Alyssa Wallingford
Professor Catherine Frank
English 206
September 22, 2022
Critique of Narrative In Law
Peter Brooks seeks to analyze the concepts behind the art of narratives, and how the differences between the two can produce a big impact. In his chapter in the book New Directions in Law and Literature, titled Retrospective Prophecies, Brooks sets out to prove the importance of these pieces of tale and telling, and how they interact with readers to lead to different results with his main focus in the legal system. In his words, “the narrative construction of reality as an explanatory system surely is omnipresent, and it needs to be recognized as a construction rather than accepted as one of the givens of the real”(Brooks 104). He also uses “The Adventures of Charles Augustus Milverton” to explain how the narrative changes depending on how the story is told.
How the story is told, also described as the telling, is a huge determinant in how the reader or receiver of the story processes that narrative, and makes an opinion about it. Brooks offers numerous examples as to how the telling can change the ultimate opinion formed or the conclusion that is drawn after experiencing it. He wants to connect this idea of the tale and telling to law, but it is not recognised as being as important as he claims it to be. There are classes emphasizing the importance of controlling the narrative, but no one ever seems to talk about the true impact of this, nor do they acknowledge its integral part in law. But Brooks also points out that there could be a valid reason as to why narrative is so powerful in law, but is not really discussed. He says that if people were to readily point out that the narrative and character of a defendant has such a pull in a courtroom, people would then have to admit that the law is more dependent on rhetoric than originally thought (Brooks 102).
He also wants to prove how integral Holmes’ practice of how he solves cases is to both the plot of the story and also a broader context. This particular Holmes story begins with a crime: blackmail, a staple in the detective genre. But by the end, this crime is solved, but a mystery remains unanswered: who is the woman that they saw, and why won’t they say anything about her? The case is solved, but so many questions go unaddressed, and this could be the reason as to why Arthur Conan Doyle has been set apart from others in the detective genre. I find it intriguing that Brooks does not mention these unanswered questions as a support to his argument to the importance of narrative, since these questions leave the reader feeling partially unfulfilled, even though technically, the case has been solved. This method of how Holmes solves the case, Brooks claims, is a process of abduction, which is “inference to the best explanation”(Brooks 94), rather than deduction. In knowing the outcome, you can then come up with the most likely scenario based on what you know was the result. Brooks also calls this “retrospective prophecy”(Brooks 97). He claims that this is a tool that both Sherlock Holmes and normal, everyday courtrooms use, wanting to show both its fictional and real uses. In court and in stories, narratives are important, and can control the flow of a story. As he puts it, “narrative allows us to put things in a meaningful sequence to find the answers or conclusions to our questions or series of events.”(Brooks 98) These ideas of Brooks line up quite well with the literary theory of structuralism, which also, like Brooks, places importance on the difference between how events actually happened vs how they were told to have happened, also referred to as the tale and the telling.
What I find to be the most interesting about Brooks’ claims is as I look back at all of the stories that I have told and have read, I can’t think of one instance in which the way in which the story was told, and what was and was not left out of telling, did not have an impact on how I processed that story. Regardless of what it was, everything from the word choice to the order of the events told all affected my perception of the story, whether either of us thought about it or not. Something that I am unsure about though, is near the end, when Brooks is discussing concluding thoughts, if one of his claims is that reality is constructed, and not actually factual, how would he go about proving it? Is this actually what he means, or is he simply talking about within the aspects of the law? These ideas of narrative have implications far past that of law, and although for the purposes of Peter Brooks’ analysis he chose a specific field to focus in, it would be interesting to see how other fields are affected as well. In conclusion, narratives not only give the teller different ways in which to tell the same story, it also has an effect on how the people who receive those narratives process and form an opinion about what they think happened as well.
Works Cited
Brooks, Peter. “Retrospective Prophecies.” New Directions in Law and Literature, by Peter Brooks, edited by Elizabeth Anker and Bernadette Meyler, New York, NY, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 92–108.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton. Simbach Am Inn] Miniaturbuchverlag Leipzig, 2017, file:///C:/Users/awall/Downloads/The%20Adventure%20of%20Charles%20Augustus%20Milverton%20chas.pdf. Accessed 18 Sept. 2022.
