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Lawyers and Literature Exercise 2-2 | Thinking About Our Lives as Stories Long before one begins the study of law, you are already enmeshed in a story, more accurately a set of linked stories. You have been told stories and become a part of a storied world by way of your family and your neighbors, and the place (or places) where you grew up. Over all the years you have had stories blasted at you from popular culture. Now, in law school, you are in a place where still more stories are being offered to you. Becoming a lawyer requires you to come to grips with various stories and to see how these stories are going to hold up out in the world.
For additional notes on myth and mythology, see: An Archaeology of Myth|
Telling/Living Our Stories: "When we tell our stories, we want to create a vivid and continuous dream in the listener's heart and mind. As John Gardner says, this dream is the aim of all fiction, all stories. As an analyst [a Jungian psychotherapist], therefore, I look for the language, details, memories, events, and metaphors that make the analysand's story [that is, the story of the person undergoing counseling] precise and vivid. I watch for the distractions, defenses, and narrative flaws that break the continuity of the dream. We all . . . have a unique, compelling, and coherent story to tell. When psychotherapy works, the patient can tell her or his story with narrative competence and create a powerful, vivid, and continuous dream in the analyst's mind." [Excerpted from The Narrative Impulse: Telling Stories, "The Educated Heart," Donald Williams, a work-in-progress] Williams contends that "we create our lives and the world with the stories we hear and tell. In other words, we maintain our world primarily in conversation--inner dialogues, face to face conversations, and a vast series of conversations we carry on through books, newspapers, films, magazines, television interviews, electronic mail, Compuserve forums, and paintings worth a thousand words." Williams goes on to point out that, "For most of us, the stories we depend upon work like morality plays (Seek this above all; avoid that at your peril. . .), like manuals for adulthood (Here's how to. . .), or like private prayers to soothe and protect us (Now I lay me down to sleep. . .). Well-ordered fictions can be reliable maps and compasses (You are here, there's a road there. . .) and sometimes cosmologies (In the beginning. . .). We could not make death or birth, love or tragedy, human experiences without stories. We would not recognize, experience, or understand the meaning of loyalty, friendship, sacrifice, wonder, grief, or desire without good stories. We will always need new stories and the retelling of old stories." Williams talks about stories in the context of therapy. This leads us to ask what it would mean to say of a particular story, that it is therapeutic. The word therapeutic is derived from a Greek root meaning to attend, to treat. What are we treating when we read lawyer stories? Stories are Told and Heard in the Context of Other Stories: "There are many stories being imagined
and enacted, but we can only listen to them and comprehend them within
the vernacular contexts of other stories. Our conversations about these
narratives are themselves located and scripted in deeper stories that
determine their moral force. . . ." [Allan C. Hutchinson,
And Law (or Further Adventures of the Jondo), 36 Buff. L. Rev. 285,
286 (1987)]
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What stories
brought you to law school? What hopes and dreams, what fears, do you find in this
story?
Notes 
