Narrative in Law and Literature
“Retrospective Prophecies: Legal Narrative Constructions” written by Peter Brooks is a chapter in the larger piece of work New Directions in Law and Literature, edited by Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler. This book includes twenty-one other essays by other scholars in both literature and law, but this particular essay will focus on Brook’s work included in the book.
In this chapter, Brooks is introducing the issue of narrative in law and how “the way in which law understands discovery and recites the meanings derived from evidence raises problems in narrative telling”. He describes two problems: “an understanding of how narrative presentation shapes events recounted, for instance, and how anticipated ends shape story events” (Brooks). The problem Brooks is describing here is that oftentimes in legal settings many people come up with their own stories after evidence is presented. Lawyers can also use this method of narration to change the way the event is described to make it look like their client is in the right in whatever situation they are in. How a story is told or presented (narration) can change the way that other people interpret the events of the story. Brooks’ issue with this statement is that it has consequences in the legal system for law enforcement, lawyers, and regular citizens caught up in the law system. People too often forget the distinction between how the narrative is presented and how the events actually unfolded (Brooks). By recognizing this distinction, the problem of anticipated ends and false recounts of events would be much less of an issue.
Brooks describes narration faults in law by first introducing ways of gathering evidence. Brooks describes “inevitable discovery” as “a doctrine that allows the prosecution to use results of an illegal search, one in violation of the Fourth Amendment rules on searches and seizures, if it can show that what was found would inevitably have been discovered if legal means had been used to discover it.” (Brooks). The issue with inevitable discovery is that no one can know what would have happened without it happening. One cannot prove inevitability, so this idea that the discovery was inevitable is not accurate. It confuses the logic of telling vs. happening which makes the story of an event seem like the way it happened (Brooks).
Brooks uses this way of gathering evidence to introduce the idea of “retrospective prophecy”, which he describes as “a construction of the story of the past by way of its outcome” (Brooks). When looking at evidence in a case, one can only piece together what happened based on the information one was presented with. The problem with this is that lawyers in particular use this as a way to shape the narrative of a story based on evidence. In other words, if the prosecution is describing a story that paints the defendant as guilty because of evidence, they are shaping the narrative to tell the story that they want to tell. The defense can then shape a different narrative also based on the evidence, but shaping it in a way that makes the defendant look innocent. These different ways of framing the narrative make it hard to know what events took place, and what evidence is helping to tell the story.
Narration has such a large amount of power because it can change people’s views on the events that took place or evidence presented to them. The telling of events and showing of evidence is crucial in law. In a court case it can determine someone’s sentence, which is life-changing. By learning about narration in law, one can see that it isn’t always just facts and logic but also stories woven from evidence by lawyers and presented to jurors for them to make their own interpretations.
I thought that this way of looking at narration in terms of law was tremendously interesting, and it was something that I had never really thought about before. The way that Brooks described narration as “the way we speak events” as opposed to the events themselves was very interesting because it wasn’t something that I had previously taken the time to think about before. If we were to look at “Charles Augustus Milverton” by Arthur Conan Doyle through Brooks’ lens of narration, we could recognize Watson as the narrator and determine his validity or reliability as a narrator. In the short story, Watson is recalling events that have already happened in a way that is interesting to a reader, so this can change our understanding or interpretation of the story, and this was a point Brooks was trying to make. This whole essay of Brooks’ was a good source of information about law practices as well and I was able to see the connection between law and literature that he was presenting to the readers.
Works Cited
Brooks, Peter. “Retrospective Prophecies: Legal Narrative Constructions” New Directions in Law and Literature, edited by Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 92-108.
Ode on a Grecian Urn: Brooks’ Interpretation
The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry was a journal written by Cleanth Brooks. In this part of the journal, Brooks writes about John Keats’ poem On a Grecian Urn. Brooks first brings up other critics’ thoughts on the poem, before diving into his own analysis and interpretation that is much different from theirs.
The main issue or question that the author is trying to find the answer to is “what is the relation of the beauty (the goodness, the perfection) of a poem to the truth or falsity of what it seems to assert?” (Brooks 140). In other words, are the poem’s words true in relation to the context of the whole poem, or are they just there for beautification? The words in particular that Brooks is asking this question about are the words in line 9 stanza 5: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”.
Brooks compares Keats’ poem to a line from King Lear, “Ripeness is all”. He figures that if this line is true because of the context of the rest of Shakespeare’s play, then it is possible that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” can also be made true by the context of the rest of the poem On a Grecian Urn. Brooks asks another similar question: “our specific question is not what did Keats the man perhaps want to assert here about the relation of beauty and truth; it is rather: was Keats the poet able to exemplify that relation in this particular poem?” (Brooks 141). This question relates back to the first question of whether or not “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” was made true in relation to the rest of the poem because it is again asking if Keats was able to assert about beauty and truth what he set out to assert with the entirety of the poem. Throughout his work, Brooks uses evidence from Keats poem to show the characterization and even personification of the urn, leading up to the main point that these two lines “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is in fact “in character” in relation to the rest of the poem. He figures that if he were to demonstrate the speech being in character, then the lines would have the same justification of “Ripeness is all” (Brooks 142).
By being able to see how Keats set up the rest of the poem as context for those two lines in the same way that Shakespeare’s context in King Lear set up for the line “Ripeness is all”, we then see how two completely different writers do the same thing in slightly different ways, and how important it is for writer of any genre to set up context in their work so that the entirety of it fits together. Other critics criticized Keats’ poem for not setting up properly for the lines “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” and in this journal Brooks was able to use their logic for Shakespeare’s works and apply it to Keats’, thereby using their words against them.
I think that Brooks’ analysis and interpretation of Keats’ poem was similar to mine. When interpreting the poem, I thought a lot about the personification of the urn and how it itself told a story in the same way the poem was telling the story of the urn. Brooks focuses a lot on the characterization of the urn, which makes sense considering the point he was trying to make was that the lines “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” were in character for the urn and for the poem itself. In my interpretation, I also thought that these lines were in character for the rest of the poem. During my first and second reads through the poem, I wasn’t quite sure what the meaning of these lines were, but after more close reading of the other stanzas, I was able to picture the described scenes and could hear the tone that the urn was “telling” its story in. I didn’t find myself resisting or questioning Brooks’ analysis, although there were times when I thought he was straying away from the main point of his analysis a little but it still seemed natural to me within his entire interpretation. Brooks’ work made me look again through my notes on the poem, and relate some of our thoughts and interpretations.
Works Cited
Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1947.
