Storytelling for Lawyers (34 page)

Understanding this complexity is at the core of this chapter: it is embodied in the principle that there are at least two sequential progressions of time inherent in the telling of any story. The events depicted in the story follow one another in a temporal sequence, which we can call story time. But there is a second order of narrative time; that is, the recounting itself typically proceeds differently. This second temporal sequence, a separate discourse time, may or may not parallel the first sequence. The two sequences must be purposefully constructed and coordinated.

Fortunately, we are all intuitively gifted and well-practiced storytellers. We have been telling stories all our lives—whether we are aware of our practice or not. Further, it is our professional work as lawyers. Consequently, we are adept at coordinating these components of narrative time; although we seldom separate analytically discrete dimensions of narrative time. Nevertheless, it is extremely helpful for all professional storytellers, including legal storytellers, to develop a conceptual understanding of this important distinction. Although legal storytellers are not narratologists and do not need to have, at their fingertips, the esoteric vocabulary and definitions of aspects of narrative time, it is helpful to move beyond “chronology” and understand the other techniques that enable us to move about in time within a story.

It is also important to explore the malleability of the narrative time frame of any story, including legal stories. All stories are artificially constructed structures set in a narrative time meant to appear to convey “real” time. But there are innumerable possibilities for how to construct the temporal framework of a story. These choices about the time framing are crucial to all that transpires within the plot of the story, and how events unfold within it. That is, the subject of narrative time is not just about ordering events within a story; it is also about the architecture of the story itself. Crucial points in time include when
(and where) to begin the story and when (and where) to end it; these choices compel the unfolding of the events of the story itself. Furthermore, legal stories, especially those litigation stories presented by advocates to judges or juries, are typically unfinished stories. Although an implicit “right” ending is proposed or suggested, it is typically left to the decision maker to provide the ending, completing the story and inscribing final meaning on the tale. It is, consequently, especially important for legal storytellers to choose the beginnings of their stories carefully, because that choice implicitly signals the ending of the story.

In this chapter, we look at several features of this complex and compelling subject. In addition to revisiting examples from this book, and providing terminology from narratology, it is helpful to draw further guidance from the masterful novelist and writing teacher Kurt Vonnegut, including paragraphs from Vonnegut's famous time-travel novel
Slaughterhouse Five
. In addition to providing an absorbing and still highly relevant reading experience, Vonnegut's novel is a memorable meditation on the subjects of temporality and narrative time, rich in its comic-yet-profound observations. Perhaps because of his mocking playfulness, Vonnegut's depiction of Billy Pilgrim's journey across time provides a bridge between the difficult concepts of formal narratology and the more pragmatic work of all storytellers, especially legal storytellers. Like Vonnegut's protagonist Billy Pilgrim, legal storytellers move about purposefully in time, bending and shaping time within their stories to accommodate their purposes.

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to
kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room,
swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television.
He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie
backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about
American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant
men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story
went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and
corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England.
Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them
backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of
the planes and the crewmen. They did the same for wrecked
American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up
backwards to join the formation
.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that
was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors,
exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires,
gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted
the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers
were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had
miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes.
They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen
and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans,
though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over
France, though, the German fighters came up again, made
everything and everybody as good as new
.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders
were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United
States of America, where factories were operating night and
day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous
contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women
who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists
in remote areas. It was their business to put them
into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never
hurt anybody ever again
.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high
school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, and all humanity,
without exception, conspired biologically to produce
two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed
.

Billy saw the movie backwards then forwards—and then it
was time to go out … and meet the flying saucer
.
¹

Chronology describes the dominant principle purportedly employed by legal storytellers to organize the telling of their stories in time. But what, exactly, is chronology? A dictionary of narratology defines “chronological order” as
“[t]he arrangement of situations and events in the order of their occurrence. ‘Harry washed, then he slept' observes a chronological order, whereas, ‘Harry slept after he worked' does not. Chronological order is very much privileged by positivist historiography.”
²
Likewise, chronology is “privileged” in positivist legal storytelling and, in many ways, serves as the default mode for organizing events in time. By using chronology, legal storytellers attempt to signal to listeners and readers that they are not attempting to manipulate the events of a story, and are subordinating narrative to legal argumentation and principles. There are other reasons to employ chronology as a primary mode of organizing and presenting events in story time. As David Lodge observes, “The simplest way to tell a story, equally favored by tribal bards and parents at bedtime, is to begin at the beginning, and go on until you reach the end, or your audience falls asleep.”
³

Chronology, in some form and to some degree, is apparent in the telling of all the legal stories I have analyzed thus far in this book. Sometimes, employing a strict and linear chronology is a purposeful choice. But more often, an effective legal story is designed to
appear
as if it is being presented in a strict and linear chronology, controlled by the events unfolding in time rather than by the imagination of the storyteller. But upon closer inspection and analysis, this is seldom the case; narrative presentation of a story in discourse time is typically far more complex.

Why then is there such an apparent emphasis on chronology in legal storytelling? There are several possible reasons. Perhaps there is a strong presumption that chronology embodies how events transpire in real time, and it certainly arouses the least suspicion, especially from highly skeptical judicial readers and listeners. The legal storyteller must not lose credibility and must signal to her audience that she is depicting events candidly and “objectively.” The legal storyteller typically employs simple chronology to persuade the listener or reader that she is subordinating narrative to legal argumentation, merely presenting rather than manipulating the facts to suit her purposes.

Beneath all these reasons is a narrative conceit, a shared misconception about the relationship between causality and chronology. That is, storytellers often rely on strict chronology based on the presumption that chronological and causal connections are always interrelated; that earlier events presented in a narrative sequence cause the later events. This fallacy is defined by Gerald Prince in his dictionary of narratology:

Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy:
A confusion, denounced by scholasticism, between consecutiveness and consequence. According to
Barthes (following Aristotle), the mainspring of
narrativity
is related to an exploitation of this confusion, what-comes-after-X in a narrative being processed as what-is-caused-by-X: given “It started to rain, and Mary became nostalgic,” for example, Mary's nostalgia tends to be understood as caused by the weather conditions.
⁴

Nevertheless, even the most seemingly linear, straightforward, and chronological stories, when examined closely, are seldom presented in a strict chronology. Stories are inevitably filled with departures from a literal chronology, taking off at one point in time, landing at another. Like Billy Pilgrim in his spaceship time travels, storytellers frequently move about in time within narrative, although seldom with the obvious extremity of Vonnegut's reverse causality as presented in the excerpt from
Slaughterhouse Five
. Nevertheless, there is seldom a standardized one-size-fits-all, strict and truly linear chronology available for telling legal stories. Unlike Billy Pilgrim, who is involuntarily committed to a mental hospital for attempting to explain to his listeners how he has become unstuck in time, the legal storyteller typically does not want to emphasize her departures from chronology. But there are techniques that all storytellers inevitably employ to move about in time, departing from chronology, either purposefully, intuitively, or inadvertently. This chapter identifies and foregrounds some of these narrative techniques.

Billy couldn't read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could
see how the books were laid out in brief clumps of symbols
separated by stars. Billy commented that the clumps might
be telegrams
.

“Exactly,” said the voice
.

“They are telegrams?”

“There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you're
right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message—
describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read
them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular
relationship between the messages, except that the
author has chosen carefully, so that, when seen all at once,
they produce an image of life that is beautiful, surprising
and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense,
no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our
books are the depths of the many marvelous moments seen
at one time
.”
⁵

Unlike Tralfamadorians, we do not read all of our moments at one time, together. We move in sequence from one moment in discourse time to the next in understanding the events within the story. In a story, however, these moments in time seldom proceed in rigid lockstep with the ticking of a clock. There are, of course, a few notable exceptions. For example, in the film
High Noon
, one minute of screen time for the audience equals approximately one minute of “real time” replicating the two hours before the arrival of Frank Miller on the noon train. The film proceeds to provide a purportedly strict chronology of events occurring during this time. This is an effect, however, that can only be achieved in film. Unlike movies (and perhaps this is one of the reasons films seem so “real” to us and are a dominant mode of storytelling in our time), other forms of storytelling cannot effectively capture and embody “real” time. Nevertheless, the arrangement of moments must appear to present a natural and sequential unfolding of the events in story. However, a pure and rigid chronology is seldom the most effective way to capture narrative time in story; indeed, the grammar of sentences often departs from chronology even when the storyteller attempts to sequence events into a linear and chronological discourse time that mirrors the unfolding of events within the story itself. A storyteller can seldom match the depiction and unfolding of events with the ticking of a clock; the narrative presentation of a story distorts the shape of the events depicted within it.

There are techniques and narrative devices that storytellers employ intuitively to depart from chronology, to tell stories effectively in a discourse time that intentionally rearranges the sequencing of events, establishing a different order than the sequence in which these events purportedly occur within the story itself (“story time”). In narratology, there is a specific name for this departure or separation:
anachrony
. Prince's dictionary of narratology provides this definition:

Anachrony:
A discordance between the order in which events (are said to) occur and the order in which they are recounted: a beginning
in media res
followed by a return to earlier events constitutes a typical anachrony. In relation to the “present” moment, the moment when chronological recounting of a sequence of events is interrupted
to make room for them, anachronies can go back into the past (
retrospection, analepsis, flashback
) or forward to the future (
anticipation, prolepsis, flashforward
). They have a certain
extent
or
amplitude
(they cover a certain amount of
story time
) as well as a certain
reach
(the story time they cover is at a certain temporal distance from the “present” moment): in “Mary sat down. Four years later she would have the very same impression and her excitement would last for a whole month,” the anachrony has the extent of one month and a reach of four years.
⁶