by Philip Meyer
In mitigation, Eddings produced the testimony of four expert witnesses. Stephen Dorn, petitioner’s Missouri probation officer, testified that he had met Monty Eddings when Eddings was fourteen and was referred to the juvenile authorities for four break-ins and for tampering with a motor vehicle. In investigating Eddings’ past, Officer Dorn learned that, when Eddings was five years old, his natural parents were divorced. From the time he was five until he was fourteen, Eddings remained with his mother, Mary Kinney, in Jasper County, Missouri. During this period, Ms. Kinney used alcohol excessively, and, according to Jasper County authorities, may have been involved in prostitution. The report which Probation Officer Dorn “received from the Jasper County Juvenile Court was … that … Monty could pretty much—in their own language—do his own thing. He could come and go when he wanted to … starting at the age of five.” Observing that a childhood without rules or discipline often “leads [to] a chaotic adolescence,” Officer Dorn testified that when Monty Eddings turned fourteen, Ms. Kinney sent him to his natural father, Ronald Eddings, “because she couldn’t control the child.”
Ronald Eddings proved a marked contrast to Ms. Kinney in his child-rearing methods. Officer Dorn described him as “quite an authoritarian,” noting that “Monty was always fearful of his father, because his father tended to overreact; or rather than discuss things with him, would take it out in more physical means … [b]eatings, slapped, that sort.” According to Officer Dorn, Eddings’s step mother was unable to “cope with the problems of a fourteen … year old male child with serious emotional behavior”—indeed, her reports to juvenile authorities on Monty Eddings “indicated some sort of schism of thought.” In Officer Dorn’s view,
Monty was very scared, I think, of his home situation with his father. He was very hostile. Monty didn’t have anyone he could turn to and discuss his problems; and I think Monty was holding a lot of these things within him, and what happened was just a combination of Monty holding everything in and just releasing it all at one time. Towards the end, he became very hostile and bitter.
Officer Dorn summarized that Monty Eddings’s actions derived from “a mother who didn’t have time for him in Jasper County … a stormy history of divorce; a … step-mother up in Camdenton who he finally goes to live with who has no idea how to raise a child, and who, herself, had problems with children; a father who didn’t have time for anything but doing his job.” …
… Eddings’s final witness in mitigation was Dr. Anthony C. Gagliano, a licensed psychiatrist in private practice in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Dr. Gagliano interviewed Eddings in the Sapula County Jail. He indicated that Eddings “was very upset about [his parents’] divorce” when he was five, “[a]nd he had always maintained the fantasy that they would remarry.” His natural mother instead remarried a policeman from Joplin, Missouri, when Eddings was seven, and Eddings responded with “anger, hatred, rebellion, rejection, loss.” Dr. Gagliano told of one incident when Eddings
… wanted to impress his mother or father. I don’t know why he did it, but he washed down the walls, and he thought it would be nice if the walls were clean. And his [step-]father walked in, and I think removed his shoe and hit him quite severely with his shoe for dirtying the walls.
Dr. Gagliano stated that the incident engendered “Anger. Hatred.”
Dr. Gagliano diagnosed Eddings as suffering from “an antisocial or a dissocial disorder,” characterized by an “arrested emotional development at age seven” and an inability to display his emotions. He stated that at the time Officer Crabtree was shot, Eddings “acted as a seven year old seeking revenge … [against] the original cause of his anger … the Policeman who married his mother, and who stole his mother away.” Eddings’ disorder could be treated, Dr. Gagliano thought, though the treatment might take “many years—fifteen or twenty years of real intensive therapy.”23
When we compare this mitigation story and the environments depicted within it with the two excerpts from While They Slept we find they both employ quotations, witness testimony, and affidavits. Both provide generalizations about the impact of the environment on the defendant to crystallize these abstractions. Both shift perspectives strategically, enabling the reader to understand various aspects of the story.
In Eddings’s brief, however, the detailing is not nearly as vivid and there is none of the movement characteristic of Billy Gilley’s dark journey. Stylistically, the simple declarative sentences depict slices from Monty Eddings’s past spliced together with the testimony of various expert witnesses. There are some assertions about how Eddings’s childhood history affects his conduct, but the incidents supporting these assertions (whether the precise circumstances of Monty Eddings’s childhood or incidents such as when the stepfather hits Eddings with his shoe) are not as compelling or as dramatic as the accounts of abuse in Harrison’s storytelling.
The differences in Eddings’s brief and Harrison’s Billy Gilley story can be accounted for in various ways: they may arise from the material available in the record, the abilities of the storyteller, different aesthetic conventions of drafting a “Statement of the Case” in a brief to the U. S. Supreme Court, or the creation of an environment that is appropriate to the purposes of the argument, rather than constructing the most powerful and compelling mitigation story possible.
In Eddings, the narrative is left undercooked or undeveloped. The particular quality of the environment depicted in Eddings is both intentional and purposeful. The straightforward presentational style of Eddings’s brief, likewise, chooses not to overdramatize the facts. Eddings’s environment is appropriate to this brief and fits the legal purposes of the argument. Unlike Harrison’s narrative, the story is not designed to depict evil or terror. Instead, it takes slices of Eddings’s past from the perspective of two of these witnesses (a policeman and a psychiatrist). The story is simply designed to meet a lower threshold and to demonstrate that the evidence of Eddings’s past and social history were legitimate mitigating factors that should have been taken into account in determining Eddings’s punishment. The legal argument in this brief is left to do the heavy lifting and the narrative is made subservient to it, whereas Harrison’s depiction of Billy Gilley’s past was designed to persuade the reader that parricide was all but inevitable and that Billy Gilley took the only possible escape route that he believed was available to him.
V. Concluding Observations
All stories require a place for the events of the story to unfold. The skillful writer can determine the way in which the reader or listener interprets and understands the events of the story through strategic choices about how the setting is developed and described. Some stories will require the setting to be described in poetically presented sensate fragments, pulling the reader into the setting. Others will require that the place be only minimally described or not described at all, purposefully requiring the reader to supplement the setting with his own imagination or leaving the place a mystery. As we have seen from the legal and nonlegal examples, setting, place, detail, and environment can be implemented in countless ways. What is clear is that the legal writer who thinks strategically about how to describe the setting, how to set the stage, can evoke the power of environments to strongly affect the reader and possibly determine the story’s ending.
8
Narrative Time
A BRIEF EXPLORATION
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened
on his wedding day. He has walked through that door in
1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back
through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his
birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits
to all the events in between.
He says.
Billy is spastic in time, he has no control over where he is
going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in
; a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never
knows what part of his life he is going to have to act next.
— KURT VONNEGUT JR., SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE
OR THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE: A DUTY-DANCE
WITH DEATH
I. Introduction
In legal writing and clinical skills courses, young lawyers and law students are typically instructed to organize their presentation of facts simply and “chronologically.” They are told to keep the presentation straightforward and candid, and to be wary of overly shaping the facts of the story. But this instruction is, at best, naïve, and, more accurately, deceptive and self-deluding. First, chronology is not an all-encompassing or a preferential strategy for organizing events in narrative time but merely one modality (perhaps the default mode) for ordering events into story. In chronology, story time appears to mimic how time unfolds in “real life” and seems to order events onto a shared “one-size-fits-all” narrative spine. Many stories are unlike the events that occur in our daily lives, which are measured against the clock. In complex stories there is seldom a strict or pure linear chronology available. Language, almost by its nature, does not allow it; we seemingly move back and forth effortlessly in story time, and do so in extremely subtle and complex ways. Intuitively, we make selective choices from events as we shape them into stories, and we bend malleable story time to fit the demands of narrative. The depiction of time in all but the simplest of stories is, on close inspection, extremely complex, far more complex than a strict and literal chronology contemplates or allows.
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.
II. The Ordering of Discourse Time
A. The Sequence of the Telling: Billy Pilgrim Watches the Movie Backward
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
B. Chronology
Chronology describes the dominant principle purportedly employed by legal storytellers to organize the telling of their stories i
n 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.