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.