The Most "Powerful Tool of Persuasion"
In this review of Angus Fletcher's Wonderworks, I
revisit a courtroom experience where a defendant's unscripted, emotional outcry
— rather than a formal apology — moved both the bench and the gallery, and I
connect it to the neuroscience of persuasion this book describes. I also
reflect on why endless demands for retributive justice can harden a society,
and why forgiveness and apology serve a real neurological function of their
own. Finally, I trace how the emotional numbness that years of high-intensity legal
work produced in me was, until this book, an obstacle I couldn't fully explain
— let alone overcome.
Book: Wonderworks: Literary Invention and the Science of Stories (Korean
edition: 우리는 지금 문학이 필요하다)
Author: Angus
Fletcher
I found Wonderworks a demanding read for anyone who doesn't ordinarily gravitate toward literary criticism. As someone who reads mostly non-fiction, I admit it took me considerably longer than usual to finish it. Even so, I think this book has a great deal to offer not only to people in my own profession but to readers generally. In the course of reading it, I also finally understood something I hadn't been able to put my finger on before: why I had long wanted to write a novel, yet had never managed to actually write one.
The Limits of Retributive
Justice
The first thing in this book that resonated
with me was its recognition of a real problem: the danger of an unrelenting,
never-satisfied pursuit of "justice."
Fletcher explains that the brain's craving for
fairness is not only ancient but remarkably powerful. Modern psychologists have
found this craving strong enough that people will spend their own money and
risk their own health enforcing fairness even in disputes that don't involve
them directly. The emotional pull is intense enough that people will put
themselves in harm's way simply to see a wrongdoer face judgment.
I think this impulse runs particularly strong
in Korean society. Often it is the actual victim who is prepared to say,
"that's enough," or, "given how sincerely he's apologized,
perhaps it's time to forgive him" — while it is the people around the
victim who insist on a harsher line. Even when the victim signals that the
matter can be laid to rest, third parties who were never harmed at all
frequently demand that the offender be "punished,"
"ruined," or "never allowed to show his face in society
again," pursuing a version of "justice" that is really their
own.
Watching this pattern play out, I have often
found myself asking:
"Is that actually justice?"
I had long suspected that this reflexive
demand for "justice" was precisely what makes a society barren — a
place with no room for forgiveness, no tolerance for reconciliation. I was
struck by how directly the book names this same dynamic:
Forgiveness, Fletcher writes, allows us to
spare a wrongdoer, and in doing so we head off the harsh social consequences
that full, uncompromising justice would otherwise bring — while also freeing
our own brains from the corrosive effects of prolonged anger and distrust.
Why Forgiveness and Apology
Matter More Than We Think
I believe the pursuit of justice matters, but
a society only functions well when it is paired with a genuine capacity for
forgiveness. That is something I think victims themselves should keep in mind
as well: as the book suggests, no one can spend an entire lifetime hating and
resenting an offender, carrying that hostility indefinitely. In my own
experience, the more I dwelled on hatred toward a wrongdoer and channeled my
anger into demanding justice, the more that anger corroded my own emotional
life and got in the way of simply living well. I've come to believe that when
an offender genuinely seeks forgiveness, the more constructive path is to
forgive with an open heart — freeing yourself, too, from the weight of that
negative experience.
An apology, moreover, is not only valuable at
the level of society at large — it also does real work for the individual.
When our brains register an apology as
genuine, Fletcher notes, negative emotions such as anger and a sense of
victimhood measurably decrease, while positive emotions such as trust and
affection increase.
Literature as a Legal Strategy:
A Lesson from My Own Courtroom Experience
The second idea in this book that resonated
with me is its argument that literary technique can have a real, measurable
effect on advocacy and persuasion. I agree with this completely — I have used
exactly this kind of technique myself, with results I could feel in the room.
In 2019, I had a case in which the defendant's
anguished, half-articulate outburst — a mixture of lament, regret, and remorse
— filled the courtroom. Both the gallery and the bench were visibly moved, and
the written judgment later described in some detail how the defendant's remorse
had factored into a reduced sentence. At the time, I wondered why this
particular approach had worked so powerfully, but I couldn't fully explain it.
It took two and a half years, and this book, to finally give me the answer.
I should add that the way I arrived at this
approach was almost entirely accidental. Just before entering the courtroom, I
stopped briefly at the women's restroom, where I happened to overhear a woman
on the phone, her voice breaking with sobs and sighs as she spoke to someone on
the other end. As I went about my own business, I kept half-listening to her —
and the longer I listened to that voice, cracking with grief, the more I felt
an odd, welling ache in my own chest, even though none of it had anything to do
with me.
That was the moment it clicked: "This is
it."
It was the moment I recognized what might be
the single most powerful form of advocacy available to me. The catch was that
it couldn't come from my own mouth as counsel — the lament had to come from the
defendant himself. And the defendant and I had never discussed anything of the
kind beforehand. The real challenge was figuring out how to draw out, from the
defendant's own mouth, the kind of regret and lament that would move an
audience. After a good deal of thought, I used a method that most lawyers wouldn't
typically reach for, and it worked — the outcome was, by any measure, a
success.
Fletcher uses Oedipus as his example:
Oedipus's cry is not an apology. He never says, 'I'm sorry, I won't do it
again.' He simply howls in raw anguish. And yet, Fletcher argues, this
scream-like outburst can be just as effective as a formal apology — arguably
more effective, at least where the brain's own circuitry is concerned. An
unrehearsed, spontaneous cry signals that the realization is happening in real
time, right in front of us, and it draws out our sympathy almost reflexively.
It's genuinely difficult to put this particular experience into words. I wrote about it at greater length elsewhere, and I'll simply point readers to that piece:
http://news.koreanbar.or.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=23258
(Women Lawyers on
the Rise — "When a Lawyer Makes Her Closing Argument").
Beyond this, I've also used other techniques
the book discusses — the "story within a story" and "free
indirect discourse" — in my own advocacy, and both were effective. That
experience convinced me it was worth studying literary technique more
seriously, and toward the end of 2020 I began trying to write a novel, partly
as a way of studying the craft. The problem was that the novel simply wouldn't
come together. I attended a few literary community sessions, and the feedback I
kept hearing was some version of, "this isn't very engaging."
Why I Couldn't Write Fiction —
And What This Book Taught Me About Emotional Numbness
That left me wondering why, exactly, I
couldn't write fiction — and this book gave me the clue I needed to understand
why. Legal work is unusually demanding in terms of emotional labor, and the
longer I've practiced, the more I've noticed a kind of self-protective numbing
take hold. Situations that other people find sad leave me largely unmoved;
moments others describe as deeply affecting register with me as nothing much at
all. It amounts to a kind of emotional flatness. There's no question this
numbness has been useful for getting through the work itself, but it has come
at the cost of a diminished capacity for empathy — a side effect the book
diagnoses with real precision:
When the brain's emotional braking system is
under chronic stress, Fletcher explains, the brakes themselves stop functioning
properly: the prefrontal cortex preemptively clamps down on the limbic system,
cutting off the sources of emotion at the root. Instead of registering an
explosive burst of fear or joy, the brain feels essentially nothing — it simply
keeps operating, silently, like a machine.
Reading this, I found myself thinking that I
ought to try designing my own remedy for this numbness, drawing on what the
book calls "Bechdel's Blueprint." This book didn't just give me a
moment of insight — it also pointed toward a solution to a problem I had been
carrying personally. If any reader recognizes this same kind of emotional
numbness in themselves, I'd recommend at least reading Chapter 23, "Thaw
the Frozen Heart."
