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lawyers and literature Strategies for Reading
We begin with a pragmatic question: What are we to do with this story? 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. (We also read the law to prepare a letter to a client explaining the law, or to write a memorandum to a partner in the firm explaining the law, or a letter to a lawyer who represents the opposing party in which we explain how the law supports a position we have taken.) . 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 and you ask: what to do? 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&rdquo? Having read the story, you walk away from it with the question: what now? And, if you're any kind of reader at all (knowledgeable, curious, intellectual), you’ll have some questions along the way. We might call this a process-oriented view of reading and as it happens there is a reader-response school of literary theory 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: What kind of reading experiences have I had? How am I to 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 rather than my old reading strategies? 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.
Burdens of Literary Reading:
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 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, and 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, 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 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 and in fictional characters like Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird) in whom we find virtues to admire, and Will Barrett (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 we see that different readers have different strategies for reading. 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. 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 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 an 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 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. 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):
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, 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 the theme of identity, 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 in literature 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 travel we use several different strategies for locating ourselves
and learning our way about. One way we keep our bearings 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 maps we use are those offered
to us, those we carry around with us in our heads, 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 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?
