James Boyd White on Stories

One fundamental characteristic of human life is that we all tell stories, all the time, about ourselves and others, both in the law and out of it. The need to tell one's story so that it will make sense to oneself and to others may be in fact the deepest need of that part of our nature that marks us as human beings, as the kind of animal that seeks for meaning....

The story is the most basic way we have of recognizing our experience and claiming meaning for it. We start telling the stories of our lives as soon as we have language and we keep it up until we die. We make narratives literally all the time, for at some level we are constantly engaged in the process of telling and retelling the stories of our lives, trying to make sense of what is past and to allow for the force of what might happen next. We perpetually process new material, checking it against old claims, revising our story where necessary, repressing parts of it when that is the only alternative. This is among other things a central way in which our sense of our own individual character is made.... Our need and capacity for narrative is collective as well as individual, and we constantly tell the stories of our communities: think of family legends retold at the dinner table, of village or city traditions, of national histories ("from the Declaration of Independence to World War II"), or ethnic histories, all beginning with the word, "we."

The stories we tell about our own lives, individual or collective, have the fixed characteristic that they are always incomplete, always unfolding, and we accordingly find ourselves constantly trying to work into our narrative new events that may or may not fit comfortably with what has gone before. From our earliest years, each of us is constantly telling his or her story over and over again and claiming a meaning for it in the light of new events; or, more precisely, claiming slightly shifting meanings as new experiences add new material. The old story won't quite work with this new chapter; the design breaks down; so we rewrite the earlier chapter with new highlights and emphases, putting back in what we had earlier left out as irrelevant, dropping into the background what had been central, and so on....

What if your story so far has been one of virtue rewarded and suddenly vice becomes a part of the picture? Or of virtue unrecognized, and suddenly unimaginable success comes your way? Great adjustments must be made. The process of adjustment is necessary at the collective level too. Think, for example, of the way people have to take into account the ugly development (or beneficial progress) that mars (or saves) their New England village....

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[W]e do not know, or cannot remember or cannot say, everything that belongs to the story, at either the individual or the collective level. We normally deal with this problem by making skeletal outlines or formulas, which we can remember and which we use to organize the rest of what has happened and what will happen.... In "Noon Wine" we see that Mr. Thompson, the failing farmer, also has a formula, seen in his repeated reference to "his dear wife, Ellie, who was not strong." This formula sums up his career by justifying his failure that he is burdened with a wife so frail, it actually is success to do as well as he has managed to do.

Our stories, big and little, share another feature: they all end up in some essential way all right. If not in triumph, in acceptance. To tell a story that ends in total failure is simply not endurable. Thus a tragic series of losses can be seen to have a kind of saving grace, by becoming the object of superhuman endurance ... or by leading to a new level of understanding of the nature of human life. Or they may be saved by being seen as part of a larger history, of ethnic repression or revenge, for example, that has its own tolerable meaning, resting either on future events or on the moral significance of the suffering of the just. What is in experience intolerable can sometimes be made tolerable, if only barely so, by conversion into a story, a narrative with a meaning of its own.

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Our stories are always written against two possible evils; that they will make no sense at all, or that they will make sense, but of an unendurable kind. The power of narrative is a power by which the self maintains its integrity in the face of threats of total destruction.

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We are all like the Ancient Mariner, seeking to fix our stories in another's mind, and afraid we are failing; or, like Mr. Thompson in "Noon Wine," we go about the community trying to find an audience who will listen to our story, to our account of what has happened and what it means.

When we tell our stories, at either the individual or the collective level, we must always face the question whether our language is adequate to the story we have to tell. In a sense, of course, it never is. Who can finds words to express just what a particular sunset looks like, or a moment of a certain kind of sadness or pleasure, or our sense of another person? All too often when we try to do these things, as we talk and talk our impoverished cliches string themselves together in a line so that this sunset comes to seem just like any other, anywhere. Our prose sounds like a Hallmark card. (Think how utterly inadequate our language is for writing a letter of sympathy to a bereaved friend.) sometimes our language is not merely inadequate; it is really wrong and commits us to morally impossible statements....

But we do not always feel that our language is inadequate. Usually it seems good enough for our purposes.

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How about story telling in the law? To start with, it is plain that narrative is central to the intellectual activity of the lawyer, for whenever the lawyer acts, he or she is telling a story about the world and claiming a meaning for it. This fact has great linguistic and intellectual consequences, for to tell a story is to choose a language in which it is to be told, and to choose a language is, at some level, to recognize that there are other possible languages, other possible meanings. This is part of what distinguishes legal from bureaucratic talk, where the language is a given, about which there is no choice and can be no argument. (We have the form--the blue one, Number 1165-B--and you must respond to its questions in its terms.)

The process of storytelling in the law takes its form in part from another fact: that legal stories are told by lawyers and judges not about themselves, but about other people, and told in competition with each other, on the necessary understanding that each is incomplete. This means that there is in the law an openness to multiple stories, multiple languages. This openness is not accidental but structural, and it has significant political and ethical consequences as well as intellectual ones. It is in fact built into the idea of the hearing, the central form of legal life and discourse, for at the hearing two stories are told in competition with one another, and a choice between them--or of a third--is forced upon the decider. This array of competing stories drives the listener to the edge of language and of consciousness, to the moment of silence where transformation and invention can take place, and a new story, perhaps in a new language, can be told.

Once one realizes that stories can be told in different ways, with different meanings, as the law requires us to do, one's sense of the world, and of the relation of one's speech to it, change profoundly. In addition to the choice of terms, there is the choice of beginning.

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As lawyers we are engaged in a discipline that teaches us again and again ... that no story can include everything, that every story is a reduction, a fiction, made from a certain point of view. In looking at competing stories, and trying to decide between them, or upon a third, we thus naturally think in terms of inclusion and exclusion: what--or who--belongs in this story that is now left out? What--or who--is present that can be dropped? Where should it begin, how should it end? the lawyer who reads and remakes a story . . . is constantly at work seeking to integrate tension and inconsistency into a coherent whole, to "comprehend contraries": different languages, different inclusions and exclusions, different senses of ending and beginning. In all of this we are schooling ourselves in the recognition of radical difference in point of view and central experience, in the contingency of language and expectation, in the uncertainty of life, and in the inevitability of individual responsibility. And in both telling and reading the stories of our clients and others we make active, in a way that renders them available for scrutiny, the suppositions of our culture--the sense of what is "natural" that inheres in one's mind and marks it as sharing a common world with others. The narrative is the archetypal legal and rhetorical form, as i is the archetypal form of human thought in ordinary life as well.