It’s hard to know what a coroner is supposed to do. The obligations of the role might be set down in black and white, but changing times and expectations seem to stretch them wider and wider. One thing, however, is abundantly clear: if we are to believe Roland Barthes, inquests have a great deal in common with wrestling-matches.
The law
In section 11(5), the Coroners Act 1988 says an inquest should determine who the deceased was, and where, when and how he came by his death. After Middleton, we know that in order to satisfy the Human Rights Act 1998, the how question must be interpreted widely, and that an inquest should ask “by what means and in what circumstances” the deceased died. Although the courts continue to worry away at this question, there is one thing we can be clear about: under rule 42 of the Coroners Rules, no verdict may be framed in such a way as to appear to determine any question of civil or criminal liability. The coroner cannot, in other words, attribute blame. That is a significant prohibition, not only for those involved, but also for how, taking several steps back, we might choose to think of the inquest process.
A spectacle of excess
Whatever the French thinker Roland Barthes knew about coroners and their inquests, he certainly knew his wrestling, and he wrote about it an essay that subsequently appeared in his celebrated work, Mythologies (1957, Paris, Editions du Seuil). For Barthes, wrestling was “a spectacle of excess” and had “a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres.” Large parts of his analysis seem to apply equally to inquests.
Not a narrative
The first similarity between an inquest and a wrestling match lies in their conclusion, which is never the culmination of the contest that preceded it. That much, in an inquest, is guaranteed by the Rule 42 prohibition. The public “abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences.” Here, of course, Barthes is talking about wrestling. It is “a sum of spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result.”
This means that the contest cannot be understood as a narrative. On the contrary, “it is each moment which is intelligible, not the passage of time. The spectator is not interested in the rise and fall of fortunes; he expects the transient image of certain passions. Wrestling therefore demands an immediate reading of the juxtaposed meanings, so that there is no need to connect them. The logical conclusion of the contest does not interest the wrestling-fan”. This absolute focus, which wrestling might be thought to share with the inquest, on the here-and-now has several consequences for each.
No gouging
The first consequence is that “it is the pattern of Justice which matters here, much more than its content”. The contest, Barthes says, “is above all a quantitative sequence of compensations (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth).” We might argue, therefore, that although – or perhaps because – the inquest cannot conclude in the attributing of blame, it is often used to embarrass those seen, rightly or not, as culpable in the death, whether they be doctors, nurses, social workers, police officers or the Ministry of Defence. Barthes seems to anticipate this argument: “The idea of ‘paying’ is essential to wrestling, and the crowd’s ‘Give it to him’ means above all else ‘Make him pay’. This is therefore, needless to say, an immanent justice. The baser the action of the ‘bastard’, the more delighted the public is by the blow which he justly receives in return.”
In the red corner
The second consequence of the “sum of spectacles” is that everyone has – and understands – his or her allotted role. The function of the wrestler, for example, is not to win, “it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him”, and he will do this by means of “excessive gestures, exploited to the limit of their meaning.” In an inquest, of course, the wrestler-equivalent need not be the coroner himself; it could as easily be a lawyer or a bereaved relative.
The family of the deceased, in fact, has a very particular role at an inquest, even if it extends no further than reading a prepared statement or holding up a framed photograph to the television cameras on the steps of some anonymous municipal building. In its lachrymosity, the family always seems to understand that whatever the conclusion, it must at least appear to have lost. For Barthes: “The gesture of the vanquished wrestler signifying to the world a defeat which, far from disguising, he emphasizes and holds like a pause in music, corresponds to the mask of antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle. In wrestling, as on the stage in antiquity, one is not ashamed of one's suffering, one knows how to cry, one has a liking for tears.” What is it that we expect of bereaved mothers and brothers and husbands and sisters if not to take their grief – pace Barthes, their defeat – and hold it “like a pause in music”?
A light without shadow
The inquest process permits little ambiguity. “We are therefore dealing”, Barthes writes, “with a real Human Comedy, where the most socially-inspired nuances of passion (conceit, rightfulness, refined cruelty, a sense of ‘paying one’s debts’) always felicitously find the clearest sign which can receive them, express them and triumphantly carry them to the confines of the hall.” But even if the result it yields is of no interest, this process does have real, significant consequences: “It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself [...] what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private.”
At first sight, this imperative might seem to be at odds with the role of the coroner, for even if we don’t know quite what he is supposed to do, we at least know how he is supposed to do it; and that is rigorously. In several cases, not least Dallaglio, the courts have said that a coroner should conduct a “full, fair and fearless investigation”, and that his inquest should ensure “the exposure of relevant facts to public scrutiny”. But this too finds an echo in Barthes. He writes (having witnessed, it would seem, if not the workings of the coronial system, at least the places in which they are accomplished): “hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bull-fights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.”
If, however, we imagine that what this remorseless light illuminates is the truth, we are mistaken: “nothing exists except in the absolute, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is presented exhaustively. Leaving nothing in the shade, each action discards all parasitic meanings and ceremonially offers to the public a pure and full signification, rounded like Nature. This grandiloquence is nothing but the popular and age-old image of the perfect intelligibility of reality. What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.” As of wrestling, so, perhaps, of the inquest: there is more to a death, Barthes might be saying, than can be uncovered by the coroner, even by means of a narrative verdict.
