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lawyers and literature Strategies for Reading
We begin with a pragmatic question: What are we to do with this story? “There’s nothing to do, just enjoy it. I read for pleasure.” Read a story and ask yourself: What have I done with this story? “I’ve read the story, now what?” The skeptic would say of the story? “So what?”
Pragmatics of Reading: (or) What To Do (With This Story)? Reading law, you learn that you are looking for a legal rule, that legal rules when stacked end-to-end constitute a legal doctrine, and that the rules/doctrine when applied in a new factual situation results in a legal outcome/judicial decision (or letter to a client explaining the law, or a memorandum to a partner in the firm explaining the law, or a letter to a lawyer representing the opposing party explaining how you are asking for the law to be read and applied (a reading you intend to back-up by judicial/jury confirmation). Law reading is extractive (finding the rule), linear (case 1 + case 2 + case 3) (rules come in batches) (the batch constitutes a legal doctrine), and practice (or instrumental) (you seek out rules, find the pattern expressed by the rules not for pleasure, or for intellectual stimulation but to put the rules/patterns to use to solve a problem). Lawyers read to solve problems; our reading is instrumental in nature. Now, you walk up to a story (going-in) and you ask: what to do (with the story)? Am I supposed to extract something from it? Do stories, like law cases, have a bottom-line? Is there anything like the black-letter law of a story? Can a story, like a case be stated by way of its “syllabus points” (a reductive positioning of the case performed by the West Virginia Supreme Court for its decisions)? Having read the story, you walk away from it (going-out) with the question: what now? And, if your any kind of reader at all (knowledgeable, curious, intellectual), you’ll have some questions along the way. Why did Kafka write parables (or why would anyone? If you want to say something, why not just say it so everyone can understand what you are trying to say? What kind of pleasure does a non-law-trained person get in reading a story involving law and lawyers? How does the fact that I am a student of law affect my reading of this story? We might call this a process-oriented view of reading and as it happens there is a school of literary theory (reader-response) that sees in just such questions the way to understand how we give meaning to the texts we read. We might, if we want to explore the pragmatics of reading, inquire (socially and personally): What kind of reading experiences have I had? How am I too use those experiences in dealing with this story? Is this a story in which I’m going to be required to draw on life experiences (which involve still a different kind of reading, but reading nevertheless) rather than my reading experiences? (And while we’re at it, what sense does it make to compartmentalize my life experiences from my reading experiences?) In these questions about ourselves as readers we begin to explore the assumptions we bring to various kinds of reading. Carefully pursued, we may find that our assumptions lead us astray. Or we may find that our operating assumptions don’t get the job done. (E.g. driving in good weather conditions and driving roads covered with snow and ice is an entirely different experience. Or, driving with plenty of gas and driving on an interstate when you have some doubts as to whether you’ll run out of gas before you get to the next exit. Different experiences.
Burdens of Literary Reading:
We learn literature (and literary ways of reading) to become part of an academic community (that is, to be part of a social world in which this kind of reading takes place, a world in which the way we comport ourselves, and the meanings that we devise for our lives are shaped by our reading/literature. Beyond the Burdens of Literary Reading: Relieved of these burdens, what guides our reading? We might define what remains as tasks that are: simple, personal, existential.
Fundamentals of Story WorkStories Speak for Themselves. We might begin by simply reading the stories and see if it the stories themselves suggest what we are to do in trying to understand how to put them to use. Wolfgang Iser once observed that "something happens to us by way of the literary text." [Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response xi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)]. J. Hillis Miller identifies this "something" as the "ethical moment in the act of reading." It is, says Miller,
Miller suggest that a literary text makes a demand on the reader and we cannot fully reshape this demand by the workings or our own subjective reading. David Tracy, makes the argument more directly: "[F]or certain expressions, form and matter are indissoluble.... [T]he disclosive and transformative power and meaning of the story are grasped only in and through the narrative itself." [David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism 275 (New York: Crossroad, 1981)] What You Bring With You to the Story. What is it that we, as readers, with a long history of reading experiences, readers who happen to have set out to be lawyers, bring to these stories? "Readers need to stand somewhere before they pick up a book, and the nature of that 'somewhere,' I argue, significantly influences the ways in which they interpret (and consequently evaluate texts." [Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation 2 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987)]. In what ways and by what strategies do we overread, underread, misread, and otherwise blind ourselves to what we find in the lawyer stories by way of assumptions we make about ourselves as readers and as students of law? In what ways do we claim particular stories as if they were our own, while other stories we ignore as if they too did not invite us to know something about ourselves and the world? "[L]ooking at readers' starting points can help us understand how interpretation comes about and what its implications are—not the implications of the particular texts at hand, but the implications of the very means we use as we go about making sense of them." [Id. at 3] What kind of sophistication and sensibilities do you bring to your reading? Each of us are readers, are more or less sophisticated in the reading we do. By sophisticated, I mean that we are able, as a matter of course, to examine the language used in different kinds of texts, figure out roughly the purpose of the text, who might use it (the purported audience), and how the text might be put to use. An educated reader asks, however implicitly: What is this text? Who produced it? What was its intended use? What is expected to happen when the text is used as intended? A sophisticated reader knows how to get from text to meaning, that is, she knows how to read, interpret, and use what she reads. Sophisticated, cultivated reading is a matter of education of two kinds: the education we get from schooling and the self-education we give ourselves as independent learners. Schools, with their organized forced marches through various fields of knowledge, expose us to texts, some interesting, others boring, some prosaic and mind-numbing, some imaginative and mysterious. The first or primal text, however, is the text of personal experience, one's own life story, a story that schooling helps us bracket, push aside, so we can pay strict attention to texts offered up during the course of our schooling. If, as John O'Neill argues, every "voyage begins at home in the world of familiar objects, among friends and everyday scenes" then we can expect our voyage as readers and writers to begin here as well. [John O'Neill, Making Sense Together: An Introduction to Wild Sociology 2 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974)]
The Community Within Which Reading Takes Place. "As members of a particular culture and of a particular subculture or social group, we have absorbed concepts governing the nature of the literary arts, the satisfactions to be sought, the conventions to be observed, the qualities to be admired." [Louise M. Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem 152 (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976)]. Consequently, we might ask: What does it mean to read lawyer fiction in as part of one's education as a lawyer? How does reading lawyer stories in the company of fellow students affect your reading and understanding of lawyer stories? When we read a text together we join a community of readers (and their readings) and participate in the culture that reading makes possible.
How is this cultural, communal activity of reading lawyer stories to be understood, and used to further your education as a lawyer? If we are indeed a community of readers, then it might be said that we are, in reading lawyer stories, in search of friends. [See generally, Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction 170-196 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)][Wayne C. Booth]. It is certainly true in my own case that some of my most involved friendships are with books. As one colleague notes, "There are authors and characters that I feel I know so well I regard them as friends, great-hearted people whom I get to know better each time I read. Seeing that they have written a new book or story is like receiving a diner invitation: a chance to get to visit and know each other more." [Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, "You Gotta BE the Book": Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents 4 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997)] When we read lawyer stories, we find new friends, both among fellow readers (drawn to them by the nuanced way in which they demonstrate a way of reading), and in fictional characters like Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird) in whom we find virtues to admire, and Will Barrett (the lawyer protagonist in The Second Coming) who offers hope that new beginnings are possible. We may find that a novel or story itself becomes a worthy friend. As with all friends, there may be disagreements and conflict. Keep track of these disagreements with friends; learn from them. The Ways You Read. We might try, in our discussion of the stories we read, to become more attentive to our reading. "[A] reader can only make sense of a text in the same way he or she makes sense of anything else in the world: by applying a series of strategies to simplify it—by highlighting, by making symbolic, and by otherwise patterning it." [Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation 19 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987)] What is the relation between the kind of reading you are asked to do in law school and your reading of lawyer stories? "Are the kinds of attention we bring to bear on literature, the skills we use to read it, different from those we exercise in reading other sorts of texts?" [Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age 23 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996)(1989)]. Is it possible to see reading as an interpretive enterprise that extends beyond literature, indeed, as a fundamental effort to understand and locate ourselves in the world? Is it possible to "read" your experience(s) in law school, to learn not only about how one learns to practice law but how one approaches other texts in life that must be read? Robert Scholes, in Protocols of Reading, claims, as have others, that the world is a "text" and that we are each, in some fashion or another, readers of the various texts the world presents us. This is the way Scholes presents the proposition:
James Boyd White makes a similar claim:
If we are located in a world of texts, texts we inherit and texts we produce, texts we read and texts we live, then it will be our reading of these texts, our receptivity and rebellion toward them, our interpretations and misunderstandings of them, that will be of central importance. Reading stories with others (in a communal context such as a law school course) we see that different readers have different strategies for reading (a strategy is an agenda, as well as a method). We do not read, interpret, and criticize stories in the same way, indeed, some readers are quite oblivious to the need for a story to be interpreted and explored from a critical perspective. [On the distinction between reading, interpretation, and criticism, see Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English 21-24 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation 4-5 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)("[T]he text we produce is ours in a deeper and more essential way than any text we receive from outside. When we read we do not possess the text we read in any permanent way. But when we make an interpretation we do add to our store of knowledge–and what we add is not the text itself but our own interpretation of it. In literary interpretation we possess only what we create.")] Reading stories with others we often sense that a story has been misread, and with the help of other readers, we might become more attentive to ways we read and misread the texts we are given to interpret and the stories we are trying to live. Reading Reflects Character. In reading fiction we direct our attention to the character(s) we find in stories and reading for reflective purposes, to our own character. Lawyers become characters in contemporary fiction (and film) because we are cast as actors in the great dramas and social upheavals of our time. While law students may sometimes view themselves as social plumbers and mechanics, the view seems more convenient than accurate. There is something in the culture, the way of legal talking and legal thinking, that routinizes the lawyer role and legal persona while at the same time individual lawyers attempt to give the role a distinctive look. The distinctive element is always in tension with the legal persona, the mask that identifies an individual to the world as a lawyer. [persona] Lawyers indeed seem to have a character shaped by the world of law work. In the mix of predisposition, legal education and anticipation of what lies ahead, students begin to think and talk like lawyers. There is, I contend, a psychological dimension to personality and character one develops in a profession like law. There are rites of passage that must be endured before one can claim to be a lawyer. Undergoing these rites of passage we immerse ourselves in an ethos and ethic which affects attitudes and philosophies; simply put, we begin to sound and look like laweyrs. If it is possible that the way we read (cases, stories, others, fateful events, life) has a direct bearing on the kind of lawyers we become, we might want to study this relationship between reading and character, between reading and the person we hold ourselves out to be. How does your reading "mark" you as a particular kind of person, as a legal character? Or, in contrast, do you see reading law and reading literature as the use of a tool that says nothing of significance about you as a person? When teachers ask their students to learn, and to learn by reading, to learn by grappling with strange new texts, texts that seem to have no bearing on their immediate lives, they ask them to have a certain kind of character. Good teachers, when they ask us to read, are asking us to live a particular kind of life, to develop an openness to text that allows for the possibility that the text may change our thinking about what to do, and how to live, who to be. The character demanded of us by the good teacher depends on an assumption—reading is a way to better understand character, a way to live with character. [It may not be intuitively obvious that readers have and make for themselves a character in their reading. Yet, we take character into reading and reading can change character. A character for reading opens us to newness (differentness, strangeness, alienness). Learning is always a confrontation with newness.] Teachers are afraid that students who have no interest beyond their own immediate life and chosen goals will lead an impoverished, troubled, life. It is, teachers believe in their heart, this openness to the new, to Other, to experiences beyond those made possible for us at home, with friends, and a constant diet of television, that will make us more sensible, critical, and adaptable, more concerned about the good life and the various ways in which it can be lived. Stories Being Told. We interpret what we find in lawyer stories based on the stories we know from everyday life, stories we heard as children, stories which bring us pleasure, stories that create a tinge of fear, stories of the forbidden. In reading a story, interpretation begins when we say (without saying at all):
This initial reaction to the story is important and provides valuable information but it is all to often information buried deep beneath the surface of our reading. We read stories to sharpen the eye and ear for complexity, paradox, and mystery. Henry Miller made the point this way: "The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnified world in itself." [Thomas H. Moore (ed.), Henry Miller on Writing 37 (New York: New Directions, 1964)]. We need to become more watchful of the stories lived around us (some quite dreadful), and study the resources available for dealing with these stories. Every law student carries with her a repertoire of stories, some of which have been taken up unconsciously, others chosen and consciously groomed. Sometimes stories seduce us, or invade us with the force of an occupying army. Still other stories, we resist, or build great walls around so we can we shield ourselves from them. With some stories, there is nothing to do but puzzle over them. Each of us, as reader and maker of texts, establish a personal and social relationship with the stories our culture makes most readily accessible. But some of us will not be content with the ready stock of conventional stories presented to us. We will attempt to produce our own texts and tell our own stories. "I produce texts, therefore I am, and to some extent I am the texts that I produce." [Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation 4 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)]. In turning to lawyer fiction we may find something therapeutic, something that will help us make the connection between our cover stories, our untold stories, and the stories we find most puzzling. Themes and Motifs That Carry from Story to Story. In talking about the stories we read in "Lawyers and Literature," we sometimes look for patterns, or motifs, that will begin to help us make sense of the stories as a collective whole. Consider, one might, the theme of identity, that is in particular one's identity as a lawyer. Northrop Frye prefaces a comment on the more general theme of identity with Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium":
Frye then observes: "This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think the framework of all literature." [Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination 54-55 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970)] [Northrop Frye] "[T]he most interesting discussions inliterature class have to do with how readers work, how they bring to life the works we read together, how they arrive at and express their versions of the work—their intepretations and criticisms. My attention as a teacher has come to focus on the ways in which students and I myself construct texts as experiences we can talk about, write about, and share with others." [Benjamin DeMott, Close Imagining: An Introduction to Literature viii (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988)] When we read stories, it is not just the stories we are after but learned how to be more attentive to the way we read. We began by:
We have talked, in passing, about strategies for reading stories, and we need to regress a bit, to look for a moment behind reading strategies (exploring the preconditions for strategizing). Where do we get strategies for reading? What is their source? (Do we get them from teachers standing up in the front of the room? ["The moral culturally at home in a text our students become, the less dependent they will be on guidance from the instructor." Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English 27 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)] [Robert Scholes]. From literary critics? From readers who seem to have a way of reading, a power, or insight, that we do not have? Simply put, where do our reading strategies come from? When we travel we use several different strategies for locating ourselves
and learning our way about. One way we keep our bearings (and avoid
getting lost) is to make use of maps, maps drawn by others and those
we create for ourselves as we wander about and observe prominent features
along the routes we travel. We use maps to get from a place that we
know to a place that is unfamiliar and then back home (the place we
know best). The maps we use are those offered to us, those we carry
around with us in our heads (and hearts), and those we make for use
along the way. One puzzle or mystery our reading takes up is this question: What has gone wrong with the world? The question, as is so often the case, contains an assumption: Something is wrong with the world and we need to know what it might be. What would happen if you read with this question and assumption foremost in mind: Something has gone wrong. What is it? How did it happen? If you are to read with the "something has gone wrong" assumption,
you'll need to ask some questions: (1) how can your reading bolster
and legitimize the assumption; (2) if your assumption is like an investment
you'll need to watch over it and monitor whether it's paying off, or
you need to put your assumption capital in a different investment; (3)
whether the assumption allows you to better understand what is going
on around you and suggest how to respond to it; and (4) whether the
assumption allows you to better engage others and their assumptions.
Walter Kaufmann, in The Future of the Humanities (New York:
Reader's Digest Press, 1977) presents four approaches to reading:
Agnostic Reading: The third way of reading Kaufmann labels agnostic. It can "be summed up briefly as saying in effect: We don't know and suspend judgment about truth." [57-58]. "Truth is out of the picture, and the reader's concern is with something else." [58]. There are three variations of this approach to reading: the antiquarian (preference for the old and the rare); aesthetic (concerned with beauty and style); and the microscopic (preference for the part rather than the whole) [Id.] [Agonicism - Wikipedia] Dialectical Reading: The fourth way of reading, Kaufmann calls dialectical. "We [readers] don't know everything and he [the author] doesn't; but we have some intelligence and he does; and we shall try to transcend some errors by engaging in a common quest, confronting the voice of the text as a You." [59]. This Socratic approach to the text "enlist[s] the aid of the text" to examine our own perspectives and purposes. [61]. "The dialectical reader seeks vantage points outside the various consensuses by which he has been conditioned. The text is to help him to liberate himself." [Id.]. The dialectical reader "is not looking for an authority with whom he can agree but rather for alternative points of view that allow him to reflect critically on his own views. Reading in this way enables him to become conscious of his own preconceptions of the prejudices of the groups to which he belongs. [61] [dialectic - Wikipedia] [Walter Kaufmann] Does law school place more emphasis (and reward) on one or another of the approaches to reading that Kaufmann describes? Is it possible that reading lawyer fiction might require different strategies for reading than those emphasized in traditional law school courses?
"There I sat . . . happy as could be, master of Belle Isle, the loveliest house on the River Road, gentleman and even bit of a scholar (Civil War, of course), married to a beautiful rich loving (I thought) wife, and father (I thought) to a lovely little girl; a moderate reader, moderate liberal, moderate drinker (I thought), moderate music lover, moderate hunter and fisherman, and past president of the United Way. I moderately opposed segregation. I was moderately happy. At least at the moment I was happy, but not for the reasons given above. The reason I was happy was that I was reading for perhaps the fourth or fifth time a Raymond Chandler novel. It gave me pleasure (no, I'll put it more strongly: it didn't just give me pleasure, it was the only way I could stand my life) to sit there in old goldgreen Louisiana under the levee and read, not about General Beauregard, but about Philip Marlowe taking a bottle out of his desk drawer in his crummy office in seedy Los Angeles in 1933 and drinking along and all those from-nowhere people living in stucco bungalows perched in Laurel Canyon. the only way I could stand my life in Louisiana, where I had everything, was to read about crummy lonesome Los Angeles in the 1930's. Maybe that should have told me something. If I was happy, it was an odd sort of happiness." [Walker Percy, Lancelot 24-25 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977)] [Walker Percy] Note We are each, I suspect, in our own way, in need of clarity (some have more need for it than others). Clarity is indeed a virtue, one that law schools try to teach, a virtue lawyers find necessary in their work. Every profession makes clarity a virtue. Clarity, the seeing of things, with a minimum of distortion, using the best available evidence, helps us sort through muddles and convoluted problems. Clarity is a skill. Clients are willing to pay to get the skill deployed on their behalf. You will need, as a student of law and as a lawyer, as much clarity as you can muster. There are instances in which the need for clarity can get in the way of common sense, situations, times, and instances, in which clarity is not to be had. If you hold clarity to be an important virtue, seeking it and practicing it, you may get so familiar with it that you devise a clarity that fulfills your needs more than it honestly represents the situation you are in. Be forewarned that clarity is not always a virtue. Recommend Reading (about the Art & Pleasures of Reading) Geoffrey O'Brien, The Browser's Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading (Washington DC: Counterpoint, 2000) Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996) Robertson Davies, Reading and Writing (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993) (1992) [Robertson Davies]
Critical Reading
Close Reading
On Reading On Critical Thinking
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Dealing with assumptions we bring to a reading: What kind of reader am I?
noting how our reading in law school is
sharply defined by its purpose (extracting a rule of law) (obviously
there is far more to reading a case than stating a rule of law for
which the case can be stated as authority; reading law cases can be
so overly simplified that we create a caricature of legal reading);
