Taking Law Seriously

Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities Volume 7 | Issue 2 Article 7 January 1995 Taking Law Seriously Robert Weisberg Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh Part of the History Commons, and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Robert Weisberg, Taking Law Seriously, 7 Yale J.L. & Human. (1995). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol7/iss2/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities by an authorized editor of Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact . Weisberg: Taking Law Seriously Taking Law Seriously William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own. New York: Poseidon Press, 1994. Pp. 586. $25.00 Robert Weisberg A Frolic of His Own is not merely the finest novel ever written about the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure .... In an era when students who have not paid the dues of reading Eliot, Yeats, or even Wordsworth claim the privilege of postmodernist critique, William Gaddis's Frolic may prove temptation or corrective. It will prove temptation if its howling swirl of disconnected voices and its pronouncements about the reducibility of law to language receive false praise and are condescendingly characterized as postmodernist. It will prove corrective if viewed as a blessedly oldfashioned modernist novel, or, better yet, as an even older-fashioned cri de coeur for personal salvation, if not social justice, as a value still undeconstructed. Even more fundamentally, it will prove corrective as a display of linguistic art capable of anger, hysterical humor, and undeconstructable prose assertion. As a first step, I will risk naive referentiality in the most literal sense: I will say what the novel is about. It is about an insanely neurotic man named Oscar Crease who, like other characters in the book, cannot overcome his conviction that the justice system is the best medium for winning recognition of his yearnings, beliefs, and claims of integrity. As observed by Oscar's sister Christina, the sweetsouled and tragically realistic demurrer to all overheated plaintiffs in the book: "the money's just a yardstick isn't it. It's the only common reference people have for making other people take them as seriously as they take themselves,... Though money may be the currency of law according to Christina, the message of the book is that law itself is the debased currency of all social relationships. Anyone who has worked in a civil court knows that the clerk's office regularly receives pleadings filed by 1. WiLLIAM GADDIS, A FROLIC OF HIS OWN 11 (1994). Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 1995 1 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 7, Iss. 2 [1995], Art. 7 446 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities [Vol. 7: 445 paranoid schizophrenics who, using the most elaborately formal legal language, sue the Pope, the President, the Commissioner of the NFL, along with other parties, named and unnamed, who are most demonstrably engaged in a conspiracy against them. From Gaddis's perspective, the crazed regular courthouse pleader is not so much aberrant in his mental condition as representative of us all in his belief that the civil justice system is the best medium for all desperate hopes for recognition, respect, and solace. The civil complaint is thus the sonnet of our times. This belief is essentially the theme of A Frolic of His Own. Indeed, while normal conversation and casual affective language in the book may be stilted, stereotypical, and unexpressive, the loonier manipulations of legal jargon are its true poetry of feeling and idealism. Oscar, who seems to be sitting around in his bathrobe, eating and drinking throughout the book, is a middle-aged, occasional history instructor and playwright living in a frumpy relic of aristocratic real estate on Long Island. He has become a professional plaintiff, but all his suits go awry. Oscar sues for personal injury damages because his own car ran him over, and learns more than he cares to about civil procedure and tort. More notably, he sues because part of his play, Once at Antietam, has been appropriated by a sleazeball filmmaker named Kiester for an extravagantly profitable junk film called The Blood in the Red, White, and Blue. Oscar's copyright suit leads him to ask his brother-in-law Harry Lutz to supply a lawyer. Deeply empathetic but compromised by his own role in the corporate legal world, Harry supplies a lawyer, Basie, who appears to be at the top of the class in terms of legal sophistication, even after he is exposed, or perhaps celebrated, as a mere actor playing the role of lawyer under false license. Oscar is the ultimate plaintiff-in part because of the representative poignancy of his pleas in his magnificently absurd copyright infringement lawsuit, and in part because he is the ultimate defendant: he literally must sue himself. Oscar stood in front of his car while trying to start the ignition with a wire; once started, it ran him over.2 Oscar's parlor is a vortex of wildly clashing legal voices, human and otherwise. Through him or near him are heard lawyers' sleazy settlement offers; judges' absurdly pompous yet elegantly articulate renderings of human (and canine) accidents in regal formalism; lawyers' torturings of formal language in deposition disputes beyond what is dreamt of in analytic philosophy courses; and lawyers' pleadings in which the baroque technicalities of the civil complaint 2. GADDIS, supra note 1, at 18. https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol7/iss2/7 2 Weisberg: Taking Law Seriously 1995] Weisberg 447 ironically capture the frustration of the all-too-human plaintiff. The copyright suit also invites a second clash of voices, the literary. Oscar's play is, most notably, itself a work of (legal) plagiarism, since by his own admission the play is an homage to Plato; less admittedly, it steals from Camus and Rousseau, and probably infringes Eugene O'Neill's work. It is also a contemporary Augustan Dunciad denouncing the Babel-babble of legalistic fools. It is a Sterne-like comic jaunt. This book is far too devoted an homage to modernist giants to be demeaned as a postmodernist critique of the authenticity of the literary voice. More relevantly, the play within a novel is a terrific pastiche of modem literature. The melodramatic Once at Antietam is, at the very least, bad Faulkner. Maniacally interwoven through the other screaming voices in the novel, Once at Antietam becomes part of an Eliotic Wasteland and an exuberant Joycean satire-as edited by Nabokov. Or the play may be what we would have if Joyce were to capture a satirist capturing how Eliot, in his own homage to Dickens ("he do the police in different voices" 3 ), would rewrite Absalom, Absalom! The homages here are respectful to the originals, as P. D. Q. Bach is to Johann (...truncated)