lawyers and literature J. S. Marcus "Centaurs" "Centaurs," in J.S. Marcus, The Art of Cartography 17-23 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991) [reprinted in Jay Wishingrad (ed.), Legal Fictions: Short Stories About Lawyers and the Law 97-100 (Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1992)]       Thomas Bulfinch, The Age of Fable (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus Company, 1897)         [Used with permission of the Florida Center for Instructional Technology]       In “Centaurs” we have an observer par excellent in Shelia. She’s a law student, and we’re, by way of the story, taken through some days and evenings of her law school life. (I'm reminded, of the kind of walk-through you'd get with an amateur camcorder recording with commentary.) There’s nothing really devious or wretched or evil in this world. It’s a world at once zany and odd, a world where things are off kilter; it feels, walking into this story as if we've entered a room in which the pictures don’t hang straight, and the floor of the room we've entered has a decided slant, and things have been made to look as if they had been arranged properly but the order of things looks fake. This is the world—according to Sheila, the protagonist of the story—where: — “The smartest man” in her law school class tells her “he wanted to be an actor.” (Later, we learn that Sheila, had “wanted to be an actress” but is now toying “with the idea of becoming a chief executive officer.” — Another student, “[a] man from Yale who wants to go into entertainment law” takes Shelia out to dinner, talks about his work in television, and when they get back to his apartment, and get undressed, says, “Do it to me, sweetie.” Back at law school they see each other often but “he acts as if we were once partners in some sort of class project.” Sheila says, “People in law school, like people in general, try to be pleasant, and like people in general they often fail.” — The students at Sheila’s law school go to parties and even a tea at the Dean’s house; good enough, but these parties turn out to be “mandatory.” There’s something odd here—“a mandatory law-school party”—“a mandatory tea at the Dean’s house”—a party at the jurisprudence professor’s house that started as a class, but was simply a pretext for a party. — And then, there’s the editor of the law review who lives across the street from Sheila, who sometimes “has dinner parties and drinks a lot of Scotch.” More intriguing perhaps, she’s a former nun who “now wears hiking boots and smokes mentholated cigarettes. After she left the convent, and before she entered law school, she worked at the men’s cologne counter of a large department store.” Shelia guesses her age at forty-five and imagines her “a rosary in one hand, a Budweiser in the other; half saint, half goat.” (We are reminded here of the Greek god Pan, part goat, part human form)(a satyr among the converted.?) — The problem with law school, one of many, is that “you can feel boredom go from the benign to the malignant. You can see people run around with a quarter of a tuna-salad sandwich in their briefcase and argue about mink farms.” Shelia has mink farms on her mind because of some case or hypothetical she’s picked up from one of her classes: “If some man—say X—runs a mink farm, and another, Y, is exploding dynamite next door, Y does not have to pay X in the event the mink eat their kittens from the shock of the explosion. It’s the law.” — Sheila says she has “a private life but not a personal one.” Unlike the nun, neighbor and law review editor, Sheila smokes Dunhill cigarettes, “put[s] unwhipped cream on things, and read[s] early Evelyn Waugh novels. In private, I’m English.” Earlier she’s admitted: “I like the idea of private failure.” — Sheila’s getting through law school by “inertia” taking her cues for action from her law professors. “I don’t move much. I wait for a professor to intimidate me into the subject at hand: arson, divorce, whatever.” Surrounded by quirkiness (her own and that of others), nothing as it appears, everyone becoming a lawyer but holding on to the idea of becoming something else, Shelia delivers these closing thoughts: “Transformations, sublimations, things becoming other things. Yesterday, I had a Reuben potato—certainly the centaur of modern delicatessen food. Prodding the melted cheese for some trace of Russian dressing, I tried to recall if any of the law-school parties so far had been catered. I am becoming a lawyer.” What a strange, and at the same time, ordinary world Sheila describes. A collection of misfits and retreads, people becoming lawyers when they most want to be actors, private failures made public because they can be disguised but not hidden, personal lives built around the Malpractice party and the White-Collar Crime party, and the mandatory tea at the Dean’s house. We've stepped, with Sheila, across the threshold into a world—laconic, sardonic, ironic—as Sheila says, "a world of transformations, sublimations, things becoming other things.” This ordinary world—is joined with the mythic world—where we find the centaur, that race of being/animal, fabled half-man and half-horse, dwller in the mountains of Thessaly.   For a somewhat more sinister, political reading of law school and a student's "identity" crisis consider Patricia Willams' commentary on her days at Harvard, or as she calls her commentary, "teleology on the rocks" (subtitled: "spirit-murdering the messenger"): My abiding recollection of being a student at Harvard Law School is the sense of being invisible. I spent three years wandering in a murk of unreality. I observed large, mostly male bodies assert themselves against one another like football players caught in the gauzy mist of intellectual slow motion. I stood my ground amid them, watching them deflect from me, unconsciously, politely, as if I were a pillar in a crowded corridor. Law school was for me like being on another planet, full of alienated creatures with whom I could make little connection. The school created a dense atmosphere that muted my voice to inaudibility. All I could do to communicate my existence was to posit carefully worded messages into hermetically sealed, vacuum-packed blue books, place them on the waves of that foreign sea, and pray that they would be . plucked up by some curious seeker and understood. Perhaps there were others who felt what I felt. Perhaps we were all aliens, all silenced by the dense atmosphere. Thinking that made me feel, ironically, less isolated. It was not merely that I was black and female, but a circumstance external to myself that I, and the collective, could not help internalizing. When I became a law professor, I found myself on yet another planet: a planet with a sun as strong as a spotlight and an atmosphere so thin that my slightest murmur would travel for miles, skimming from ear to ear to ear, merrily distorting and refracting as it went. Again I comforted myself that my sense of alienation and now-heightened visibility were not inherent to my blackness and my femaleness, but an uncomfortable atmospheric condition afflicting everyone. But at the gyroscopic heart of me, there was and is a deep realization that I have never left the planet earth. I know that my feelings of exaggerated visibility and invisibility are the product of my not being part of the larger cultural picture. I know too that the larger cultural picture is an illusion, albeit a powerful one, concocted from a perceptual consensus to which I am not a party; and that while these perceptions operate as dictators of truth, they are after ail merely perceptions. Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights 55-56 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) Biographical Note — Patricia Williams: Receipient of the Prestigous MacArthur Award | Alchemy of Race and Rights | Patricia Williams (1951- ) | Notes: Centaurs: Centaur - Wikipedia Satyrs: With Sheila's image of the nun who is now editor of the law review: "a rosary in one hand, a Budweiser in the other; half saint, half goat," we are reminded of the Greek god, Pan, the satyr. Mara L. Pratt, Myths of Old Greece (New York: Educational Publishing Company, 1896) [Used with permission of the Florida Center for Instructional Technology] | satyr (an image and definition) | satyr (The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 3rd ed., 2002) | satyr (linked to the Greek god, Pan, the son of Hermes) | a satyr gallery | Pan (Encyclopedia Mythica) | satyr - Wikipedia | In The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy we are reminded that satyrs were famous for their drinking, and thus their companionship with Dionysus, and for chasing nymphs. "By extension, a 'satyr' is a lecherous male." We find the "lecherous male" in a Lowell B. Komie story, "The Ice Horse." [on-line text][a story you will read in "Lawyers and Literature"]   Lawyers and Literature Home Page