By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm:
What happened to Flight 370? For more than two weeks the world has searched for answers. As of press time for this post, investigators have found debris that they believe marks the end of the flight in the Indian Ocean, but that is just prompting new, possibly unanswerable questions about why the plane veered so far off course. These initial and potentially continuing lack of answers has made the Malaysian flight story a very difficult one for us to handle. We like our stories to be nicely buttoned up as soon as possible. From Aristotle all the way to today’s media, we are used to stories that have completion, resolution, and closure. There is a familiar structure that moves setting through conflict to resolution. So what happens if we never know exactly what happened? That is a practical question many media organizations have been asking. “What if the Missing Malaysia Plane is Never Found?” the title of a recent Huffington Post piece asked, before the most recent debris was found. “When something like this happens that confounds us, we’re offended by it and we’re scared by it,” the piece quotes Ric Gillespie, a former U.S. aviation accident investigator. “We had the illusion of control and it’s just been shown to us that oh, folks, you know what? A really big airliner can just vanish. And nobody wants to hear that.”
What also has confounded us for the past 15 days, though, is the lack of ending. When families receive bad news about a missing person, it is often said, “At least they know now what happened. At least they have closure.” Withholding that closure prevents us from packaging, naming, and storing the experience. Litigators are also storytellers, and also want their stories to be complete. Still, particularly in law, there are unknowns that might never be resolved. That runs up against a need for closure that I’ve written about before, noting that it is a measurable psychological trait, and also a state that can be influenced by how we tell the story in the first place. This latest example of a possible story without a natural ending prompts for me the questions: “What exactly is closure?” and “How can litigators and other storytellers refashion closure when they’re denied a natural and factual ending point?”
What Is Closure?
That seems like that ought to be simply answered: Closure is an ending to the story. But when it comes to defining exactly what that means, it is likely that we’ll adopt Potter Stewart’s adage of “I know it when I see it” or, in the case of closure, perhaps “feel it,” noting the subjective sense of finality and completeness that tells us that a story is at an end. A finer point on definition, though, comes from CUNY professor Noël Carroll, a leader in the philosophy of art and cinema. His 2007 article, “Narrative Closure,” provides one argument for how we can identify the ending point of a story. To Professor Carroll, closure occurs for the reader once the questions proposed by the narrative itself have been answered. That might sound simple, but note that the test isn’t, and can’t be “when all questions are answered,” but is instead “when the questions generated by the story are answered.” Carroll explains (spoiler alert if you’re currently reading Melville’s book):
Two of the presiding macro-questions of Moby Dick are ‘Will Ahab and his crew ever find the white whale?’ and ‘If they do, will they be able to kill it?’ When the Pequod encounters other ships that have knowledge of the whereabouts of the whale, those scenes contribute to keeping the reader bound to the story. When we finally learn the outcome of the deadly confrontation and that all of the crew, save one, of the Pequod have perished, the novel is over. An added chapter about the grand opening of Ishmael’s dry goods store in New London would be inappropriate.
Now, you might think, “Well, that is obvious, of course the story ends when the main questions are answered.” But, when you abstract beyond the tightly-structured novel and apply that idea to the messy world of human affairs, it raises some other questions.
What Questions Are Naturally Raised by the Narrative?
Moving from Moby Dick to the mock trial, it is generally the case that mock jurors have all kinds of questions after they’ve heard summary arguments from both sides. From the trial team, it is common for their reactions, to at least some of these questions, to be: “That’s irrelevant,” or “The case isn’t focusing on that,” or “In the real trial, they will never hear an answer to that.” These may all be true circumstances, but that does not stop the jurors from generating questions. In many cases, those questions are going to be off-topic, but they will still be a distraction. When there is a noticeable trend in your mock trial research pointing to something that jurors want to know, then you either have to provide some kind of answer to that question if you can, or refashion your story so that jurors are focused away from that question if you cannot.
For example, in a products liability case, jurors might naturally wonder if any subsequent measures have been taken to address the chance of injury. In some cases, that can and should be answered with a definitive “Yes” or “No” depending on the case. In other circumstances, though, it will be better to draw juror attention away from the present time frame by putting brackets around what is most relevant. You can’t guarantee that the question won’t come up, but you can minimize its salience by emphasizing a clear ending point on the timeline and the story, and by giving jurors a reason why this is the period of time that matters most.
What Happens When Questions Cannot Be Answered?
At times, and potentially still in the case of Flight 370, even the most directly relevant questions that a story proposes may never be answered. In that case, the question is what becomes of the story and the audience for that story. As I’ve written before, a juror’s ability to tolerate incompleteness is a trait that can be measured in something called the “Need for Closure” scale. In addition to potentially using questions like these to identify who would be more or less troubled by the remaining gaps, the research also shows that embracing story structure itself, rather than an issue-by-issue approach, can in effect teach a tolerance for some incompleteness, because we still expect stories to be less complete than arguments.
In the case of the missing Malaysian airliner and media stories like the Huffington Post piece discussed above, as well as others from CNN and the New York Times, the media adapts by moving away from a question that cannot be answered (yet), “What happened to the plane?” and focusing instead on a question that can be answered, “How will we cope with a lack of knowledge if the plane is never found?” Litigators can do the same. Jurors want to know “What does the missing memo say?” and if that can never be answered, then the skillful litigator will redirect them to the question, “Why would that memo go missing in the first place?” Since the goal is to create closure even in the face of unknowns, then the effective persuader will focus on what we can know, see, and decide, and not on what we cannot.
Going back to the title, “finding” your closure won’t always mean giving your audience the closure that they expect or even demand. Instead, it can mean creating a closure that provides a finality even in the face of incomplete facts. That finality can often be found in the jurors’ own role. That role might be to balance the scales by finding for a plaintiff or to uphold other principles like evidence and burden of proof by refusing to do so. It can also mean filling in some gaps on their own. By encouraging them to be part of the story and to write its final chapter, you empower the jury to act as their own form of closure.
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Other Posts on Narrative and Other Forms of Closure:
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Carroll, N. (2007). Narrative closure. Philosophical Studies, 135(1), 1-15. URL: https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/hinchman/www/Carroll-NarrativeClosure.pdf
Photo Credit: Uhuru1701, Flickr Creative Commons