Storytelling for Lawyers (30 page)

I was still begging him to please let, you know, let me leave. I said, “you can get a lot of other girls down there, for what you want,” and he just kept saying, “no;” and then I was really scared, because I can't describe, you know, what was said. It was more the look in his eyes; and I said, at that point I didn't know what to say; and I said, “If I do what you want, will you let me go without killing me?” Because I didn't know, at that point, what he was going to do; and I started to cry; and when I did, he put his hands on my throat, and started lightly to choke me; and I said, “If I do what you want, will you let me go?” And he said, yes, and at that time, I proceeded to do what he wanted me to.

He “made me perform oral sex, and then sexual intercourse.” Following that:

I asked him if I could leave now, and he said, “Yes;” and I got up and got dressed; and he got up and got dressed; and he walked me to my car, and asked if he could see me again; and I said, “Yes;” and he asked me for my telephone number; and I said, “No, I'll see you down Fell's Point sometime,” just so I could leave.
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If the settings and the environment are so important in this sequence of scenes (first, at the bar; second, in the parked car outside Rusk's apartment; third, inside the apartment), why doesn't the dissent further emphasize the victim's vulnerability and fear by foregrounding the scene with vivid, descriptive details, akin to Didion's narrative strategy? These details are available in
the trial record of the victim's testimony and, indeed, this testimony is cited in footnotes annotating the story. There are reasons for the selective use and frequent underinclusion of descriptive detail in depicting settings and environments in many legal stories, especially the stories told by appellate judges.

First, the conventions of judicial storytelling practice impose constraints on how appellate judges tell stories: judges seldom employ language (akin to Didion's) that intentionally directs the reader's attention to the artistic and narrative dimensions of their craft. Appellate judges typically profess that their decisions are limited to review of the legal—not factual—claims.

Second, legal decision making assigns causal significance and responsibility to the free will of individual actors; characters shape events into plots. Many law stories discount the significance of settings and environments external to the various actors, especially judicial stories about the guilt or innocence of actors and the punishments visited upon them.

Nevertheless, in a nicely understated way, the dissent's critique of the majority's story suggests how the victim, “Pat,” was affected by her surroundings (the setting or environment) and how defendant Rusk took advantage of these circumstances to compel Pat's submission. In the selection and ordering of scenes, the dissent conveys a shadowy environment. It begins in the appropriately named Fell's Point, a falling-off point where Pat meets Rusk in the bar. The dissent's narrative then cuts to the dark and unfamiliar neighborhood where Rusk pulls the keys from the ignition of Pat's car. Finally, the narrative turns to the bedroom of Rusk's apartment. The bare-bones setting matches the intentional gaps in the physical and psychological depictions of Rusk and Pat. The powerful rhetorical message of the dissent's narrative is centered not on what the majority opinion said but rather what it
omitted
from its retelling of events; these gaps in the narrative cannot be filled in accurately from the cold record of the trial—only the jury, who evaluated the credibility of the witnesses, weighed the evidence, and pieced together the fragments of the narrative, could begin to find and put into place the missing elements of the story.

W. G. Sebald writes stories grounded in places and settings; his environments predominate and shape events, narrative outcomes, and the fates of characters
within. Sebald travels in his books, vividly evoking places and settings. He supplements his descriptions with visual evidence, including photographs and sketches, pictures of family and relevant historical figures, and depictions of artifacts that document the authenticity and legitimacy of his observations and of his stories. He makes the images, settings, and the characters who inhabit these places come vividly alive in the mind of the reader. The foregrounding of setting and place invites digressions into personal memory and collective history. Setting is always the starting point and ending place for the story; Sebald's art is a meditation on place.

In
The Emigrants
, for example, Sebald retraces the paths of four emigrants, whose stories are embedded in the landscapes or settings mapped by their journeys. Sebald reconstructs these characters' stories through presentation of place; these environments are as alive as the characters who inhabit them.

For example, in one of the four narratives, Sebald retraces the picaresque journey of Sebald's great-uncle Ambrose, a manservant, whose emigrant journey terminates in a sanatorium in upstate New York where Ambrose is treated for depression with a regimen of electroshock therapy.

Initially, this setting is depicted through the perceptions of a character named Dr. Abramsky, now retired. Many years earlier, Abramsky treated Uncle Ambrose as an assistant to a “Dr. Fahnstock,” who was the previous director of the sanatorium. Fahnstock, like Uncle Ambrose, is now long dead and the sanatorium is no longer operating. Ambrose had entered the sanatorium voluntarily and submitted to electroshock therapy to treat his depression. There are two interlocking descriptions of this setting and the practices of electroshock therapy within this institution. In the first, the practices at the sanatorium are described somewhat abstractly by the old doctor, Abramsky.

It was also remarkable how readily Ambrose submitted to shock treatment which, in the early Fifties, as I understood only later, really came close to torture and martyrdom. Other patients often had to be frogmarched to the treatment room, said Dr. Abramsky, but Ambrose would always be sitting on the stool outside the door at the appointed hour, leaning his head against the wall, eyes closed, waiting for what was in store for him.

In response to my request, Dr. Abramsky described shock treatment in greater detail. At the start of my career in psychiatry, he said, I was of the opinion that electrotherapy was a humane and effective form of treatment. As students we had been taught—and Fahnstock, in his stories about clinical practice, had repeatedly described in graphic terms—how in the old days, when pseudo-epileptic fits were induced
by insulin, patients would be convulsed for minutes, seemingly on the point of death, their faces contorted and blue. Compared with this approach, the introduction of electro-shock treatment, which could be dispensed with greater precision and stopped immediately if the patient's reaction was extreme, constituted a considerable step forward. In our view it seemed completely legitimate once sedatives and muscle relaxants began to be used in the early Fifties, to avoid the worst of the incidental injuries, such as dislocated shoulders or jaws, broken teeth, or other fractures. Given these broad improvements in shock therapy, Fahnstock, dismissing my (alas) none too forceful objections with his characteristic lordliness, adopted what was known as the block method, a course of treatment advocated by the German psychiatrist Braunmühl, which not infrequently involved more than a hundred electric shocks at intervals of only a very few days. This would have been about six months before Ambrose joined us. Needless to say, when treatment was so frequent, there could be no question of proper documentation or assessment of the therapy; and that was what happened with your great-uncle too. Besides, said Dr. Abramsky, all of the material on file—the case histories and the medical records Dr. Fahnstock kept on a regular basis, albeit in a distinctly cursory fashion—have probably long since been eaten by the mice. They took over the madhouse when it was closed and have been multiplying without cease ever since; at all events, on nights when there is no wind blowing I can hear a constant scurrying and rustling in the dried-out shell of the building, and at times, when a full moon rises beyond the trees, I imagine I can hear the pathetic song of a thousand tiny upraised throats. Nowadays I place all my hope in the mice, and in the woodworm and deathwatch beetles. The sanatorium is creaking, and in places already caving in, and sooner or later they will bring about its collapse.
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What is there for the legal storyteller to see in Sebald's initial description of shock treatments and depiction of the setting of the sanatorium in upstate New York? These two paragraphs introduce the reader to the use of electroshock at the sanatorium. Abramsky's description is presented as a clinical abstraction. There is little physical detail in the initial description of the room, the practice itself, or the machinery employed in electroshock therapy.

Sebald uses the description as a set piece; it is not a complete scene or sequence of scenes in which the characters are actors in control of the actions on a stage. For example, there is only a single sentence about an individual
character or identified actor: Abramsky recalls Uncle Ambrose as distinct from the other patients who had to be frogmarched into the room. Unlike other patients, Uncle Ambrose “would always be sitting on the stool outside the door at the appointed hour, leaning his head against the wall, eyes closed, waiting for what was in store for him.” After this vivid evocation of Ambrose, Sebald, through Abramsky's point of view, describes the practice itself.

Despite the level of generality, the description is very powerful because of the selection and arrangement of a few observational details. Sebald, through Abramsky, contrasts what he then considered the “humane” practice of electroshock with still more primitive practices. In the various offhand observations by Abramsky the reader understands that the practice that Uncle Ambrose was subjected to was anything but humane. Abramsky further observes that, especially where the shock treatments were so frequent, there was the necessity of proper documentation and assessment. He reconnects the observations about past practices to the disrepair of the building and its current occupants: the case histories and medical records have probably “long since been eaten by the mice.” Finally, there is a powerful evocation of the “dried-out shell of the building” that is “creaking, and in places already caving in,” overrun by the scurrying mice that will eventually “bring about its collapse.” And on nights “when a full moon rises beyond the trees,” Abramsky imagines hearing the “pathetic song of a thousand tiny upraised throats.” These voices may belong to the mice who have overrun the building or are, perhaps, echoes of the desperate cries from the throats of the long-ago patients, including Uncle Ambrose.

Sebald's initial description of the setting and environment is compelling in part because of the details
omitted
. What is left out—and therefore left to the imagination of the reader—is more important than what is put in. This is not simply a parade of horribles. There is purposeful yet subtle use of indirection and ambiguity in the description.

Two pages later, Sebald revisits the same place with Abramsky. This time Abramsky describes Uncle Ambrose as a more fully developed character in the scene. Abramsky recalls Uncle Ambrose receiving shock treatment from the villainous Fahnstock on the day that Uncle Ambrose died:

It was almost evening. Dr. Abramsky led me back through the arboretum to the drive. He was holding the white goose wing, and from time to time pointed the way ahead with it. Towards the end, he said as we walked, your great-uncle suffered progressive paralysis of the joints and limbs, probably caused by the shock therapy. After a while
he had the greatest difficulty with everyday tasks. He took almost the whole day to get dressed. Simply to fasten his cufflinks and his bow tie took him hours. And he was hardly finished dressing but it was time to undress again. What was more, he was having constant trouble with his eyesight, and suffered from bad headaches, and so he often wore a green eyeshade—like someone who works in a gambling saloon. When I went to see him in his room on the last day of his life, because he had failed to appear for treatment for the first time, he was standing at the window, wearing the eyeshade, gazing out at the marshlands beyond the park. Oddly, he had put on armlets made of some satin-like material, such as he might have worn when he used to polish the silver. When I asked why he had not appeared at the appointed time, he replied (I remember his words exactly): It must have slipped my mind whilst I was waiting for the butterfly man. After he had made this enigmatic remark, Ambrose accompanied me without delay, down to the treatment room where Fahnstock was waiting, and submitted to all the preparations without the least resistance, as he always did. I see him lying before me, said Dr. Abramsky, the electrodes on his temples, the rubber bit between his teeth, buckled into the canvas wraps that were riveted to the treatment table like a man shrouded for burial at sea. The session proceeded without incident. Fahnstock's prognosis was distinctly optimistic. But I could see from Ambrose's face that he was now destroyed, all but a vestige of him. When he came round from the anesthetic, his eyes, which were now strangely glassy and fixed, clouded over, and a sigh that I can hear to this day rose from his breast. An orderly took him back to his room, and when I went there early the following morning, troubled by my conscience, I found him lying on his bed, in patent-leather boots, wearing full uniform, so to speak. Dr. Abramsky walked the rest of the way beside me in silence. Nor did he say a word in farewell, but described a gentle arc with the goose wing in the darkening air.
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