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Abrahams, Roger D. 1985. “Our Native Notions of
Story.” New York Folklore 11 (1-4): 37-47.
“Our Native Notions of Story”
Roger D. Abrahams
[beginning of page 37]
For more than a decade, folklorists have been discussing the
problems
of expanding our notions of usable texts by including those stories
which
are told in the first person about recent and representative
experiences.
It is clear that such stories are not traditional, in the sense that
they
are passed on by word of mouth over a long period of time and over
great
geographical distances. Yet such stories are as formulaic and as
susceptible to being repeated, conventionalized, and coded with
important
cultural information as those other kinds of narratives we recognize
and
study as traditional. Our problem with dealing with them as
folklorists
is, of course, that we must regard them as too idiosyncratic to be
worthy
of being addressed using either the comparative or the performative
methodologies
of analysis. Dealing with such ephemeral matters curses our
discipline
with threats of dealing with even more of a trivial body of data than
we
are usually accused of generating. Yet it has become increasingly
clear that for the folklorist to continue to enter into the discussion
of how communities are given articulation from within by performance of
traditional expressive units of behavior, we must begin to address
ourselves
seriously to the entire range of devices used by community members in
their
expressive exchanges. It is not enough to simply study the most
heavily
resonant and encoded activities like ritual and ceremony, songsinging,
and dancing and taletelling, for the most common ways in which the
human
propensity to operate socially is by gathering together to discuss
important
matters. This is as often done through gossiping and telling
about
what one did that day or the day before, as it is in reciting the myths
and legends that deal with how the group was formed at the very
beginning.
Recognizing this need, folklorists have boldly entered into
the discussion
of the role of personal narrative in the repertoire of expressive
devices
important to individuals within a community. But in doing so, we
have grouped all such personal stories in one category, which we call memorates
or personal experience narratives. To do this is to err
in
several directions simultaneously. First of all, it assumes that
all experiences are not only tellable, but that they are equally
weighted
with regard to their importance in the lives of the individuals
undergoing
[beginning
of page 38] the experience and telling about it later. This
is
patently not so. Just as we make a distinction between experience,
referring to the flow of life through the activities of individuals,
and
an
experience, a happening which is sufficiently (and typically) removed
from
the everyday flow of life that it may be used as a point of reference
for
later discussion, so too we distinguish between various kinds of retold
experiences in terms of how typical they are and how fully they
represent
cases that may carry important cultural messages.
A second error in lumping together personal experience
narratives into
one folkloristic category is that doing so ignores some important
native
theory of storytelling that tells us a good deal about why and how
stories
are launched, and why some may be given greater social and cultural
weight
than others. We overlook the differences between testimony
and giving witness, and getting off a good one and giving
an example, a case in point, an excuse accounting for one’s
actions
or simply reporting on what happened because of it, and so
on.
The same story may be told in many circumstances; each rendition will
be
determined in part by who is telling it to whom, and under what
circumstances.
All to obviously, the same story, in such cases, will also be a
different
story because it will be launched from a different perspective in hopes
of affecting the hearer in different ways. Should it then be
considered
the same story? In this essay, I attempt to bring up some of
these
questions without providing any answers. As with a number of
recent
essays I have written on other key folkloristic terms taken from common
parlance -- play, game, performance, experience (and an
experience),
events (and an event) -- my objective here is to investigate
the
usefulness of these terms in developing commonsense analytic procedures
of some use in the field. By carrying out such semantic
exercises,
I hope to encourage folklorists not only to widen the range of
expressive
data in our examinations, and to relate the various levels of
discussion
to a large entity we might call an expressive inventory and profile of
a culture, but also to eliminate unconsidered ethnocentricities brought
about by using all words as terms of art in an unexamined
fashion.
This is simply saying that folklore, as with all other disciplines,
must
somehow become more self-consciously reflexive with regard to our own
practices,
and especially, our own limitations imposed by our cultural
vocabulary.
[This essay was written with these aims in mind, and couched somewhat
in
Jeremiad terms, and without the usual footnote procedures
followed.
The editor has been kind in encouraging me to leave it in this form.]
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion
reminds us
at the beginning of the White Album. She is discussing the
process
of [beginning of page 39] translating experiences into
narrative
as a creative response to apprehensions of random impulses taking over
our lives and even the lives of others that we might happen to be
watching
from afar. From this perspective, we might say that we tell
stories
in the face of life’s transitoriness in order to derive some minimal
sense
of order and meaning to our otherwise willy-nilly activities. But
it is not only this kind of defensive storytelling that Didion is
discussing.
She is focussing on the storymaker in each of us. the fictionizer who
is
able to take any observation from a distance and to make something of
it
by imposing a typical drama around behavior which is experienced or
observed.
It is our ability to fit on-the-spot observations (even of our own
activities)
into the plot-lines of typical life-transition stories that encourage
us
to turn random happenings into reportable acts; and, by adding a little
more detail (still of the typical sort), the storyteller begins to make
an account of proceedings, thus entering boldly into the
process
by which lived experience is embellished with conventional
artifice.
To this extent, storymaking takes otherwise inchoate behaviors and
begins
to provide a sense of order -- even purpose -- to the doings of
ourselves
and others, and in doing so we have the beginnings of an art. At
certain points in our lives, even when we are going through crises, we
are sometimes given a perspective on what is happening to us if we are
able to typify it, drawing on terms of literary art, noting that what
is
going on is a tragedy, or a comedy of errors, or even a soap
opera.
Moreover, the fact that we have such recognizable categories of
significant
action provides us with ways in which we can not only hear the stories
of others but understand them, not only with regard to what the stories
are, but how we are supposed to feel about them.
I am arguing simply that we have a system of story-types as
part of
our common culture, and that this system provides us with a reservoir
of
both narrative structures and sentiments which are conventionally
intertwined.
This may be obvious, but it is such a basic fact of our interactive
lives
that in putting together a description of what our common culture is,
we
cannot afford to let the subject go unexplored. Among other areas
of our lives affected by this storymaking process is that we are able
to
relate, by storytelling, with people with whom we have never otherwise
had a relationship. Because stories are both representatively
human
and infinitely subject to variation, telling them gives us some sense
of
engagement with others that we may not even know. And this is no
little achievement in a society which equates maintaining mobility,
achieving
individuality, and going forward in life; for what is lost in such a
configuration
is the sense of relatedness, and this is made up for to some extent by
having stories to which we can relate, even empathize, to use
that
most okay of our recent terms of endearment. To know someone, in
other words, begins with knowing [beginning of page 40] their
story;
and in initial contact situations (especially between friends of
friends),
we feel so much more secure in our getting-to-know-you talk if we are
able
to interact with some knowledge of what has happened to that
person.
For a story to be worthy of being told, it must have a sense of
consequentiality
between the initiating action as it is narrated and its ending.
The
story will be judged as being worth listening to and repeated only if
it
has a sense of grab to it, if it interests us.
In many surprising ways, our abilities both to place events
and experiences
into the conventions of a story frame, and to tell these stories under
appropriate conditions have a good deal to do with our
personalities.
We are who we are, to our friends, not only by what we do and have
done,
but also by how we can relate the past scenes we have been involved in,
witnessed, or just heard or read about. By the stories, and the
way
in which we tell them, we make claims for ourselves as human
beings.
For only in the storytelling exchange can our values be affirmed along
with our personal identities, thus authenticating ourselves, even as we
tie ourselves to others willing to tell similar stories on
themselves.
We offer up ourselves within the sacred precincts of personal and even
public history, by bearing witness to past happenings if only by
telling
what we were doing when we heard about something significant
happening.
Among other things, from sharing of, say, where we were when we heard
about
Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination, our identification with a time,
even that amorphous group we call a “generation,” begins to assert
itself.
A number of fine minds have addressed themselves to this
storytelling
impulse, producing a nuanced and discriminating literature on the hows
and whys of the building of narratives, both personal and public,
including,
of course, the place of the hearer or reader in the ongoing achievement
of the story and its shared meanings. But how little of the
common
sense which informs Didion’s reminder is to be discovered in these
writings
on “narratology” -- not a lack of horse sense, but rather a failure to
reveal and draw upon the storytelling notions that we share within our
language and cultural practices. Indeed, insights into such
commonsensical
matters, using our own professional techniques of observation and
vocabulary,
call for discovering the “native categories” within the American
vernacular;
common terms which reveal that within our ways of talking we have
conventional
ways of testifying to our beliefs and values through “representative
anecdotes.”
Moreover, such typical stories, by their very typicality, give
conventional
shape and feeling to our “native testimony.”
But let me return to my native informant, Joan Didion for
the moment.
“We live entirely...by the imposition of a narrative line [beginning of
page 41] upon disparate images,” she intones, “by the ‘ideas’ with
which
we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our
actual
experience.” Of course, this process of freezing occurs more
often
in the retrospective retelling than in the accounting going on during
our
solitary stroll through the city or countryside, when the isolated eye
begins the story through the practice of people-watching.
For it is the role of flaneur, the function of observing
strangers,
that Didion is taking on: “The naked woman on the sixteenth floor is a
victim of accidie, or...is an exhibitionist, and it would be
interesting
to know which... It makes a difference whether the naked woman is
about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political
protest,
or is about to be (the Aristophanic view) snatched back to the human
condition
by the fireman in priest clothing just visible in the window behind
her...”
It is the imposition of “ideas” on not only our own
experience but those
we advertently observe which provide us with our major impetus for
storytelling,
for it is through the process of deriving meaning from the conventions
of ongoing and past action that we make the first stab at imposing some
meaning in good circumstances, an interpretation, on what we’ve
observed
or lived through. Like Didion’s image of the naked woman on the
balcony,
we look for some intrinsic interest in what’s going on -- that is, a
sense
of disjunction in the passage of everyday time and activities that is
sufficiently
arresting that we want to observe it now so that we can report
it
later. Where the disruption is especially out of the ordinary, we
hope that it will play itself out into a significance that bears up
under
the weight of the weight of the focus in common. In such a case,
it becomes a good example of something, that is, a story to
illustrate
and underscore some conventional idea. The narrative line then
informs
the sufficiently weighty point that we can call it a message or
lesson.
But not all recountings carry such heavy messages; more
often we tell
our stories to clean up the past, or at least to eliminate some of the
strong aspects of transitory actions. As another native
informant,
the novelist James Crumley, phrased it in his potboiler, The Last
Good
Kiss: “It’s the story that counts,” one of his characters opines,
when
after telling a story of his love-life, his hearer asks about what
happened
to “the woman.” “It’s the story that counts,” but the other
insists
that most important aspect of the story is how it ends, obviously
employing
different aesthetic criteria in dealing with real-life tales. The
storyteller responds equally critically: “Stories are like
snapshots,...pictures
snatched out of time...with clean hard edges. But this life, and
life always begins and ends in a bloody muddle, womb to tomb, just one
big mess, a can of worms left to rot in the sun” (Crumley 189).
His
listener would like life, even in snatches, to have a point; if
not an end, at least a sense of purpose. Surely, our
native
notions of [beginning of page 42] story would include the
life-story,
in addition to reports of the more transitory activities that find
their
way into our daily talk. We like to hear of endings as well as
meanings,
messy disappearances or deaths as well as good ones.
If we tell stories in order to live, we do so not only to
endow life
with order and meaning, but to have good relations with others,
relations
that give us the go-ahead to engage in exchanges concerning
ourselves.
Moreover, the stories we tell on ourselves and each other are not
necessarily
clean and hard-edged, not necessarily even finished. Indeed,
friendly
relations are often defined as ones we enter into in which we can
confide
in others -- by which we often mean getting permission to tell our
ongoing,
unfinished, and halting stories. In less intimate situations,
ones
in which we are still involved in establishing our self-image with
others,
we tend to define this self almost as the sum of the stories we have
developed
to tell on ourselves concerning what we have done. This is the
stuff
of literature, for it is such stories that allow each character in a
novel
to be established in terms of his or her character, to establish
possible
moves and motives within a contrived set of encounters.
Recognizing
that to others we meet on first encounters, we are what we have done,
we
all need to have stories ready on a great number of themes --
especially
with regard to who we have known and under what circumstances, and
where
we have been and what we have been careful to observe there. A
fully
socialized talker will also have stories which can be linked to those
of
others relating to common situations -- stories like “the most exciting
thing that ever happened to me,” or “the most embarrassing moment of my
life.”
One of the conditions of modern life to which we must
constantly attest
is our equal access to being victims of various kinds of outrageous
approach,
invasion, personal attack; that is, one badge of having lived today is
to be able to add one’s voice to storytelling sessions on the subject
of
hold-ups, aggravated assaults, rapes and other such unpleasantries
which
we (or our friends and acquaintances) have experienced. Insofar
as
each of us has a repertoire of such “you-think-that’s-something”
stories, we make claims for ourselves as members of a speaking
community.
These personal stories or anecdotes may be used to do a
great
deal of social and cultural work for us. To begin with, we use
them
to testify to our having played a part in the ongoing drama which we
call
“life”; having experiences which are sufficiently typical that we use
them
to establish both our humanity and to make a bid for group membership
--
even when the group is as evanescent as a queue or other chance
encounter
situation under strange conditions. In these interchanges, we
find
ourselves talking about -- and even dramatizing a bit -- our most
life-testing
experiences. We supply detail to these conventional tales as a
way
of [beginning of page 43] taking the edge off the lie, inducing
some degree of receptiveness through the force of verisimilitude.
Thus we are simultaneously typical in our experiences and individual,
even
idiosyncratical, by having lived to tell the tale.
Such personal accounts, because they replay past incidents
of disruption,
have a kind of therapeutic character to them, drawing upon their
characteristics
as a shared retold experience, ones which others have gone through, as
a means of taking care of the problems they represent. Each time
they are replayed, they are shared that much more widely, placed in
ever
enlarging categories of experience. As actual traumatic
happenings,
they make us feel less threatened by the experience as we relive it; we
domesticate it, bringing it more under control. There is ample
native
testimony to this power of retelling: the psychiatrist, the lawyer, the
social worker, the teacher, the mortician each has a kind of story of
anguish
and disruption to which they are accustomed to listening and
responding.
And each has a repertoire of stories themselves which gives the
message,
“I know what you’re going through.”
But such stories do not arise only in such hierarchical
situations between
professional and client. Rather, they thrive as shared
experience
stories in the relatively egalitarian environment of conversations
of both a casual and deep sort. When we are among friends
we can engage in such very personal talk that we are given license to
relate
any stories to our life-story. Thus we make a bid for notice
because
of some virtue: as a hero, a stoic, a clown or whatever conventional
role
we choose to take on at such tellings. As an act of
intimacy,
we encourage each other to tell personal stories which are ongoing,
unfinished.
Most gossip consists of such an uncompleted action. In
these
ways, storymaking is an important device in our equipment for living.
In our native system of storytelling, we have at least three
levels
of storying: 1) the informal and ongoing personal storytelling in which
the ending and its meaning are negotiable (or still under negotiation);
2) the well-made story, one capable of being retold because of its
sense
of beginning-middle-end and implicit message or point; and 3) those
stories
which are so well-known and central to the existence of a group that
they
need only be referred to and not necessarily retold for their points to
be made. The point of such a story is actually a cultural
lesson.
The first of these is just a story, the second an exemplary
tale,
the third approaches being a myth.
What I am getting at here is that there is a hierarchy of
story-forms
embodied in our discourse on narratives, based on forms deemed more
powerful
and more important the farther they get from everyday interactional
use,
and the more they are used in the specially intensified or highlighted
environments of performance or ceremony.
Such conventionally deep stories have a crafted integrity
and a [beginning
of page 44] residue of important meanings and feelings attached to
them. They are remembered and retold. When such items
appear
in sermons and ceremonies, they are called on to convey larger
statements
and to deliver the more imposing messages or lessons. If the
burden
of our everyday talk is to assert and maintain personal relationships
by
imparting information about ourselves, others, and the world
around
us, then the controlling center of our more formal interactions
revolves
around a higher and more explanatory knowledge. In the
case
of recitation of our most valued narratives, such as parables or myths,
we encounter that even more weighty synthesis of experience and
apprehension:
wisdom.
In these three terms for capacities of mind in recording and
reprocessing
experience and observation -- information, knowledge, and wisdom -- our
lexicon asserts a scale by which different kinds of narratives may
impose
ever more weighted meanings on the speaker and the hearer. Of
course,
the more weighted the kind of story, the more special its place in our
repertoire of storytelling events: the more formally and structurally
regular
and predictable, the more knowledgeable or wiser the message appears to
be. The more full and complete and ceremonial the telling, the
more
focussed and imposing the means and the message will be. (Here I
am simply repeating my earlier point, but in this changed context: that
we have an informal hierarchy of narratives, the “higher forms” being
reserved
for special times and places, and under the productive control of the
most
gifted of the retellers, the “pros,” whether they are paid in specie
for
their examples or not.) In addition, the more imposing and wise
the
telling and the tale, the more we sidestep our need for novelty, and
the
greater our appreciation of the repetitive and the predictable.
Every
way of telling is predictable in some dimension, whether we are engaged
in making gossip or news or sermonizing or orating. But in
performing
the set-piece, the ceremonial and wise story, the teller is absolved
from
observing the rule of novelty or spontaneity in setting -- and setting
up - his example.
This hierarchy of forms is reflected in a number of ways in
our narrative
system: a system reflected not only in the texts of tales but in the
ways
we talk about them. Here I attempt to get at some of our criteria
of judgment by looking at the way we employ, on an everyday basis, some
of the terms for narrative that we have also used in a “tighter” way in
folkloristics: stories, tales, and myths. All are
involved
in recountings of what are purported to be past doings or
happenings.
But we often use the term story to get at the relationship
between
present situations and relationships, and happenings in the
more-or-less
immediate past. A tale (alternatively an anecdote or
example)
on the other hand is assumed to be a more considered story, one which
we
know of and can contend with because it is both plotted and has a point
to it. Discussing story, then, means reporting happenings as a
way
of [beginning of page 45] keeping others in one’s acquaintance
up-to-date
on one’s life. They become important specie in the exchanges
which
go on as a ‘natural’ part of carrying on friendly relationships,
broadly
conceived. Employing a tale more commonly means relating the
developing
plot-line to the larger and more imposing message. In myths
we find accounts which are so widely known and so conventionally
associated
with the wisdom of a group that rather than referring to them as
conveying
a point or even a lesson, they themselves embody truths -- not ones
available
for verification, in fact, but what used to be called Higher Truths.
In one dimension, this differential of weightedness begins
to account
for the distinction between a story and a tale, insofar as we actually
make that distinction. Story can refer, in such a case, to any
narrative
from the most ongoing and incomplete to the most well-wrought and
finished.
But tale has a sense of being conventional, finished-off,
message-laden.
Strangely-enough, this difference is not registered in a distinction
between
story and myth; for this latter term seems to resonate with ideas which
are, in fact, so commonplace and well-known that the story need not be
told beginning to end.. The presumption is that everyone knows the
fiction
which embodies the myth. tales, in this sense, are formulated as
if they need to be told to the unknowing, the child or the stranger;
myths
register stories which go even deeper and rely on a richer cultural mix
than can be delivered in singly-narrated formulations. Myths, in
this sense, are “deep stories,” weighted and often implied forms of
narrating
episodes which are so representative of human experience that they seem
to epitomize some aspect of life in meaning and feeling.
I am not just talking about how archaic myths seem to have
operated
here; I also mean myths in the journalistic sense, a gnomic referencing
of a conventional value-invested belief. These stories are not
quite
stories, for they are told in plotless, already-having-occurred
fashion.
In such a case, the individual traits of a character or the
particularity
of a setting or situation is not important. Like religious and
cosmological
narratives, these myths have a sense of developmental inexorability to
them. We know them only as Myths (as in “The Myth of the
Golden
Age”) in which the development is negatively regarded, and we see a
falling-off
in the quality of the natural and social environment; but also as a Dream
(as in “The American Dream” or “The Impossible Dream”), in which the
ending
is regarded as positive and essentially unachievable; and as The
Great...Story
(as in “The Great American Success Story”), in which the positive end
is
indeed possible. Idea is a more neutral term in the same series
(as
in “The Idea of Progress”). Because these “myths” impose
value-orientations
or ideologies upon a basic developmental pattern, they are capable of
being
exposed as reflexive fictions, and as such they may be regarded by some
who do not share [beginning of page 46] that vision, as lies,
sometimes
even implicated in The Big Lie. These contemporary
secular
myths are often pointed to as examples of gross human error, as devices
as benign as wishful thinking (“The Dream of the Hereafter”)
and
as malignant as agencies of life-defeating forces (“The Myth of Racial
Inferiority”). Of course, we have other less ideologically
encumbered
names for differently rendered versions of these deep patterns: archetypes,
representative anecdotes, fables, even paradigms or models.
Whatever they are called, these deep patterns offer us matrices by
which
we may more energetically construct a social reality out of the details
of our own experiences, and conventions of presentation, that make it
possible
for us to share these experiences with others after they are over.
Such shorthand statements exist on the plane of cultural
generalization
and cosmological abstraction that elevates them to a kind of
secularized
holy writ, and thus provides us with the mode of connection between
this
everyday use of the term myth and that employed in talking
about
those stories which bespeak the beginnings of humanity and the coming
of
culture. They both refer us to the highest, the weightiest and
most
privileged statement of life’s patternings, all the while encouraging
those
who draw on these myths to introduce ideological notions while
encouraging
practical actions.
All three -- story, tale, and myth -- draw upon our interest
in what
happens at life’s points of transition. But the more weighty and
exemplary the story, the more momentous we expect the transition to be,
and the more profound the transformation which might occur. This
is simply pointing out that there are larger and smaller patterns of
consequential
movement which interest us.
Examining our stories at all levels of weightedness and
detail will
demonstrate value and meaning connections between the everyday world
and
those times of transformation and disruption. Stories heighten
the
apparent significance of a happening as they are told and retold after
the event. Just as we distinguish between everyday
experience,
an experience (one which is not to be considered normal either when
it is happening or when we talk about it later), and a Big
Experience,
something that takes us as individuals far beyond ourselves, allowing
ourselves
to attach ourselves to events larger than ourselves individually (the
day
they burned old Dixie down”) or cosmologically (“where were you when
the
flood of ’60 hit?”), so we have stories of our experiences that carry a
different sense of weight because of the intensity of the occasion and
the number of others who were involved in the same event. All of
these different sorts of stories would be included under the same
rubric,
personal experience narratives, if we let them. But if we do so,
we step away from a descriptive and analytic resource that would make
the
overall study of stories considerably more rich.
[beginning of page 47]
NOTE
While I have not indicated here the articles and books which
have entered
into my thinking on these matters, as I am away from my library, it
does
seem appropriate to thank a number of colleagues who have been willing
to debate these matters with me over the last few years: Dick Bauman,
Michael
Holquist, Frank Proschan, Brunhilde Biebuyck, Eleanor Wachs, Keith
Basso,
Ed Bruner, Vic Turner, Debora Kodish, Samuel Shrager, Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,
Erving Goffman, Henry Glassie, Dick Dorson, and most recently, Don
Brenneis
and Michael Roth.