Questioning Cerriere's Answer

-- By CarolineFerrisWhite - 15 Apr 2010

Truth, Beauty, and the Law

Martha Tharaud believes that "the truth will be revealed." She is speaking about the fundamental nature of the employment relationship, but her words have a Keatsian ring; in talking about truth as an abstract, she is also talking about beauty. Downtown Manhattan speaks to her in artists' names. She loves buildings for the other, imagined spaces they suggest: a palazzo in Venice, a café in Vienna. Her conversation is peppered with Dreiser and Dante. Her final speech before meeting Cerriere reveals that this interest in art is not that of a dilettante, but is of central importance. "That, finally, is what it is. To know anything about beauty, you have to take the trouble to learn." Most lawyers don't, and "there are a lot of people hurt by it, really hurt." This provokes a sense of futility in her: "I'm not sure, either, what you can do about it, other than protect yourself, protect what you believe in, those whom you love. I'm really not sure there's a whole lot more you can do about it."

As a lawyer, Tharaud has built a career (and a fortune) by knowing exactly what is to be done about her clients' problems, but here she is at a loss. This is a pivotal moment in the story, signaling both a formal rupture--the end of a scene--and a thematic crescendo. Tharaud reveals the importance of the way that she connects with the world, and makes a startling claim: art matters to the law. Not only does the appreciation "of subtlety, of beauty" make you a more capable lawyer, but without that capacity, a lawyer is a dangerous thing. To respond to beauty you must be open to the world and its vicissitudes, you must be able to feel many things and care about more than just putting "money in your pockets." But this also leaves you vulnerable. You have to "protect yourself."

At the Fishhouses

This passage in "Cerriere's Answer" took me back to the second week of law school. I came home from Legal Methods, overwhelmed, terrified, and full of doubt, pulled my Elizabeth Bishop off the shelf, and flipped to "At the Fishhouses." I surprised myself by bursting into tears.

The poem begins with a landscape of silver and fog. Sea, fishhouses, and lobster pots shimmer in the gloaming. Everything is interconnected: flies and the fish scales reflect each other's iridescence; the fisherman is covered in sequins of scales, a fish's "principal beauty." From this homely yet sublime place, the poem finds its way to flight in its closing lines.

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Through highly specific, attentive observation of the physical world – its harmonies and disharmonies, its beauty and its stench, the interdependence of all things – Bishop accesses a higher order. For Tharaud, that higher order is truth and beauty, but they are both talking about the same thing. Bishop calls it "knowledge," and this was the word that made me cry. Bishop reminded me that knowledge is unalterable: "dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free," it cannot be corrupted. In coming to law school, I had accessed a language and a community of minds that could help me build freedom, no matter how manacled I felt at the time. Tharaud evinces a similar sense of liberation through knowledge/truth when she says "in due course, what can be proved and what cannot will be clear to us all." Like Tharaud, I believe it.

Tharaud might hear herself echoed in the poem's only refrain: "Cold dark deep and absolutely clear." I hear her, and other fragments drawn from this class: Lawyerland's epigraph from Rilke ("in the depths everything becomes law"), Eben's exhortation to "think deeper in time," even Felix Cohen and the importance of the unconscious. At the time, of course, I hadn't thought about any of these things, but I felt no less comforted. In acquiring knowledge, "derived from the rocky breasts," we create a primal and nourishing relationship between ourselves and world. This relationship is both happening and happened, present and past, and we are all a part of it. What could be more soothing to the isolated and disaffected law student?

Bishop in Lawyerland

Tharaud sits just across the table from Cerriere, yet they may as well be separated by an abyss. Tharaud sees the truth of the world in the employment relationship; Cerriere sees employment as a transaction that should be as efficient as possible. Their differing approaches to their profession has to do with their differing views of the world. Tharaud sees beauty; Cerriere sees that the world is full of violence, that it is arbitrary, and there is nothing that anyone can do to change that. It is also changing rapidly, with terabits replacing gold bars as dominant units of meaning and power. Cerriere might understand the futility that drives Tharaud to protect herself and the ones that she loves, but he finds himself on the other side of the table from her because he can't see anything worth saving.

I do not agree with Tharaud and Cerriere that their differences are irreconcilable. I feel both their points of view. Cerriere detests Tharaud's self righteousness, finds it ridiculous to worry about the lives of the working class when people are being tortured and executed arbitrarily. Ideas, he seems to say, are frippery at best and lethal at worst; hence his reliance on data and efficiency. There's a humanity to Cerriere, but it has lost its way. On this point, Tharaud and I may not agree. The two are adversaries, after all, and when there are only two sides, you have to pick one. But do you? This class has taught me the value of holding two contradictory things together in your mind at once, of accepting that light is a particle and also a wave. This is how you come to think creatively as a lawyer, and to ask the kinds of questions that lead you to something that wasn't there before.

For Joseph, the question "what are lawyers like?" produced a work of art, a complete universe unto itself. Legal realists tell us that the law is not about logic, but about experience. Joseph brings this concept to his art. He shows us that to know what lawyers are like, we must know what they do, so he lets them speak, virtually uninterrupted, and lets us observe them in the world. Bishop also cared for questions. In her poem "The Moose," a busload of nighttime travelers comes across a moose standing in the road. The sight of this unexpected creature prompts the speaker to ask:

Why, why do we feel
(we all feel)
this sweet sensation of joy?

The answer is in the question itself: in the community ("we") it creates, in the higher order ("joy") it has touched. Questions don't always contain their own responses, however, and this essay asks more than it answers. Why is the shared artistic project of Bishop, Joseph, and Tharaud of importance to the law? Can feeling deeply about art really make me a better lawyer? How can I avoid Cerriere's fate without forgetting that like all lawyers, I suppose, he was a child once?

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