Narratives of Enlightenment 105

read like traditional law review articles, essays that emphasize story and the“inner” experience of individuals over the logical syllogism and the analytical reasoning that characterize mainstream doctrinal legal scholarship.® It is“a form of countermajoritarian argument, a genre for oppositionists intent on showing up the exclusions that occur in legal business-as-usual— a way of saying, you cannot understand until you have listened to our story.”

These oppositional narratives, not surprisingly, have touched anerve among mainstream legal scholars. These authors, though they concede the value of many of the claims of narrative jurisprudence, find its weakness in its lack of any evaluative mechanism. If “storytelling in law is narrative within a culture of argument,” it is

presumably necessary to distinguish what counts as a good argument from a bad one. Yet this, say the mainstream scholars, is precisely what storytelling cannot do." A story that recounts one’s personal

experience is not an example of reasoned argument. It is essentially an example of emotive and intuitive discourse, and it cannot be subjected to the test of accuracy. The fact that“this is my story” does not make my story an accurate depiction of legal reality; merely because someone deeply feels a certain thing to be true does not mean it is true. Storytelling is self-consciously a matter of perspective; it invariably promotes a particular point of view. And that point of view is not necessarily more“true” than or morally superior to other competing perspectives. A story can just as easily promote a bad outcome— indeed, the narrativists claim that the stories of the dominant culture do just that—as a good one, and when we have disposed of our“foundations” of judgment and evaluation, any story, like any interpretation, can make an equally valid claim to the title of“truth.” Narrativists respond that this is precisely the point: the conventional criteria of legal evaluation that mainstream scholars seek to defend are“objective” only because the background assumptions that make them seem that way have been largely unexamined. In other words, the very possibility of impartial