Affabulazioni dell’eccezione: legge, giustizia e violenza in The Round House di Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich’s novel The Round House investigates the complex interrelations between justice, the law, and tribal sovereignty. A number of critics have argued that the revenge mission against the white man responsible for the rape of the narrator’s mother, should be justified not only on moral but also on cultural and legal grounds. The essay argues that this amounts to a serious misreading of both the novel and the anthropological/legal context it refers to. While the novel does call attention to the “toothless sovereignty” that the execution of the rapist is meant to remedy, it also stresses that violence fails in securing the basis for a true tribal sovereignty. The novel, in short, can only register a set of historical and political contradictions that admit no neat narrative resolution.