is sexually harassed, while bathing in the garden of her marital home, by two old judges who, having been rejected by her, take their revenge by publicly accusing her of adultery. The innocent woman, after being condemned to death by stoning, is saved by the intervention of the prophet Daniel, who on that occasion adopted a refined and pioneering technique of cross-examining the witnesses in court, making them fall into contradiction. In short, an ancient forebear of the lawyer Guido Guerrieri, the courtroom hero conceived by the writer Carofiglio who, before becoming a senator, was a magistrate. The falsehood of the biblical judges is unmasked by means of a rhetorical technique that seeks to reveal the ephemeral and uncertain character of earthly justice.
Dostoevsky’s judge Porfiry Petrovich seems to acquit, or rather not to condemn, the student murderer, but only because he knows, in his heart, that the defendant will have to answer before a divine court and will serve the “true” penalty, inflicted on him by his own conscience.
Camilleri, a reader of “grown-up” novels since the age of seven, has met hundreds of figures of judges. Many he has forgotten, others have stayed with him

“either because I found them likeable, or because I found them unpleasant, or because I remained wholly fascinated by the ingenious mechanism of their way of reasoning, or because they struck me by their perversity, or because I appreciated their wish to know, to the very bottom, the reasons of the person against whom they would pass judgment.”

A wish to know, the one that ought to animate the judge, yet always full of limits. Not only those of the quibbles of criminal procedure, but ontological, structural limits. If Émile Zola, with his reflections on the Dreyfus case, warned judges against lending themselves to political operations, Carlo Ginzburg, examining the Sofri trial, cautions them against writing history.
In Arthur Miller’s Crogiuolo, in that work denouncing American McCarthyism of the middle of the last century, the judge Danforth boasts of having led seventy-two people to the gallows. Emboldened by the flattery of his interlocutor, he states that people “have nothing to fear if their conscience is clear.” He then explains that

“there are no middle ways: either one is in favour of this court or one must be considered its enemy; we live in a particularly difficult and well-defined moment; we are now far from that twilight stage in which evil could be mistaken for good, causing bewilderment and confusion in this world of ours; today, by the grace of God, the sun shines high, and whoever has no reason to fear the light can only rejoice in it.”

Judges must decide on the facts, but in literary fiction, and perhaps not only there, they inevitably judge people and, by reflection, judge themselves.
That transferential mechanism, which shifts the object of the decision from the “fact” to one’s own “inner self,” is a recurrent literary model. The elusiveness of the fact, the need to frame it within the person, the inevitable confrontation with one’s own experience determine the uncertain character of the truth that comes to be affirmed.
“If it exists, what do we do with the truth?” wonders the anonymous magistrate who investigates the death of his colleague from Cagliari in Mannuzzu’s novel “procedura,” a man who in real life was himself first a magistrate, then a politician and writer.

Torments suffered in the first person, those that afflict Dante Troisi in his “diario di un giudice,” where he describes the miseries of the deliberation chambers of a justice that is always inflexible with the weak and understanding with the powerful. A justice laid bare, in which Satta’s “il mistero del processo,” its hermeneutic rules, the feigned and conventional unanimism of collegial decisions give way to the dignity of the minority and isolated position, vividly portrayed in the face of Gian Maria Volonté. In the film adaptation of Sciascia’s book, in those “porte aperte” opening outward, in that longing for light against the darkness of the courtrooms, in that implacable collective demand, imposed on judges by society, to inflict the death penalty on the guilty party, in that judicial context a reversal of roles takes place. In the course of the trial it is not the defendant who is judged, but the judge, at least that single one who does not accept the verdict, who at the outcome of the case becomes innocent.
The judge is not the executioner but arms the one who carries out the sentence. In that dialogue between “il giudice ed il suo boia,” Dürrenmatt asks himself “who arms whom” and also raises the doubt whether it is right to condemn a defendant for a crime he has never committed when in reality he has committed another that has gone unsolved. The answer is always and only this: the epistemological impossibility, for the trial, of reaching the truth of the facts.
Assuming always that truth exists and that we are not in the presence of a slander, the very one that led to the “processo” of Josef K., who one morning, without having done anything wrong, was arrested. Judges, in literary fiction, are the custodians of “doubt,” while the facts are reconstructed and affirmed in their “truth” by other professional figures. First of all, by private investigators, especially of American and Anglo-Saxon origin, to be clear and to limit ourselves to the most famous, whether these be professionals, such as Poe’s pioneering Dupin, Doyle’s logical-deductive and cocaine-addicted Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s moustachioed Poirot, the born-to-the-trade Ellery Queen, the gourmet orchid scholar Nero Wolfe, the rough Philip Marlowe, or whether they become investigators for pleasure, such as Miss Marple of the aforementioned Christie, who found her television transposition in the “signora in giallo” Jessica Fletcher, a shrewd writer of the genre, or the cynical aesthete Philo Vance of the “master” Van Dine. The guilty are also discovered by lawyers, such as the legendary Perry Mason and even Father Brown, embodied on television, in the days of black and white, by Renato Rascel, shortly after another priestly television hero of the time, our own Father Tobia.
Naturally, continental Europe too has its heroes of the genre, not only inspector Maigret but also the former communist Pepe Carvalho of Montalbán, to limit ourselves to two of the most famous and, so as not to forget Italy, the Bolognese sergeant Sarti, the diligent policeman De Vincenzi, inspector Ambrosio and his Sicilian counterpart Montalbano.
To find a judge who is an investigator, a solver of cases, one must travel to China, where judge Dee, an imperial official whose real existence in the Tang dynasty is uncertain, was immortalized in his criminal cases by the pen of Robert Van Gulik.
And yet one cannot say that Italy lacks heroic representations of judges, but they seem more the acknowledgment of figures who really existed and tragically perished than creatures of the imagination.
Perhaps this derives from the fact that in Italy, between 1969 and 1995, as many as twenty-five Italian magistrates were killed by criminal and terrorist organizations.
In literary and cinematic representation, then, the authority of judges does not arise from the ability to solve the case, but is discerned, and at the same time denied, in the mere recognition of their power, regardless of the soundness of their decisions. The more power they enjoy, the more they are recognized as judges and set at a distance from the society that surrounds them. Separation is the price they must pay in order to be able to judge others. But that split is internalized and divides them within themselves. In the letter to his judge, Georges Simenon has the narrator utter the plea “I should so like one man, one single man, to understand me. And I would wish that man to be you.” A judge, distant from society, who is asked to understand the love and the hatred, the craving for life and the sense of death that the defendant felt in committing the crime.
Fortunately, what is described in literature is only fiction. Reality is another story. Perhaps.

Sergio Sottani is a magistrate at the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Perugia. With Alessandro Cannevale and Massimo Carloni he published the novel Backstage (Einaudi, Turin 2006).