“‘Can it be possible,’ speculated this reporter, ‘that Judge Stanley is beginning to doubt the wisdom of capital punishment?’
Sullivan Stanley was not beginning to doubt anything of the kind. The reason for the peculiar expression on his face as he passed judgement on that autumn afternoon in 1947 was that, for the first time in some years, he had an erection as he spoke; he had an involuntary orgasm.”
Perhaps because her best-known work is the (deceptively) straightforward The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), readers are sometimes unaware of what an unrelentingly strange writer Muriel Spark is. Her novels take place in a kind of strange, heightened reality which seems at times to be our own and at other to be entirely distinct from what we know about the ways people interact and talk to each other. Her short fiction is no different.
‘The Hanging Judge’ is one of my favourites of hers in part because it’s so funny. The story depicts Judge Sullivan Stanley, well known for sending offenders to be hanged if necessary and a big believer in the value of capital punishment. However, reporters and onlookers notice a pained expression as he sentences a murderer named George Forrester, who killed overweight women he picked up in the Rosemary Lawns Hotel, to death. His expression comes not, as the press speculates, from the guilt of taking a man’s life, but from the spontaneous orgasm that he, so long impotent and flaccid that a local prostitute dubs him “the hanging judge”, experiences upon doing so.
The rest of the story details his long-held confusion at the meaning of that orgasm as he moves through his professional life and eventually retires to the very hotel from which the murderer in question would pick up his victims. Is he, he wonders, a sexual deviant, or can his arousal be explained in some other way. Spark provides us with no answers and, as with the Alasdair Gray story I will discuss later, the reader is left to wonder whether she is just tweaking our nose or whether there really is something deeper going on.
First published in The New Yorker, 1994. Collected in The Complete Short Stories, Canongate, 2011
A Personal Anthology 