Beyond Narrative Coherence (Studies in Narrative)

Beyond Narrative Coherence

Studies in Narrative (SiN) The subject of SiN is the study of narrative. Volumes published in the series draw upon a variety of approaches and methodologies in the study of narrative. Particular emphasis is placed on theoretical approaches to narrative and the analysis of narratives in human interaction.

Editor Michael Bamberg Clark University

Advisory Board Susan E. Bell

David Herman

Eric E. Peterson

Jerome S. Bruner

Janet Holmes

Catherine Kohler Riessman

Bowdoin College New York University

Jennifer Coates

Roehampton University

Michele L. Crossley

Edge-Hill University College

Carol Gilligan

New York University

Rom Harré

Linacre College, Oxford

Nort Carolina State University Victoria University of Wellington

Charlotte Linde

University of Maine Boston University

Theodore R. Sarbin

Institute for Research Learning

University of California, Santa Cruz

Dan P. McAdams

Deborah Schiffrin

Allyssa McCabe

Margaret Wetherell

Northwestern University University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Georgetown University Open University

Volume 11 Beyond Narrative Coherence Edited by Matti Hyvärinen, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo and Maria Tamboukou

Beyond Narrative Coherence Edited by

Matti Hyvärinen University of Tampere

Lars-Christer Hydén Linköping University

Marja Saarenheimo Central Union for the Welfare of the Aged

Maria Tamboukou University of East London

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdamâ•›/â•›Philadelphia

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beyond narrative coherence / edited by Matti Hyvärinen ... [et al.]. p. cm. (Studies in Narrative, issn 1568-2706 ; v. 11) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Discourse analysis--Psychological aspects. 2. Cohesion (Linguistics) 3. Narrative inquiry (Research method) I. Hyvärinen, Matti. P302.8.B49 2010 401’.41--dc22 2009046919 isbn 978 90 272 2651 8 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8855 4 (Eb)

© 2010 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

Chapter 1 Beyond narrative coherence: An introduction Matti Hyvärinen, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo and Maria Tamboukou

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Chapter 2 Weird stories: Brain, mind, and self Maria I. Medved and Jens Brockmeier

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Chapter 3 Identity, self, narrative Lars-Christer Hydén

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Chapter 4 ‘Mind-reading’, a method for understanding the broken narrative of an aphasic man Tarja Aaltonen

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Chapter 5 Broken narratives, visual forces: Letters, paintings and the event Maria Tamboukou

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Chapter 6 Artists-in-progress: Narrative identity of the self as another Linda Sandino

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Chapter 7 Breaking of self-narrative as a means of reorientation? Vilma Hänninen and Anja Koski-Jännes

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Chapter 8 “There is no fear in my lexicon” vs. “You are not normal if you won’t be scared”: A qualitative semiotic analysis of the ‘broken’ discourse of Israeli bus drivers who experienced terror attacks Alison Stern Perez, Yishai Tobin and Shifra Sagy

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Chapter 9 Beyond narrative: The shape of traumatic testimony Molly Andrews

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Chapter 10 Afterword: ‘Even amidst’ — Rethinking narrative coherence Mark Freeman

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List of contributors

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Index

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Chapter 1

Beyond narrative coherence An introduction Matti Hyvärinen, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo and Maria Tamboukou University of Tampere, Finland / Linköping University, Sweden / Central Union for the Welfare of the Aged, Finland / University of East London, UK

The introduction suggests a paradigmatic turn in narrative studies as regards the coherence thesis. The classical, Aristotelian, notion has been widely shared among scholars who otherwise often disagree, often drastically, from folklore and linguistics to philosophy, psychology and narrativist theory of history. Once and again, the key function of narrative is seen to be the creation of coherence. Recently, this conception has faced increasing criticism both from the ranks of narratology and in particular, from scholars who study “naturally occurring”, oral narratives. The normative mission to find and value coherence marginalizes many narrative phenomena, omits non-fitting narrators, encourages scholars to read narratives obsessively from the perspective of coherence, and poses ethically questionable pressures upon narrators who have experienced severe political or other trauma.

The purpose of this book is to suggest and nurture a kind of paradigmatic change within narrative studies. The narrative turn in social sciences, beginning in the early 1980s and gathering momentum in the 1990s, almost exclusively assumed that there is a vital and many-layered relationship between narrative and coherence. Narratives were conceptualized in terms of coherence: linguistic, temporal, sequential and so on. Coherence was considered a virtue — or, alternatively, a mortal sin — and hence the ultimate guarantor of the quality of narratives. Coherence was assumed as a norm for good and healthy life stories and coherence indeed was something that scholars ventured to investigate and to find, for instance, in life-story interviews. The coherence paradigm generally implies that (i) good and competent narratives always proceed in a linear, chronological way, from a beginning and middle to an end, which also constitutes a thematic closure; (ii) the function of narrative

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and story-telling is primarily to create coherence in regard to experience, which is understood as being rather formless (which may be understood as a merit or disadvantage of narrative); (iii) persons live better and in a more ethical way, if they have a coherent life-story and coherent narrative identity (or, in contrast, narrative is understood as being detrimental because it creates such coherence). Beyond Narrative Coherence challenges this paradigm theoretically (positioning it historically; indicating its problems), methodologically (in showing its often problematic consequences, finding out new methods with which to approach broken narratives) and ethically (by showing how the coherence paradigm privileges middle-class conventionality and marginalizes the experiences of artistically creative as well as politically traumatized people). The volume does this by drawing from a wide range of disciplines and approaches: philosophy, linguistics, sociology, psychology, social psychology, conversation analysis, health research, and historiography. We go about this by posing some general theoretical arguments, and more particularly by suggesting cases of narratives and storytelling that do not fit into the received and dominant idea about narrative coherence. We invoke cases, for instance, where the storytellers do not necessarily comply with the often implicit norms of narrative theory — persons that are not able bodied or that have severe communicative disabilities; or stories that are told in circumstances and settings that severely constrain the telling; or telling about experiences that do not allow the use of conventional narrative forms. In all these cases people tell stories that are often fragmented, disorganized or where the narrative text is superseded by the performance of the story. In order to be able to listen to these stories it is important that researchers, as well as all other listeners, suspend their preconceived narrative norms and rather treat these stories as invitations to listening in new and creative ways. Sensitivity to these stories also requires new methodological solutions. Undoubtedly, coherence will remain a useful concept in narrative studies long after this volume, but hopefully in a substantially re-thought manner.

The historical vicissitudes of narrative coherence As Maria Medved and Jens Brockmeier write in this volume, theoretically the idea of coherence “can be tracked back to Aristotle”. While noticing this lineage, it is vital to recognize what Aristotle in fact was doing when he discussed coherence and the role of the beginning, middle, and end. When presenting these concepts, Aristotle was not theorizing narration, diegesis, but drama and in particular good tragedy. Of course Aristotle did not have the same generalized concept of narrative that only became possible in the 1960s, thanks to structuralist narratology.



Chapter 1.╇ Beyond narrative coherence

To develop this thought ad absurdum: Aristotle never seriously considered everyday oral stories as a research topic and it never occurred to him to impose his aesthetic and normative concepts on factual statements about narrativity. Over the centuries following Aristotle’s death, his normative and aesthetic notions on tragedy started to be used in a way that, in practice, limited the understanding of empirical, factual narratives. William Labov and Joshua Waletsky (1967/1997; Labov 1972) have a particular merit of beginning the story from the entirely opposite end of the continuum, namely from orally rendered everyday stories. Yet the extremely influential structural model they suggested also presumes a structured whole; a whole that has a distant resemblance to the Aristotelian idea of good tragedy. On the other hand, Dell Hymes has identified traces of more recent literary theories in the Labovian model: All this is part of an adaptation and extension of categories from traditional rhetoric. A famous text of the time (Brooks and Warren, 1949) has distinguished four categories: Exposition, Complication, Climax, and Denouement. Labov and his co-workers recognized six categories; Abstract, Orientation, Complicating Action, Evaluation, Resolution, and Coda. These six are said to constitute a fully formed narrative. (1996, p.â•›192)

There is of course no problem in using categories from literary theory, but perhaps this adaptation highlights the difficulty in theorizing oral narratives in terms of their genuine characteristics, without the help of aesthetic categories. It is often argued that the narrative turn in humanities, including literature studies, was strongly influenced by the English translation and publication of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale in 1958. Propp characterized himself strictly as being an empirical researcher. He insisted that he had read all available Russian wondertales and had drawn conclusions on the permanence of the form, functions and agents from this material alone (1968, 1984). Thanks to the impact of French structuralism, this bottom up model was turned around, and introduced in a radicalized form into new areas as a top-down model, suggesting the potential of a universal model of narrative. Because the Saussurean, structural linguistics was understood to be the pilot science for literature as well, the distinction between langue (language system) and parole (actual and imperfect use of language) informed the study of narratives. Broken, unfinished, or incomplete narratives could only be considered to be less interesting instances of parole, whereas the fundamental problem of study was to locate the narrative form or the deep narrative grammar (Doležel, 1999). When the narrative perspective came to the field of social inquiry, both narrative grammar and the Proppian model turned out to be widely influential. As

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Jerome Bruner writes in his book Actual Minds, the earlier discussion “suggest(s) that there is some such constraining deep structure to narrative, and that good stories are well-formed particular realizations of it” (1986, p.â•›16). Good stories, in this language, no doubt are coherent and complete stories, reflecting the deep structure of language and narrative. Structuralism and neo-Aristotelianism put an equal emphasis on narrative coherence, although for partly different reasons. The difference, best observable in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre (1984) was the Aristotelian emphasis on the normative aspect of narrative coherence. MacIntyre was worried about modern individualism and moral fragmentation, and suggested that understanding our lives as evolving, coherent narratives might make the difference and help us to resolve the modernist dilemma. MacIntyre was obviously the first to introduce the theme and dilemma of narrative identity. Personal identity cannot simply be reduced to its strict categorical meaning (John is or is not Peter’s son) but includes a fuzzier aspect of “more or less”: your characteristics at the age of fifty are more or less similar to what they were at the age of forty. Mere psychological traits can only account for the strict meaning, says MacIntyre, not the “more-or-less” aspects of identity. Thus he comes to the conclusion that “personal identity is just that identity presupposed by the unity of the character which the unity of a narrative requires. Without such unity there would not be subjects of whom stories could be told” (1984, p.â•›218). This proposal to use the model of novelistic character to inform the character of personal identity is of course a profound idea, and might even suggest important historical changes in the ways personal identities have been understood. Unfortunately, MacIntyre leaves the idea here and says nothing more specific about the unity of character. More alarmingly, his literary example (The Count of Monte Cristo) does not even allude to the complexities and dis-unities of character exposed by such modernist authors as Robert Musil, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and many others who followed them. In other words, MacIntyre does not consider the option that the history of the novel might inform a parallel history on understanding identities. From the beginning, the concept of narrative identity was thematized from the perspective of unity and coherence it was able to afford, not in terms of complexities, contradictions and undecided elements it might include.

Historical narratives Narrative coherence was an idea that was soon shared by most disciplines and most otherwise competing schools of thought. The narrativist school of thought in historiography (Louis Mink and Hayden White as its most remarkable early representatives) for example, soon established a binary opposition between the



Chapter 1.╇ Beyond narrative coherence

coherence of narrative and the multiplicity of the facts of life. The philosopher of history, Louis Mink, summarizes much of the inherited understanding of narrative in an essay written in the late 1970s: There are also at a more general level conceptual presupposition of the very idea of narrative form itself, and these supervene on its many varieties. Aristotle’s comment that every story has a beginning, a middle and an end is not merely a truism. It commands universal assent while failing to tell us anything new, simply because it makes explicit part of the conceptual framework underlying the capacity to tell and hear stories of any sort. And in making a presupposition explicit it has implications that are far from banal; it makes clear that our experience of life does not necessarily have to form a narrative, except as we give it that form by making it the subject of stories. (1987, p.â•›186; emphasis added)

What are the implications of “a narrative form itself ”? Mink’s choice of words is informative: narrative form was a singular, stable, coherent formation which was already known by Aristotle. Indeed, so obviously strong is the intellectual power of structuralism that even the philosophers of history constitute an entirely a-historicized, essential conception of narrative. In order to criticize naïve narrative historiography, following the worst genres of the realistic novel, Mink postulates a conceptual eternity, immovable narrative that “commands universal assent”. Hayden White, the leading figure of the narrativist school of historiography, conforms to this collapse of history when it comes to the concept of narrative. His often cited, celebrated and criticized passage from the essay “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” repeats this idea of eternally similar narrative form: Does the world really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories, with central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that permits us to see ‘the end’ in every beginning? Or does it present itself more in the forms that the annals and chronicle suggest, either as mere sequence without beginning or end or as sequences of beginnings that only terminate and never conclude? (1981/1987, p.â•›24; italics added)

Resistance to narrative comes here with the price of presenting a timeless observer of “the world”, who either receives the world in the forms suggested by Aristotle’s aesthetic theory or in the form of annals or chronicles. In order to criticize narrative foreclosure in history, White employs conceptual foreclosure and a binary opposition between the multitude of life and the full, fixed and eternal form of narrative. Without going deeper into this debate here (see Hyvärinen 2006) it is noteworthy that philosophers of history have continually rejected the option of historicizing narrative when criticizing it. The other ironic aspect of the ongoing debates

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is the way critics of narrative almost systematically subscribe to the essentialist, conventional and immovable conception of narrative, as Galen Strawson has recently done. He reminds us that The paradigm of a narrative is a conventional story told in words. I take the term to attribute — at the very least — a certain sort of developmental and hence temporal unity or coherence to the things to which it is standardly applied — lives, part of lives, pieces of writing. (2004, p.â•›439, italics in the original)

Indeed, beginning from such a limited view of narrative it is rather easy to argue that narrative cannot articulate characters’ “episodic” experiences.

The Coherent Self The emerging narrative psychology often followed MacIntyre’s example in understanding narrative as an instrument for achieving a complete and intact self or personal identity. Dan P. McAdams, in particular, has emphasized the coherence creating function of the life story: It is an individual’s story which has the power to tie together past, present, and future in his life. It is a story which is able to provide unity and purpose in his or her life. (1988, pp.â•›17–18; italics added) We are all tellers of stories. We each seek to provide our scattered and often confusing experiences with a sense of coherence by arranging the episodes of our lives into stories. This is not the stuff of delusion or self-depreciation. (McAdams, 1993, p.â•›11)

This understanding of the benign role of the coherence-creating narrative can also be found in many other disciplines and subject areas. The overall middle-class orientation of this idea is equally well formulated by Charlotte Linde (1993, p.â•›3): “In order to exist in the social world with a comfortable sense of being a good, socially proper, and stable person, an individual needs to have a coherent, acceptable, and constantly revised life story.” The philosopher Marya Schechtman (1996, p.â•›96) provides a similar argument considering the social necessity of expressing one’s identity in the form of a linear and conventional story, by saying that “this means that constituting an identity requires that an individual conceive of his life having the form and the logic of a story — more specifically, the story of a person’s life — where ‘story’ is understood as a conventional, linear narrative”. Because we normally are socially accountable for a certain chronology of events in our lives, Schectman argues, our life stories and identities need also be chronological and more or less conventional. This, of course, is a wrong conclusion in a number of ways, but most of all



Chapter 1.╇ Beyond narrative coherence

it ignores the possibility of self-narrative as a creative study of one’s history and its complexities, and transforms it almost as a curriculum vitae demanded by others. The coherent self further emerges as a cultural construction and an effect of gendered and racialized discourses and practices. In this context it has been richly theorized, discussed and deconstructed in feminist and postcolonial critical studies. Critical feminist interventions in narrative studies have indeed shown that there are many different ways of narrating the female self, ways that are always embedded and embodied and often experimental, transgressing the limitations of coherence and closure. (See Smith & Watson, 1998, for an excellent review of this literature). For postcolonial critics, hybridity and multiplicity have emerged as catalytic factors in the ways we read, analyse, understand and evaluate “coherent” narratives. What happens to the desire for textual coherence when place and location as material coherences par excellence, melt into fluid spatialities, forced displacement and diasporic subjectivities? How can coherence be sustained in narrative texts produced as effects of discourses of colonization? How can “the coherent self ” be located across different national territories, ethnic locations and multicultural places when narratives of return cannot be imagined, let alone expressed or inscribed, when there is no material place of origin or beginning? (See amongst others, Bhabha, 1986; Gillroy, 1993, 2000; Hall, 1990; Spivak, 1987.) In light of the above, it is therefore no big surprise that later critics of narrative and narrativity often criticized the generalized vision of every human individual as a life-story teller (Strawson, 2004) or the outlined life as a “teleological project” (Sartwell, 2000). The profusely cultivated “we” does not exactly invite deviating experiences. Without exception “we each seek to provide our scattered and often confusing experiences with a sense of coherence” (McAdams, 1993, p.â•›11). Can narrative coherence be a harmful phenomenon, how, and in which context? This is a question posed much less frequently, yet the ideological implications of an overtly coherent and linear life story should at least be questioned in the kind of world(s) people have been living in since the First World War. Ian Craib (2000) indeed disturbed the benign understanding of narrative identities by alluding to the possibility of “bad faith narratives”. Mark Freeman (2000), using the concept of “narrative fore-closure”, showed how an overly crafted and coherent life narrative may actually lead to severe constraints of life options. Freeman (2003) has also directed outspoken criticism at the tendency to idealize the presumed narrative coherence within narrative psychology. The question that has finally been posed in the above-mentioned feminist and postcolonial literatures is not simply why subjects deemed to be different — women and slaves to state but the obvious — have not written “coherent” narratives, but also how the imperative of coherence works to legitimize certain narratives while excluding or marginalizing others from the narrative canon.

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Coherence, linearity, and completeness Thus far we have discussed all aspects of narrative coherence as if they formed a unitary package of temporal linearity (as in Aristotle and in Labov and Waletsky), strong cohering power of the ending (White) and completeness in terms of actantial roles (Bruner). However, if we want to see cracks in the unitary picture of coherent narrative and to re-theorize narrative coherence, we obviously need take these aspects separately, and also see incongruent packages of these elements. The attempt to read these aspects separately and in a more sophisticated way is compelling, of course, for the reason that recent criticisms of narrative often seem to present all these aspects as being necessary and essential parts of the narrative approach in general (Strawson, 2004). Paul Ricoeur most emphatically was a theorist who early on (1981) resisted the structuralist reduction of temporality into linearity of sequences. Although he understood narratives to be complete, he nevertheless systematically resisted the ideas of temporal linearity and thematic coherence. He did this partly because he did not base his theory of narrative solely on the work of Aristotle, but drew heavily from St Augustine’s thinking on temporality and its paradoxes. He also resisted the idea of full causal and thematic coherence by maintaining that “[e]mplotment is never the simple triumph of ‘order’↜” (1984, p.â•›73). The purpose of narrative according to Ricoeur is not simply to produce coherence out of disorder. It is above all an attempt to cope with the “discordant” aspects of acting and suffering. It is interesting how Ricoeur’s persistent criticism of sequentiality was neglected and pushed away during the early days of the narrative turn. Jerome Bruner (1990, p.â•›43), for example, argues that narrative’s “principal property is its inherent sequentiality,” and supports the view by a quote from Ricoeur. In this quotation Ricoeur discusses the sequentiality of “story” using the term the way it is used in narratology, as equal to the supposed sequence of events, and not at all as “narrative” per se. Bruner himself is a contradictory figure in terms of coherence. He draws heavily from the Proppian and structuralist heritage, for example, and often repeats his trust in the sequential structure of narrative. Nevertheless Bruner does not believe in coherence in the same unconditional way as many other narrative psychologists. Indeed, in his article “The Narrative Construction of Reality” (1991) he famously claims that narratives are “designed to contain uncanniness rather than to resolve it” (p.â•›16). A deeper (potential) deviation from the unilateral understanding of coherence is embedded in Bruner’s account of “folk psychology” or the script-like knowledge of common sense. Bruner emphasizes a conceptual distinction between scripts and narratives, maintaining that it is “only when constituent beliefs in folk psychology are violated that narratives are constructed” (1990, p.â•›40).



Chapter 1.╇ Beyond narrative coherence

By contrast, for example, McAdams’ outlines of successfully coherent life stories rather resemble folk psychological expectations than narratives worth telling. One of the paradoxes of the coherence thesis is that it so obviously contradicts what avant-garde literature and film have been doing with narrative. What, for example, has the sequential, chronological and coherence-oriented model to do with James Joyce, Virginia Woolf or Henry James? In other words, why is it that the paradigmatic models of narrative were so often taken from simplified literary models of 19th-century realism? Monika Fludernik’s project to build “natural narratology”, meaning narratology based on everyday oral narration and capable of understanding both literary and “naturally occurring” narration, took an entirely different tack (Fludernik, 1996). Fludernik argued that the sequential and linear beginning, middle, and end model of narratives represent only “zero-degree narrativity”. Fludernik sees “experientiality” to be the core of narrativity and argues that both the modernist consciousness novels and imperfect oral narratives express this experientiality more fully than the strictly sequential and conventional stories. In another attempt to displace the discourse on sequence and coherence David Herman in his book Story Logic (2002) takes Bruner’s proposal of folk psychology and pushes it a bit further. Herman locates narrativity on a scale between, on the one hand, cultural-cum-cognitive scripts, presenting the expected and normal courses of events in a sequential model and, on the other hand, a totally chaotic and idiosyncratic scribble. Herman’s proposal is completely fatal for the admiration of coherence and sequence because it suggests that pushing too far in this direction actually leads toward the thinning away of narrativity. The coincidental, unexpected, experimental, even the chaotic, are all necessary and integral aspects of a narrativity that tries to capture an uncharted aspect of experientiality. Understandability (resorting to a rich number of cultural expectations) and tellability (distance from the scripts and deviations from the expected) work constantly in different directions and create the innate tensions of narrativity. The impetus to reject and challenge the sequential model came from many theoretical and practical sources. Just to mention a few exemplary studies that did not privilege separate, complete and coherent stories, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capp’s Living Narrative (2001) portrayed the lively and fragmented interactional narration in everyday situations. The authors noticed that many conversational narratives are incomplete, and get completed and finally evaluated only within interaction. Kristin M. Langellier and Eric E. Peterson’s Storytelling in Daily Life (2004) similarly rejects the idea of separate and complete narratives and foregrounds instead the interactional performing of family realities by storytelling. Similar arguments and findings have been reported by researchers dealing with trauma studies, brain trauma, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias (cf. Hydén

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& Brockmeier, 2008). Catherine Kohler Riessman (1990) has challenged the idea of narrative linearity by suggesting the important category of “hypothetical narrative”. Narratives routinely play with multiple options, and this is also reflected by Gary Saul Morson (1994; 1998; 2003) and Michael André Bernstein (1994), who have introduced the concept of narrative “side-shadowing”. The idea of one single, relatively coherent life narrative has equally been challenged in the study of “small” and conversationally situated narratives (e.g., Bamberg 1997, 2004; Georgakopoulou 2007).

Does it matter? Above, we have documented the great number of different research orientations that take the idea of narrative coherence for granted. However, has this orientation signified any problems in practical, empirical narrative analysis? Does it matter in terms of research methodology? We would like to argue that it matters. The normative attitude privileging coherent narratives may give rise to at least four kinds of problems. First, scholars may privilege coherent stories as better and more thickly representational material, and neglect other, more challenging cases. Many chapters in this volume take apparently “incoherent” and defective narratives and narrative situations, and show how meaning is made interactionally (Medved and Brockmeier, Hydén, Aaltonen), as a performance (Medved and Brockmeier, Hydén) or evaluation (Hydén). Narratives that may appear to resist chronology and clear temporal order can turn out to be extraordinarily rich studies about the life course, as argued in the chapter by Vilma Hänninen and Anja Koski-Jännes. Second, an overly normative attitude towards coherence may lead to a biased reading strategy as the scholar is desperately working towards “finding” the deepest, coherent meaning of the self-narrative. We believe that coherence is not an objective feature of an individual narrative as a text, but rather is something that has always been produced interactionally, thus implicating the researcher as a coherence-creating or coherence-declining agent (Brockmeier, 2004). Interpretive projects always run the risk of looking for ready-made and overly neat solutions, and this risk is made that much greater if a coherent and complete life narrative is the blueprint. Reading may instead go in the other direction, as for example in Linda Sandino’s chapter. Sandino employs Paul Ricoeur’s theory of triple mimesis and the dual nature of narrative identity to portray the turning points, the contemplation of art works that mark the turn of a career, the other who becomes part of one’s own work and thinking. Similarly Maria Tamboukou offers, in her chapter, both the non-linear and resistant epistolary narratives written by the



Chapter 1.╇ Beyond narrative coherence

artist Gwen John, and a consciously Deleuzian reading of the cracks, hesitations, and formations of insecure identifications when writing and painting self-portraits. Alison Stern Perez (with her co-authors), in her chapter on the Israeli bus drivers, who have experienced terrorist attacks, takes an obvious incoherence of pronoun use and straightforwardly contradictory statements given by a bus driver about not fearing and having feared, of course, as the starting points of her analysis. Perez’s reading of the variable use of the Hebrew gendered ‘you’ opens up different layers of vulnerability and dominant masculinity, and how the contradictions of the statements are attached to contradicting societal expectations, which render the individual interviews seemingly incoherent. Third, the biased emphasis on narrative coherence and coherent narratives seems to impoverish the narrative thought and reduce narratives once again more or less to adequate representations of past life, experiences, or thoughts. Many of the chapters in this volume foreground the performative and evaluative roles narration takes. Lars-Christer Hydén, in particular, shows how the performance of a narrative and narrative evaluation may survive the textual coherence in the storytelling of dementia patients. This urge to tell, and to do it interactionally through a network of family members even after severe brain damage or aphasia is analysed in the chapters of Medved and Brockmeier and Aaltonen. Molly Andrews’s chapter on political trauma narratives addresses a fourth set of problems with the coherence bias. Extreme political traumas often seem to block the whole capacity to tell, and the ideal of coherent and standard narration stands in cruel contrast to what the victims and witnesses can actually do. As a dramatic example, Andrews recounts how the translation process during the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa often cleaned out important personal details in order to fit the purposes of the national project of unification. All in all, a significant part of the politically and humanly most important narration comes out hesitantly, often incoherently, replete with contradictions and resistant to chronologically smooth, linear progress. Again, as Andrews argues, the performance of telling seems to be the most urgent task, where the meaning and coherence of the accounts remain secondary in importance. In addressing the four sets of problems identified above, the chapters of this volume challenge the sequential, coherence-oriented model of narrative from three major subject areas: illness, the arts, and trauma in the political context. Typical for these areas is that they confront the middle-class normalcy and the vision of life as a teleological project that the narrator-protagonist creates with the same ease as he or she tells it. Maria Medved and Jens Brockmeier open the volume with a survey on research constituting the coherence paradigm in illness and brain injury research, and show compellingly with their case studies, how this paradigm limits the

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recognition of genuine narrative performances. Lars-Christer Hydén, in his article on narrative, self, and identity also foregrounds the performative and evaluative aspects of storytelling, showing how Alzheimer patients whose coherence in narration is far from complete, nevertheless can interactionally produce the desired evaluative point of the story, the affirmation of the suggested identity. Tarja Aaltonen continues with the narrative difficulties of an aphasic patient, and argues that the family members and the speech therapist use “mind reading” as a technique in teasing out the correct interpretation from the very limited and disordered speech of the patient. Maria Tamboukou begins the section about artistic impediments and challenges to linear and coherent narration. The painter Gwen John, writing postcards and love letters to the leading artistic figure Rodin, is impeded by wrong language (French instead of English), mixed identity (a female artist and model within a male dominated scene), and wrong media (an artist writing), thus constantly struggling with several kinds of evasions in her epistolary narration. Linda Sandino, by contrast, studies interview narratives of British ceramic artists. Sandino works within the Ricoeurian paradigm, reading out the changes and challenges of identity, pointing out how the idem (sameness) identity cannot help us to understand the changes artists experience through visiting and receiving artistically explosive work by other artists; and shows the relevance of the identity as temporally evolving and changing ipse. Vilma Hänninen and Anja Koski-Jännes introduce the third artist, now in the context of dilemmatic recovery from severe drinking problems. The authors argue that, in contrast to many coherent and conversionlike stories by recovered drinkers, the female artist of this story rejects a linear, chronological, and sequential model of narration, and instead proceeds through large temporal cycles, and only cautiously approaches the most traumatic experiences of her youth. The article presents a marvellous narrative moment of creation and investigation of the self, rather than delivering a repeatedly told, finished and polished narrative of the self. The last section consists of papers discussing trauma in the political context. Alison Stern Perez, with her co-authors, discusses the oral narratives of Israeli bus drivers who have faced terrorist attacks in their line of work. What could be a more dramatic break and challenge to the linearity and coherence of a life story? Perez goes on to reveal highly telling incongruities in the use of Hebrew pronouns, and focuses her analysis on the obvious factual contradiction of the narrative. Moreover, precisely the departures from the coherent ideal turn out to be the most telling elements of the bus drivers’ stories, not a deficiency of the material. Molly Andrews’s article on narrative difficulty in accounting for severe political traumas, from the European Holocaust to other genocides and to the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee, foregrounds the utmost difficulty



Chapter 1.╇ Beyond narrative coherence

to provide a narrative account after such an experience. Coherent, linear, and traditional narrative is often the most unlikely account of such experiences, even though the witnesses struggle with the obligation to tell and not to remain silent after such atrocities. It is a huge methodological challenge to approach such complex and potentially re-traumatizing narrative situations, a challenge, which cannot be met just by trusting in the inherited representational model. As Andrews concludes, the performance of the narration is again the key aspect of the contradictory situation. In the final chapter, Mark Freeman encounters the challenge of coherence again from a new angle, and discusses the ideas presented in the previous articles of the volume. Freeman makes the initially surprising observation that ‘nearly every chapter in this book seeks to show that, behind the manifest in-coherence or “a-coherence” of the narratives in question a latent coherence lurks. Moreover […] most of these chapters suggest that there is some relationship between narrative coherence and well-being’. Freeman’s nuanced article suggests that perhaps it is, after all, both impossible and unnecessary to go beyond narrative coherence, if the terms of coherence and in-coherence are rethought one more time.

Note We are grateful to the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change, the research team Politics and the Arts, for arranging and funding the Third Tampere Conference on Narrative, Living, Knowing, Telling, taking place June 26–29, 2007; and finally to the Academy of Finland Research Project The Conceptual History of Narrative (1111743) for making the editorial process of this volume possible.

References Bamberg, M. (1997). Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7, 335–342. Bamberg, M. (2004). Positioning with Davie Hogan: Stories, telling, and identities. In C. Daiute & C. Lightfoot (Eds.), Narrative analysis: Studying the development of individuals in society (pp.â•›135–157). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bernstein, M. A. (1994). Foregone conclusions: Against apocalyptic history. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Bhabha, H. (1986). Signs taken for wonders: Questions of ambivalence and authority under a tree outside Dehki : 1817. In H. L. Gates (Ed.), Race, writing and difference (163–184). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Brockmeier, J. (2004). What makes a story coherent? In A. U. Branco & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Communication and metacommunication in human development (pp.â•›285–306). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

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Matti Hyvärinen, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo and Maria Tamboukou Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1991). The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry 18, 1–21. Craib, I. (2000). Narratives of bad faith. In M. Andrews, S. Day Sclater, C. Squire & A. Treacher (Eds.), Lines of narrative: Psychosocial perspectives (pp.â•›64–74). London: Routledge. Doležel, L. (1999). Fictional and historical narrative: Meeting the postmodernist challenge. In D. Herman (Ed.), Narratologies: New perspectives on narrative analysis (pp.â•›247–273). Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Fludernik, M. (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge. Freeman, M. (2000). When the story’s over: Narrative foreclosure and the possibility of selfrenewal. In M. Andrews, S. Day Sclater, C. Squire & A. Treacher (Eds.), Lines of narrative: Psychosocial perspectives (pp.â•›81–91). London: Routledge. Freeman, M. (2003). Identity and difference in narrative inquiry: A commentary on the articles by Erica Burman, Michelle Crossley, Ian Parker, & Shelley Sclater. Narrative Inquiry, 13, 331–346. Georgakopoulou, A. (2007). Small stories, interaction and identities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gillroy, P. (1993). The black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. London: Verso. Gillroy, P. (2000). Between camps: Race, identity and nationalism at the end of the colour line. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hall, S. (1990). Cultural identity and diaspora. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity, community, culture, difference (pp.â•›222–237). London: Lawrence and Wishart. Herman, D. (2002). Story logic: Problems and possibilities of narrative. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. Hydén, L.-C., & Brockmeier, J. (Eds.). (2008). Health, illness and culture. London: Routledge. Hymes, D. (1996). Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality. London: Taylor & Francis. Hyvärinen, M. (2006). Towards a conceptual history of narrative. In M. Hyvärinen, A. Korhonen & J. Mykkänen (Eds.), The travelling concept of narrative. Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies; http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/e-series/volumes/volume_1/index.htm Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Labov, W., & Waletsky, J. (1967/1997). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7, 3–38. Langellier, K.M., & Peterson, E.E. (2004). Storytelling in daily life. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Linde, C. (1993). Life stories: The creation of coherence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacIntyre, A. (1984). After virtue: A study in moral theory (2nd ed.). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. McAdams, D.P. (1988). Power, intimacy, and the life story: Personological inquiries into identity. New York, NY: Guilford Press. McAdams, D.P. (1993). The stories we live by: Personal myths and the making of the self. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Mink, L.O. (1987). Historical understanding. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Morson, G.S. (1994). Narrative and freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Morson, G.S. (1998). Contingency and poetics. Philosophy and Literature, 22, 286–308. Morson, G.S. (2003). Narrativeness. New Literary History 34, 59–73. Ochs, E., & Capps, L. (2001). Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.



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Propp, V. (1968). Morphology of the folktale (L. Scott, Trans., 2nd ed.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Propp, V. (1984). The structural and historical study of the wondertale (L. Scott, Trans.). In A. Liberman (Ed.), Theory and history of folklore (pp.â•›67–81). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1981). Narrative time. In W.J.T. Mitchell (Ed.), On narrative (pp.â•›165–186). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative (K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer, Trans. Vol. 1). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Riessman, C.K. (1990). Divorce talk: Women and men make sense of personal relationships. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Sartwell, C. (2000). End of story: Toward an annihilation of language and history. Albany: State University of New York Press. Schechtman, M. (1996). The constitution of selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Smith, S. & Watson, J. (1998) Women, autobiography, theory: A reader. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Spivak, G.C. (1987). In other worlds: Essays in cultural politics. London: Routledge. Strawson, G. (2004). Against narrativity. Ratio (New Series), XVII(4), 428–452. White, H. (1981/1987). The value of narrativity in the representation of reality. In H. White (Ed.), The content of the form: Narrative discourse and historical representation (pp.â•›26–57). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Chapter 2

Weird stories Brain, mind, and self Maria I. Medved and Jens Brockmeier

University of Manitoba, Canada / University of Innsbruck, Austria

In the literature on autobiographical narrative, self, and identity construction, many researchers have taken narrative coherence as an important feature that reflects and shapes identity and sense of self. Commonly, this feature is defined and assessed in isolation, as if at stake were an autonomous text. We argue this approach is too narrow to represent things as complex as narrative, self, and brain. We explain this argument in discussing narratives by individuals with serious neuropsychological challenges: people who, due to illness or disability, cannot fully rely on their neurocognitive and narrative resources for their identity construction. We offer a broader view of the issue of coherence in autobiographical narrative that goes beyond a decontextualized concept of narrative, especially, by including (i) the intersubjective context in which stories are told, (ii) the larger autobiographical context of their narrator, and (iii) the wider socio-cultural context in which narratives and narrators are situated. Using narrative excerpts from adults with acquired brain injuries and neurocognitive disabilities, we point out how what is seen as (narrative) coherence of one’s brain, mind, and self changes when these contexts are taken into account.

Narrative identity and coherence: The Aristotelian version The idea that autobiographical narratives are not only essential to the construction of human identity but also in the creation and reflection of one’s sense of self is wide-spread. In psychology, Jerome Bruner (1986, 1990) was one of the first to emphasize the link between autobiographical narration and personal identity. While this view — sometimes called the narrative identity thesis — initially was met with reluctance and resistance, there has been an exponential increase in the number of studies investigating self and identity by examining people’s narratives. This is true both for more theoretical studies in psychology, the social sciences, and the humanities, as well as for areas of applied research. We want to take a closer look at how the narrative identity thesis is drawn out in one applied

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area, a landscape of the mind that we think is of particular interest because it involves people whose “natural” resources both for narrative and the construction of identity are seriously challenged: individuals who cannot rely on “normal”, that is, typical neurological and neuropsychological functioning because their brains went awry. There are, indeed, many researchers and theorists concerned with neurological and psychopathological issues who have discussed the interweaving of autobiographical narratives and the self. Oliver Sacks (1985) argued, from the point of view of what he called a new neuropsychology, that “each of us constructs and lives ‘narrative,’↜” concluding “that narrative is us, our identities” (p.â•›105). (For a discussion of this “strong narrative identity claim,” see Eakin, 1999.) Similarly, Daniel Dennett (1986, 1992) argued that the self, since it does not have any neuronal correlates, only makes sense if thought of as an abstraction. It is a purely linguistic arrangement, a “center of narrative gravity.” While the self, for Dennett, is fictional, it is not fantastical. It is not real in the way brain processes and structures are real, but still plays an important role because it allows us to explain, predict, and narratively organize human behavior. In short, there is no real self, but the assumption of a self makes sense — narrative sense, that is. Antonio Damasio has suggested a neurobiological theory of consciousness that includes a “narrative core”: “The story contained in the images of core consciousness is not told by some clever homunculus. Nor is the story told by you as a self because the core you is only born as the story is told, within the story itself” (1999, p.â•›191). In the same vein, Michael Gazzaniga (1998) has viewed “the self as the product of stories we tell about ourselves.” He underscored the argument that, biologically, there is no such thing as a self, but only the illusion of a self created through and by narrative. Drawing on his work with split-brain patients, Gazzaniga proposed that there is an “interpreter” in the left hemisphere of the brain whose function is to seek explanations for internal and external events and, in so doing, constructs intelligible and coherent narratives about these occurrences. Recently even cognitive psychologists, for a long time the staunchest critics of all things narrative, have taken over some of these ideas and adapted them to their models. Greenberg and Rubin (2003), for example, believe that our ability to narrate is so fundamental and unique to human beings, that it represents a distinct cognitive process associated with a distinct neural network. Commonly, neuroscientific authors do not assume a biological substrate for the self, viewing it rather as a “secondary” construction in which narrative may play the role of an organizer. There are, however — in clinical, social, and developmental psychology, education, and even in narrative psychology — stronger claims regarding this kind of this narrative organization. Here many researchers, investigating the narrative construction of identity, have postulated coherence as



Chapter 2.╇ Weird stories

the dominant feature not only of autobiographical narratives, but also more generally of identity construction. Typically, coherence and integration are thought to be linked to the ability to sustain a sense of continuity, directionality, and meaning in one’s life (e.g., Angus & McLeod, 2004; Linde, 1993; McAdams, 2003; Neimeyer, 1994). There seems to be extensive agreement that people whose narratives about themselves are assessed as coherent report a high level of psychological well-being, whereas individuals whose narratives are incoherent report psychological difficulties (Androutsopoulou et al., 2004; Baerger & McAdams, 1999; Lysaker, Wickett, & Davis, 2005; McAdams, 2006a & b; Pals, 2006). It has even been claimed that coherence not only influences people’s own selves and well-being, but also those of their children. Main (1991), for example, argued that adults who are able tell coherent stories about their childhood experiences, no matter how troubled or traumatic these might have been, have children who develop into psychologically healthier adults. Generally, the underlying assumption of this literature is that if peoples’ autobiographical narratives are incoherent, their sense of self is also incoherent, and this mostly seems to imply that it is psychologically unhealthy or troubled. And conversely, if a person’s autobiographical narrative is coherent, their self is also psychologically healthy and generative. On these grounds psychotherapists aim at co-constructing with their patients new and coherent narratives to replace disorganized or incoherent ones (McLeod, 1997). Developing a coherent life story, the story of a coherent self, is seen to be the outcome of recovery (e.g., Davidson & Strauss, 1992), if not redemption (McAdams, 2006a). To put it even more technically, increased “self-narrative coherence indicates ‘improvement’↜” (Androutsopoulou et al., 2004, p.â•›385). Again, these and numerous other authors seem to be convinced that the coherence of personal stories, in general, and stories about oneself or autobiographical stories, in particular, correlates with psychological functioning, health, and well-being of the teller. Ultimately, narrative coherence equals both a coherent mind and a coherent self. In McAdams’s (2006b, p.â•›109) terms, coherent life stories reflect the “richness of experience” of a good life; these stories therefore provide “convincing causal explanations for the self.” Moreover, they organize the self into a “unified and purposeful whole” (2003, p.â•›189). If narrative coherence, then, is taken to be such a powerful indicator, how is it defined? A common definition of coherence draws on what we would describe as the traditional notion of narrative, as it is characteristic of 19th century European genres of realist fiction. Theoretically, this idea can be traced back to Aristotle. An Aristotelian narrative is a well-structured story; it has a clear, temporally ordered plot with a dramatic complication that eventually is resolved. Its components are constituted by the elements of Burke’s (1945) “dramatist pentad,” which includes an act (with a beginning and an end), a scene, an agent, agency, and a purpose.

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All of this endows Aristotelian stories with a high degree of coherence and potential complexity. Now, in the literature on the relationship between self and narrative the idea of coherence is, however, more narrowly defined, and its Aristotelian model typically is not addressed. These more specific versions of coherence, to mention a few, range from “internal consistency” (based on causal and thematic linkages in one’s life story) (e.g., Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Habermas & Paha, 2003), the organization, flexibility, and congruence of affect and content (e.g., Fiese & Sameroff, 1999; Fiese & Wamboldt, 2003), “micro- and macrolinguistic structures” organizing “semantic information”, to “intelligibility” (Androutsopoulou et al., 2004) in terms of both narrative form and content, which is expected “to advance living action” (McAdams, 2006b). Furthermore, most concepts of coherence using narrative frameworks include time — typically understood in terms of temporal sequentiality — as a strong criterion of coherence (for a critical discussion see Brockmeier, 2004). How does the narrative identity thesis “apply” to people with hardcore brain problems? By hardcore we refer to what clinicians call neuropsychological deficits or dysfunctions due to accidents, diseases (stroke, dementia), or syndromes (developmental disabilities). This is an area of research, assessment, and therapy, where one’s sense of self and the construction of identity are almost always centrally affected — and so are people’s self-narratives. In examinations of the way in which people with these neurological problems situate themselves in their life worlds, the traditional definitions of narrative coherence are also used to assess the opposite, namely, the incoherence of their stories. Mostly, here only a weak version of “mental coherence” or “mental incoherence” is implied; still, the idea of a nexus between brain-mind-self and narrative coherence underlies much of the literature in this area. As the literature on neurotrauma is vast, we mention only a few representative studies to give a sense of this kind of research on mental and narrative coherence. Snow, Douglas, and Ponsford (1999) argue that individuals with traumatic brain injuries demonstrate more story planning errors on what they call an objective story-telling task (e.g., composing the plot of a story); these are seen as signs of lower narrative coherence than found in stories by individuals without brain injuries. In a single case study, Caspari and Parkinson (2000) examined unrelated, abrupt, and inappropriate topic shifts in the stories of a woman with a memory impairment. In numerous similar investigations of stories by people with closed head injuries, clinicians and researchers have pointed out deficits in “logical,” “causal,” and “temporal” coherence, “referential cohesion,” and/or “structural incoherence” (e.g., Coelho, 2002; Davis & Coelho, 2004; Heartley & Jensen,1991; Mentis & Prutting, 1987). Irrespective of which brain area is damaged or what ability is impacted, narratives of affected people are commonly classified as “incoherent” or



Chapter 2.╇ Weird stories

“incohesive.” Such findings are almost always interpreted as suggesting a disturbed sense of self. Let us at this point change our perspective. We shift from reporting and reviewing to taking an analytical and critical stance towards the idea that the criterion of (narrative) coherence and incoherence, as used in the above studies, is capable of adequately “assessing” the mental state and the sense of self, let alone the identity, of a person affected by neurotrauma, neurodegeneration, or neurodisability. We want to make the case that narrative coherence, at least in the way it is typically understood in mainstream psychological and neuroscientific research, as well in neuropsychological assessment and in therapy, is a construct that is all but capable of reflecting the sense of self and the construction of identity in individuals who cannot fully rely on their brains. We believe that the standard — Aristotelian — view on what represents narrative coherence in autobiographical narrative is misleading because it offers too narrow a picture of coherence and incoherence, be it of autobiographical narrative, the mind, the brain, or the self. In what follows we flesh out this argument theoretically and empirically, drawing on our own research as well as on that of others with individuals with neurological damage and disability. In offering a broader narrative, discursive, and socio-cultural approach to the question of how incoherent stories may be linked to the mind, the self, and the brain, we propose that not all weird autobiographical stories are necessarily incoherent, and not all incoherent stories mirror a weird self.

Narrative identity and coherence: A discursive version The first problem we see with the focus on narrative coherence as the key criterion of a coherent mind and self is that it generalizes specific concepts of narrative and coherence — we have called them Aristotelian — and employs them to the wider field of human social practice and self-experience. A second problem arises from examining people’s autobiographical stories in isolation, more precisely: in textual isolation. In a sense, isolating narratives from their discursive contexts and cultural life world is also already part of the Aristotelian conception of narrative. While such an approach may seem plausible if we take narrative to be a written text, it is precarious if we want to approach a person’s autobiographical narratives in order to understand his or her brain, mind, sense of self, and identity construction. Here we clearly need to go beyond the limits of the narrative text, at least if it is not understood in a poststructuralist sense (and we can be sure that this is the case in the literature under discussion). We believe the main difficulty of this approach results from its tendency to decontextualize stories. More precisely, it decontextualizes self-narratives from three

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essential areas or aspects of what Alexander Luria (1979) called the “living reality” of human beings: the intersubjective context in which all stories are told (which includes the dialogic or discursive relationship between teller and told), the larger autobiographical context that is behind all self-narratives (which includes one’s life history), and the socio-cultural context (which includes the social environments in which narrators share their lives with others). Limiting the focus of investigation to pure cognitive (or mental or neurological) “functioning” brings with it the danger, as Luria put it, of “reducing living reality with all its richness of detail to abstract schemas” (quoted in Wasserstein, 1988, p.â•›440). In abstracting from the psychological and social embeddedness of every narrative discourse, it even excludes the possibility to understand narrative incoherence as rooted in real-life worlds. In our own research with people suffering from neurological memory impairments (Medved & Brockmeier, 2008a & b), we wanted to explore how these individuals experienced the catastrophe of a neurotrauma and how they continued to live their lives afterwards. In other words, in which ways were they able to narrate their experiences retrospectively? Not surprisingly, all of the individuals we visited, talked to, and interviewed, struggled to formulate narrative accounts because their linguistic and cognitive resources were seriously limited by their brain lesions. Others experienced difficulties because they had simply no or very few autobiographical memories after their accidents or strokes on which their stories could draw. But what we did not expect was that many of them, although they complained about the lack of autobiographical memories and the impossibility of formulating their experiences in the form of stories, did not complain about changes in their sense of self and their identities in time. The stories they told us were occasionally a bit tricky — for example, they invented, “imported,” and “appropriated” memories they had heard from others into their own narratives (Medved, 2007). Often, these stories were presented in a weird fashion — they were disconnected, fragmented, and implausible. But they were amazingly coherent in an important respect: they suggested an unbroken continuity between their lives and selves before and after the neurotrauma. Most surprisingly, our participants, people with severe memory impairments, appeared to have maintained a strong sense of sameness, in fact, of self-continuity — despite the chaos in their minds and lives. Although they acknowledged, and complained about, their lack of autobiographical memory, the gist of their stories unveiled a sense of self and identity that hardly seemed to have been disturbed by their brain injury. A similar picture emerged in a study by Örulv and Hydén (2006). They reinterpreted another form of weird narration, so called confabulation, that they observed among the elderly residents of a dementia day care. Instead of examining



Chapter 2.╇ Weird stories

the confabulatory stories of the residents as an isolated cognitive event (for example, of thematic and temporal distortions), Örulv and Hydén describe them as products of a particular social and discursive situation. They plot the story of Martha, a woman with Alzheimer’s disease whose narratives are about receiving friends at home whereas she is at her day care clinic. When decontextualized, Martha’s story clearly appears nonsensical and incoherent by all Aristotelian standards. But when the immediate context of the day care, her life history, and the limitations due to her disease are taken into account, her story does not seem so bizarre at all; rather it is a story that, in fact, establishes and maintains a personal identity for Martha, what the authors call self-making.

Coherence in context We now want to illustrate in more detail how we see autobiographical narrative and the question of its coherence as a discursive phenomenon contextualized in the “living reality” of its narrator and co-narrators. Although we have set up our argument wider in range, we will flesh out our views by closely looking at autobiographical stories told by individuals who are badly equipped for such narrative discourse, individuals who are in one way or another neurologically and neuropsychologically challenged. Here the issue of coherence and incoherence reveals still another existential meaning; to get a sense of it we must not only consider the isolated stories of these people and the clinical accounts of their problems but also engage with the reality of their life worlds We start with Ann, a teenage girl with Fragile X Syndrome, a genetic syndrome that leads to various cognitive problems or, as neurologists would put it, intellectual deficits (Medved & Brockmeier, 2004). Ann was born in a Caribbean country and, as her mother was unable to care for her, she was raised by her grandparents who allegedly had been abusive. Soon after her birth her father left the family and immigrated to North America. She followed him a few years later, and shortly afterwards was diagnosed with Fragile X Syndrome. Ann told us that in her father’s new household she had to do most of the family chores, duties she deeply disliked. When we first met her, she had moved into a semi-independent home and worked as a cleaner. She also started taking a course, “a course in animal care,” she told us, “because I love animals.” To be sure, the first time we talked to this shy and quiet girl we had difficulties understanding her. Ann’s stories were told in strange fragments that seemed to be only associatively connected. No doubt, when her story fragments or collections of such fragments were assessed as isolated statements in a traditional neuropsychological fashion, they unavoidably appeared to be incoherent, particularly in terms

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of their causal, temporal, and semantic relations. The picture changed, however, when we examined what she told us not against the standard of well-formed stories, which they obviously were not, but as contributions to a dialogic exchange. To understand them as narratively charged conversational turns — turns, admittedly, in an unusual conversation — meant integrating them into a discursive context in which the task of making them intelligible and, that is, creating coherence, was not just on one side but on the sides of both participants of the conversation. Ann: I know a secret. Interviewer: What’s that? A: My sister is pregnant, my brother told me. I: Gosh, that IS a big secret. A: She’s only 16 years old. I don’t feel sorry. How will she go back to school. She can’t go back. I: You think school is important? A: I go to college for a course. I: What kind of course? A: For animals. I want a good job. I: You want to change your job? A: I don’t want to clean trays.

While traditional assessments focusing on rounded and autonomous Aristotelian stories told by an isolated individual easily result in “deficit diagnoses,” in this small example the girl and the interviewer demonstrate different things. They act as what in recent narrative theory is called “co-narrators” and their exchange unfolds, as a result, into a fully-fledged discourse. This discourse includes the transformation of one storyline — the “secret” of Ann’s sister’s pregnancy and its dramatic consequences — via a reflection on the importance of education for life to another, autobiographical storyline that reveals Ann’s discontent with her present job and the consequence she has drawn from it: attending a course in order to realize her dream to work with animals. Reconstructing these, at first sight, simple plots which capture, however, existential human concerns implies shifting the focus from the construct of an autonomous narrative to a social, interactive situation. It means creating a discursive space in which this girl, encouraged, supported, and interpreted by the interviewer — who, as any co-narrator in any everyday conversational narrative, fills in the gaps, comments on and bridges different elements, and brings in personal interest and warmth — is able to give narrative shape to personal experiences and thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and intentions. None of this would have been (and, in fact, was) possible in the context of a neuropsychological assessment or any (causal, temporal, semantic, or narrative) coherence-centered approach. In fact, curtailing acts of narrative interaction in order to fit traditional assessment requirements and “construct” a decontextualized



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clinical subject necessarily emphasizes impairment, disorder, and deficits and, in this way, confirm the hypothesized view of an incoherent brain, mind, and self. The idea that a narrative is jointly constructed and performed by co-narrators elaborates on an understanding of narrative as primarily a communicative activity. This is in contrast with most of the literature mentioned earlier which is based on an idea of narrative (and of language in general) as primarily representational. In viewing each narration as a discursive venture, as a process of interaction and mutual understanding — a view that we see nicely illustrated in the quoted exchange — we suggest a different, discursive, and interactional approach to the question of coherence. Although we have illustrated this approach by referring to the special stories of a special narrator, a girl with Fragile X syndrome, we believe it is a general, in fact, constitutive feature of stories that they are not told as such but always embedded in a conversational dynamic. Thus the coherence of stories, as discussed in more detail elsewhere (Brockmeier, 2004), can change relative to the rhetorical dynamic of the conversation which, in turn, depend on the interplay among the different strategies, intentions, and narrative competencies of the participants. In our second example we present another weird autobiographical story. In this case we want to draw attention to a different context which, we believe, must also be taken into account in order to understand the coherence, and incoherence, of this kind of story. Here the context is that of the narrator’s life history which, quite like the discursive and interactional context, typically is excluded by the focus on the Aristotelian coherence of personal stories. How essential it is to be aware of the life history of a person in order to make sense of her autobiographical stories and conceive of them as either coherent or incoherent (or both), we experienced in our work with a woman suffering from the neurological and neuropsychological consequences of a stroke. Admitted to the hospital, this woman, Ms. E, showed many symptoms of what clinicians call an “anterior communicating artery syndrome,” which often includes dramatic personality changes, amnesia, and confabulation. This means, for example, that she tells highly unusual stories, if one can call them stories at all. To give an idea of how this looks, let us quote a narrative she abruptly started in the middle of a conversation about her life that had been changed so profoundly by the aneurysm. See, that’s why some like me. I told somebody this before, I don’t know who I told this before but its coming right back to me. We were talking about drugs, taking, not medical drugs but illegal street drugs. That’s what you call them. That’s why someone like me could never do it. I’m too afraid something would happen to me. That someone would guide me the wrong way. I have to be … I have to have my wits about me. Like drinking. If we go out drinking, oh I’ll drink, but when I order my drink straight up, lots of ice please and it just sits there. Cause I always have to be in control. And [my husband] knows that, cause he’s told me…

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Reading this transcript, it is not difficult to confirm our impression as we first listened to Ms. E’s agitated monologue (which went on for quite a while, and occurred in one way or another in almost all our visits): What is, we were wondering, the point of these endless story bits and pieces? What do drugs and alcohol have to do with the life of this woman, a middle-aged, middle-class professional, wife, and mother with a house in the suburbs? Why does she have to be so in control, even restricting herself to one drink? And what does all this have to do with her stroke and her present life? In no way could this sudden narrative eruption claim any coherence — unless, well, unless we go beyond the concept of an isolated narrative (if we, for once, call it a narrative) and contextualize it within the broader knowledge we have about the life of the narrator. Linguists refer to this as world knowledge, the knowledge beyond the word and the text, completed with the interpretive and imaginative ability, and the emotionality and intentionality shared by members of the same culture. Typically, these are resources every speaker and listener brings to a discursive event. When cast against the backdrop of the life story of this woman, her weird sort-of-narrative begins to make more sense. An established business woman, just before her stroke, she was in charge of an office staff of about 20 people, priding herself on running a “tight ship.” For many years working hard to combine her career with her family, she apparently was very successful in both domains. Now, imagine what a catastrophe not only for her brain but for her entire being in the world was triggered by a stroke that, at the time she told us this story, left her in a state that made it most unlikely for her to ever return to her former life. In our work with her we have come to suspect that this truth, together with all the havoc caused by the stroke on her brain, might have been simply too much to bear. So her stories went on to suggest, to others but perhaps most of all to herself, a picture of herself as the woman she always was and wanted to be: a strong and energetic woman, a woman in charge. Given her clinically reduced state, her stories were no doubt obsessive, bizarre, and weird; but they were not incoherent stories, at least not when understood as — shall we say, psychological — attempts to struggle against the utter breakdown that fully realizing and accepting her desperate situation would have entailed. They were narratives that gained intelligibility and, indeed, coherence, if understood as counter-narratives. What they were supposed to counter was the horrifying perspective of this woman’s future in contrast with her lived life history. The third context in which we propose to situate the issue of coherence widens the narrative and discursive framework even further into the sociocultural environment in which people talk about themselves. Typically, individuals are engaged in all kinds of ongoing discursive interactions that involve family members, friends, neighbors, colleagues, baristas from a favorite cafe, and many others. All



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of them know something about me and my past, and all of them contribute to my sense of self, to the way I see, feel, and understand myself in this world. And what’s more, they will likely continue to do so even if I have forgotten things about myself that are considered fundamental. This discursive net of everyday communication is of particular importance when I may have forgotten, due to illness or dementia, essential parts of my autobiographical identity — say, the names of new friends, babies, and acquaintances, what I did on my last birthday, whether I thanked you for the gift, whether you gave me a gift, and in fact, whether we are still friends at all. One could assume that these bits of information are essential for maintaining a sense of personal continuity and perhaps even of identity in time. Can there be any kind of coherent self if there is no coherent knowledge of who I am, not to mention of memories about my personal past? Studying sense of self-continuity and identity in people with serious brain injuries and disabilities we found that the discursive net of one’s social environment, with one’s family in the center, plays an essential role in holding together the sense of a coherent self even when individuals cannot rely on this kind of self-knowledge and autobiographical memory anymore. As already pointed out, we were surprised that, despite profound neurological problems, many individuals with whom we worked did not feel they had to recover their former sense of self — simply because, as we concluded, they subjectively seemed to have never lost it. In order to understand these findings we believe it is important to see that there are countless everyday practices, micro acts of recognition, reaffirmation, and reassurance in the social environments that individuals share with others that seem to compensate for what is missing. In fact, these interactions provide a social network of support and stability that leads people to feel no fundamental alteration in their sense of self (see also Roger, 2006, for a similar discussion involving people with dementia). If they had been, however, “measured” in terms of individual and decontextualized cognitive and narrative performance, these people might have revealed a fundamental “incoherence” not only of their brains and minds, but also of their selves. To demonstrate this, we do not want to present, as in the previous two examples, a narrative from an individual with neurological challenges but from an interview with the entire family of such an individual. In our example this includes the sons of a woman with whom we had a number of meetings and interview sessions. This woman, a divorced 56-year old former bank teller and mother of two teenage-aged sons, suffered an aneurysm which left her with cognitive impairment and serious memory problems. Unable to return to work she had to stay at home most of the time. While she was assisted by her sons as well by her brother and sister with many of her daily living activities, she appeared, however, amazingly unchanged in her self perception and self understanding, despite her complaints about her poor remembering and, especially, the lack of autobiographical

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memories. This is how her sons talk about her situation, and it also is about how she experiences herself as perceived and understood by her sons: Interviewer: …I also talked to your Mom on her own and whenever I leave, I’m under the impression that the way you [talking directly to the mother] present yourself is really, really impaired. Like you know, like really. Older son: That’s the way SHE presents herself. Interviewer: Yeah? Older son: WE don’t present her as impaired, we think she’s quite normal, SHE’S the one that always has to bring up the aneurysm thing. I don’t know why. Younger son: Everybody you [looking at his mother] meet likes you. Older son: Half my friends don’t even know she had an aneurysm. Younger son: They come into our house and “Your Mom’s really nice,” you know, and we’re like “yeah, she is.” Mom will cook, she will clean the floor, she will vacuum a little bit. So what? Older son: Yeah, like a normal Mom. I don’t see her as if she’s impaired in any way. The only thing is that she has a memory problem, sometimes. Even if she does have a memory problem, who doesn’t?

Clearly there is an enormous difference between assessing, in a decontextualized fashion, the ability of this woman to tell coherent autobiographical narratives and observing herself acting and interacting within her familiar social environment, supported and encouraged by the people with whom she “shares” her identity (and who, like her sons, may just wish to have a healthy and “normal” mom). It is this sociocultural framework of agency and identity practices which, we suggest, constitutes the only appropriate context to consider the question of coherence and incoherence of this woman’s mind and self. A more adequate examination of this question (if we still assume it is a meaningful question) must obviously also encompass the social and discursive fabric in which she lives, a fabric of many voices and practices, woven by many social actors.

A community of brains We have presented three different ways of contextualizing narrative coherence, integrating the issue into larger frameworks of autobiographical intersubjectivity. All these frameworks highlight the communicative and, more generally, social dimension of human existence, be it on the level of brain, mind, or self and identity. Since the argument of humans’ interactional and intersubjective nature is, in one form or another, wide-spread in the “discursive” literature on narrative, identity, and the mind (in contrast with the literature on narrative coherence referred to



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above), we want to conclude with a few more remarks on the social dimension of the brain. One reason we have emphasized this dimension is because of its particular importance for people with neurological damage, people with whom we have worked and whose personal and autobiographical narratives we have mainly drawn on in explaining our argument. Steven Sabat and Rom Harré (1992; Harré, 1998; Sabat, 2001) have made similar observations in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease. Within a discursive context that allows them to be active and live a socially embedded life, the people Sabat and Harré worked with demonstrated abilities that were obviously better preserved than one would have assumed on the basis of their performance on standardized dementia tests. These tests operate on the same decontextualizing and individualizing premise as the narrative coherence tests. Sabat and Harré’s studies confirm the assumption that the human mind cannot be exclusively localized in the individual brain, nor can it be identified with an individual self; what is needed is a broader context that does not negate people’s discursive and affective interactions. As Goldstein (1934/1995) and Luria (1973) have already pointed out many years ago, the experience of individuals with lesioned brains makes it obvious that our neurological and neuropsychological functioning is socially intertwined with that of other brains. In fact, it is dependent on other brains, especially, when, as a consequence of brain damage and traumatically caused deficits, they take over certain neurocognitive functions, “bridging the cognitive gaps” (Goldstein, 1934/1995) and creating new “functional systems” (Luria, 1973). What on the level of consciousness, mind, and self has been discussed in terms of “distributed cognition,” “discursive mind,” “transactional mind,” “relational self,” “interactional self,” and “social self ” finds an equivalent on the level of the brain. This is hardly surprising considering that the human brain not evolve in isolation but that its specific qualities stem from the fact that what has evolved has always been a community of brains, a community that has co-evolved with human’s capacity to symbolically interact (see, e.g., Deacon, 1997; Donald, 1991; Hobson, 2004; Rose, 2006; Tomasello, 1999). We see here a further rationale for our approach to situate the issue of narrative coherence in the context of communities of selves, minds, and brains.

Note This research was supported by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research/Canadian Neurotrauma Research Program (JPF-50718) and the University of Manitoba Research Grants Program.

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References Androutsopoulou, A., Thanopoulou, K., Economou, E., & Bafiti, T. (2004). Forming criteria for assessing the coherence of clients’ life stories: A narrative study. Journal of Family Therapy, 26, 384–406. Angus, L.E., & McLeod, J. (2004). The handbook of narrative and psychotherapy. London: Sage. Baerger, D.R., & McAdams, D. (1999). Life story coherence and its relation to psychological well-being. Narrative Inquiry, 9, 69–96. Brockmeier, J. (2004). What makes a story coherent? In A.U. Branco & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Communication and metacommunication in human development (pp.â•›285–306). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. Bruner, J.S. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J.S. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burke, K. (1945). A grammar of motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Caspari, I., & Parkinson, S.R. (2000). Effects of memory impairment on discourse. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 13, 15–36. Coehlo, C.A. (2002). Story narratives of adults with closed head injury and non-brain-injured adults: Influence of soicoeconomic status, elicitation task, and executive function. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 45, 1232–1248. Damasio, A.R. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace. Davis, G.A., & Coelho, C.A. (2004). Referential cohesion and logical coherence of narration after closed head injury. Brain and Language, 89, 508–523. Davidson, L., & Strauss, J. (1992). Sense of self in recovery from mental illness. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 65, 131–145. Deacon, T.W. (1997). The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the brain. New York, NY: Norton. Dennett, D.C. (1986). Content and consciousness. London: Routlege and Kegan Paul. Dennett, D.C. (1992). The self as a center of narrative gravity. In F. Kessel, P. Cole, & D. Johnson (Eds.), Self and consciousness: Multiple perspectives (pp.â•›103–115). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Donald, M. (1991). The origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eakin, P.J. (1999). How our lives become stories: Making selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Friese, B.H., & Sameroff, A.J. (1999). The family narrative consortium: A multidimentional approach to narratives. In B.H. Fiese, A.J. Sameroff, H.D. Grotevant, F.S. Wamboldt, S. Dickstein, & D.L. Fravel (Eds.), The stories that families tell: Narrative coherence, narrative interaction, and relationship beliefs. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 64 (Serial No. 357, pp.â•›1–36). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Friese, B.H., & Wamboldt, F.S. (2003). Coherent accounts of coping with a chronic illness: Convergences and divergences in family measurement using a narrative analysis. Family Process, 42, 439–451. Gazzaniga, M.S. (1998). The mind’s past. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Goldstein, K. (1934/1995). The organism: A holistic approach to biology derived from pathological data in man. New York, NY: Zone Books.



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Greenberg, D.L., & Rubin, D.C. (2003). The neuropsychology of autobiographical memory. Cortex, 39, 687–728. Habermas, T., & Bluck, S. (2000). Getting a life: The emergence of the life story in adolescence. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 31–50. Habermas, T., & Paha, C. (2001). The development of coherence in adolescents’ life narratives. Narrative Inquiry, 11, 35–54. Harré, R. (1998). The singular self. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Heartley, L.L., & Jensen, P.J. (1991). Narrative and procedural discourse after closed head injury. Brain Injury, 5, 267–285. Hobson, P.R. (2004). The cradle of thought: Exploring the origins of thinking. New York: Oxford University Press. Linde, C. (1993). Life stories: The creation of coherence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luria, A. (1979). The making of mind: A personal account of Soviet psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Luria, A. (1973). The working brain: An introduction to neuropsychology. New York, NY: Basic Books. Lysaker, P.H., Wickett, A., & Davis, L.W. (2005). Narrative qualities in schizophrenia: Associations with impairments in neurocognition and negative symptoms. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 193, 244–249. Main, M. (1991). Metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive monitoring and singular (coherent) vs. multiple (incoherent) model of attachment: Findings and directions for future research. In C.M. Parkes, J. Stevenson-Hinde, & P. Marris (Eds.), Attachment across the life cycle (pp.â•›127–159). London: Routledge. McAdams, D.P. (2003). Identity and the life story. In R. Fivush & C. Haden (Eds.), Autobiographical memory and the construction of a narrative self: Developmental and cultural perspectives (pp.â•›187–207). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. McAdams, D.P. (2006a). The redemptive self: Stories American’s live by. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McAdams, D.P. (2006b). The problem of narrative coherence. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 19, 109–125. McLeod. J. (1997). Narrative and Psychotherapy. London: Sage. Medved, M.I. (2007). Remembering without a past: A study of anterograde memory impairment in individuals after neurotrauma. Psychology, Health and Medicine, 12, 603–616. Medved, M.I., & Brockmeier, J. (2004). Making sense of traumatic experiences: Telling your life with Fragile X syndrome. Qualitative Health Research, 14, 741–759. Medved, M.I., & Brockmeier, J. (2008a). Talking about the unthinkable: Brain injuries and the “catastrophic reaction.” In. L.-C. Hydén & J. Brockmeier (Eds.), Culture, Health and Illness: Broken Narratives (pp.â•›54–72). London: Routledge. Medved, M.I. & Brockmeier, J. (2008b). Continuity amid chaos: Neurotrauma, loss of memory and sense of self. Qualitative Health Research, 18, 469–479. Mentis, M., & Prutting, C.A. (1987). Cohesion in the discourse of normal and head injured adults. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 30, 88–98. Neimeyer, R.A. (1994). The role of client generated narratives in psychotherapy. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 7, 229–242. Örulv, L., & Hydén, L.-C. (2006). Confabulation: Sense-making, self-making and world-making in dementia. Discourse Studies, 8, 647–674.

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Chapter 3

Identity, self, narrative Lars-Christer Hydén

Linköping University, Sweden

By tradition many narrative researchers interested in questions about identity have focused on interview narratives and especially on their discursive organization in terms of coherence and referentiality. This paper argues that other aspects than coherence are of importance in negotiating identity. Examples are taken from narrative research to show the ways in which persons with dementia illnesses, brain injuries, and related problems actually use and tell stories in order to claim various identities. There is a special focus on the way the storytelling activity and all kinds of expressive resources are used in order to establish and negotiate identity. It is … the narrated past that best generates our sense of personal identity (…) Narration into some form of story gives both a structure and a degree of understanding to the ongoing content of our lives. (Kerby, 1991, p.â•›33)

The American philosopher Paul Kerby and many other narrative researchers have argued that it is by turning our lived experiences into events in a story that we give meaning to our lives. The story not only connects events with each other, but also configures these events in relation to a plot. Through the plot a direction is introduced and the life acquires a higher order of meaning, letting particular events and happenings be part of a larger movement. Through the development and elaboration of the life story the individual self emerges. As Jerome Bruner writes, “In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives” (1987, p.â•›15). In telling autobiographical stories we are constrained by certain “rules” or conventions. Telling the truth is a basic rule in autobiographical telling; you relate only experiences you actually have had and can claim ownership of. In describing events it is necessary to adhere to normatively accepted views of what a person is and avoid use of the imagination. If we break these and other rules at least the listeners hold us accountable. In discussing the consequences of breaking the rules and conventions of autobiographical storytelling the literary scholar Paul Eakin suggests that there is

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a “disciplinary potential confronting those who fail to display an appropriately normal model of narrative identity” (2001, p.â•›120). The question is of course what consequences a failure to adhere to the “normal” expectations of autobiographical tellings has for both narrative theory and for the person in terms of the person’s ability to present, establish, and negotiate his or her identity. This is something that becomes especially compelling when persons have diseases that affect their ability to use language and tell stories (Alzheimer’s disease, aphasia) or their ability to tell certain types of stories (psychiatric diseases). The obvious question is of course whether the inability to tell stories about the past and to establish a plot implies a loss of identity, replaced by a void that is never to be filled again. A further range of questions has to do with the often taken-for-granted assumptions about narratives, especially the narrative as a coherent discursive representation of a temporal unfolding of events. In the following these questions will be discussed, using examples from narrative research into the ways persons suffering from illnesses and related problems actually use and tell stories in order to claim various identities. I will especially focus on the way the storytelling activity and all kinds of expressive resources are used in order to establish and negotiate identity. At first some of the paradigmatic modes of discussing illness narratives will be discussed, and then three examples are given in order to illustrate how autobiographical storytelling can be used as a tool for presenting and negotiating identities. The first example deals with specific ways of organizing the narrative discourse in order to expand identities. In the two following examples the performance of narrative — that is, the storytelling event — as well as the performative aspects of autobiographical narratives are discussed. In conclusion the concepts of ritual and move are suggested as ways of conceptualizing this type of identity work.

Illness, disease, and narrative In his classical article about narrative disruption and reconstruction, Gareth Williams (1984) quotes the character of Ulrich in Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities. In a lengthy discussion about narratives Ulrich says that the narrative order is “the simple order that consists in one’s being able to say, ‘When that had happened, then this happened.’↜” Gareth Williams continues: The trouble is that sometimes the ‘orderly sequence of facts’ gets broken up. It cannot be sustained against the chaos and, for a time at least, the life course is lost. The routine narrative expressing the concerns of the practical consciousness as it attends to the mundane details of daily life is pitched into disarray: a death in the family, serious illness, an unexpected redundancy and so forth. From such a situ-



Chapter 3.╇ Identity, self, narrative

ation narrative may have to be given some radical surgery and reconstructed so as to account for present disruptions. Narrative reconstruction, therefore, represents the workings of the discursive consciousness. (Williams, 1984, p.â•›178)

To Gareth Williams — as well as for the literary character Ulrich — narratives are primarily about something happening. Narratives are representations of events. The ideal is to be able to re-present events as progressing and to tell a coherent narrative. Illnesses tend to disrupt the smooth flow of events and demand “surgery”; a new order of events has to be reconstructed out of the temporary chaos. Gareth Williams’ seminal article is a very good example of when physical changes (traumas, chronic illness) shatter the taken-for-granted assumptions of everyday life and as a consequence also make almost all everyday stories about the past, present and future impossible to tell or listen to. This situation in turn makes it necessary to reconstruct a new autobiographical story, covering the events resulting in a chronic illness and revising both the past and the future. The autobiographical story is a type of narrative and storytelling situation that has become almost paradigmatic for much of the research on illness narratives. From a narrative point of view they are stories that are told in an interview situation to an actively listening researcher collecting his or her material. In these interviews there is almost no competition for the discursive space, giving the interviewee/storyteller the opportunity to tell a lengthy story, from beginning to the end, without being interrupted by another speaker. In this sense the interview situation is quite different from storytelling in ongoing conversations involving several interlocutors, as for instance in family dinner conversations. The study of illness narratives in interviews has often implied a view of narrative as mainly a representation of events, i.e. the events leading up to the illness, the events linked directly to the illness, and the relationship between all these events. Identity is often thought of in terms of a person being able to tell a coherent and progressing life story, covering all salient events, especially those related to the illness. Going outside this paradigmatic idea of illness narratives shows that stories can be told in other situations pertaining to health and illness, resulting in other ways of organizing narratives and also stressing other social functions compared to interview narratives. Telling stories in encounters with medical doctors or therapists generally means that it is the functions of the story in the ongoing relation between the parties that come to the foreground. When patients are telling stories in medical and clinical settings, this context often has profound consequences for how the story is organized and what functions it has — in many cases leading to a fragmented story (cf. Clark & Mishler, 1992). Furthermore, patients telling stories in medical and clinical settings often do so in order “to reconstitute a self during medical examinations (…) by inserting into the realm of medicine (…) a narrative enclave” (Young, 1997, p.â•›33).

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Other patients tell stories as part of their treatment. This is true of persons going through psychotherapy or treatment for drug-related problems. To these persons it is essential to learn to tell new stories about themselves in order to change (Schafer, 1992), that is, to reconfigure their stories in the ongoing dialogic, therapeutic conversations with a psychotherapist or psychoanalyst. Focus is on change through dialogue and the establishment of a new plot, rather than on just being able to re-present events from the past. A further problem in the field of illness, health, and narrative is that some persons may either be in a process of losing their abilities to tell stories — as in the case of an illness like Alzheimer’s disease (Hydén & Örulv, 2009) — or may already have lost them through a brain injury (cf. Medved & Brockmeier, 2008). In these cases people generally have no access to some of the cognitive and linguistic resources needed to tell autobiographical stories that adhere to the conventional norms and expectations. This will often result in autobiographical narratives that are perceived to be flawed or incomplete. In general, broken narratives are rather the rule than the exception in connection with illness narratives (Hydén & Brockmeier, 2008). This is especially important as the question about the relationship between identity and narrative in many ways becomes highlighted in illness; traumas and diseases challenge the taken-forgranted everyday identities. As a consequence of this, other aspects of narratives than those having to do with the coherence of the textual organization of the narrative has to be observed. This is especially true concerning the relationship between narrative and identity. It has been suggested by Oliver Sacks and several others that narratives represent events coherently and in that way constitute identities (for a critical discussion of the role of coherence, see Brockmeier & Medved, in this volume). If we instead look at narratives as a special way of organizing speech and interaction, focus will be both on the ways narratives become part of ongoing interactions (like conversations) and on how the telling of narrative acquires a performative force. In the following I will focus on three aspects that I consider to be especially salient in this context. The first aspect is how the teller of the story discursively organizes the relationship between the physical teller and the teller as a figure or character in his or her own story. The second aspect is the way the teller organizes the point of the story in the interaction. And finally, the third aspect is the fact that sometimes the content of story is almost irrelevant or superfluous; it is instead the telling of a certain type of story to a certain audience and in certain situations that counts.



Chapter 3.╇ Identity, self, narrative

The teller as character One of the wonderful things about telling a story is the possibility to create new realities existing in the here-and-now of the speech event. As tellers and listeners we can travel thousands of miles, visit other times and places, and even familiarize ourselves with events that may never have taken place at all — at least not in historical reality. Basically, it is this possibility that we use in telling autobiographical stories. Just by telling a story we introduce other times, places, persons, circumstances, and events right into the middle of the ongoing speech event, in order to define and redefine ourselves. That is, storytelling can be used as a tool to establish and negotiate identity in specific situations. First of all, in telling autobiographical stories the speaker introduces a “double”, the speaker as a character or figure in a story. This character is often the protagonist of the story or a witness to the transpiring events, and it is generally through this character’s perspective the listeners witness what takes place in the storyworld. It is important to remember that the character in the story is not the teller; it is rather an historical version of the teller. The character is often a previous version of the teller, for instance the teller as a young person, sometimes as a small child, at other times as a teenager or as a young adult. In some stories the character may even exist in several versions. For instance, the character may appear as a teenager commenting on himself as a child. There is not only a temporal difference between the teller and the character in the story. The story probably takes place somewhere else, in other geographical and social places, and in different kinds of situations. As a consequence of this, the character in the story may have different properties than those of the physical teller in the storytelling event. The character may share certain things with the teller, but probably has different experiences, knowledge, outlook, moral values, and so on. This fact gives the teller a possibility to introduce new versions of him- or herself into the ongoing conversation in order to display other possible identities or to revise existing identities. Let me give an example of these phenomena. Some 20 years ago I conducted a series of interviews with former psychotherapy patients (Hydén, 1995). They had all been in psychodynamically oriented psychotherapy for 18 to 36 months, and they all had completed their therapy at least six months before the time of the interview. I will call one of these interview subjects Peggy. She was a woman of 40-some years at the time of the interview, and had undergone psychotherapy for a period of two and a half years. She had completed her therapy about a year prior to the interview.

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In the interview she gave a description of the chain of events that led to her coming into contact with a therapist, but she also gave a description of herself before the beginning of therapy and of what caused her to seek help. Her description has the form of a short autobiographical story. Example 1 (Int: Had you ever been in psychotherapy before [this time]?) 1. No / I’ve always been interested and thought a lot about it (…) 2. I realized / I was pretty awful at helping myself 3. and I also realized / I had built up these high defensive walls against all kinds of things in my life / and repressed a lot of things 4. because some things had happened when I was studying to be a nursery school teacher / my mother died / and I met a guy there too / it was very intense in many ways 5. and I chose to put on these blinders / and tried when my mother died / I tried to take some time off to help my father and that’s when I realized I was the one who needed help 6. tried to flee into doing different things / ran marathons like a lunatic / flying around the country and competing 7. but it worked only so far / and then I began to react / to scream [in my sleep] (…) 8. so there was a lot that has just been building up / that I never did anything about / just tried to flee from it all / and it got worse and worse of course later on, when I became a mother / tiredness / and unable just to creep aside like

This story about the events leading up to the decision to enter into psychotherapy is structured around some basic themes (numbered 1 through 8). These themes in turn consist of further sub-themes (marked by slashes). The flow of events progresses in time as told and commented on by a storyteller. The storyteller or psychological subject that determines the perspective in the example is an “I.” If we look closely we will find that this “I” actually consists of several different versions of herself, which allows Peggy to tell about and make comments about herself. The interview starts with the initial interview question. In this Peggy is addressed by the interviewer as the addressee in the speech situation; that is, she is the physical person sitting opposite the interviewer. Then in Line 1 we encounter a new version of the “I”, namely the narrator of the story. That is, the voice that is going to guide us through the events (“I’ve always been”). In Lines 2 and 3 the “I” refers to Peggy as a young person reflecting back on an even younger version of herself (Line 4: “when I was studying” and Line 5). Further on in Line 5 the “I” has become somewhat older and is starting to realize that she needs help. If we jump to Line 8 a new version is introduced: Peggy as a mother.



Chapter 3.╇ Identity, self, narrative

As observer and commentator Peggy appears in two guises in relation to time; one is the narrator in an interview situation who talks about herself without giving any explicit time indication at all, as in Line 1 (“I have always”). But the narrator can also observe a second guise, an observing “I” in past time as in Line 2, “But I realized I was pretty awful at.” This “insight” is historical; the realization comes to an observing “I” in past time and is conveyed by a narrating “I” in present time. These different “I”s and the time indications are devices that allow Peggy to put events, experiences, and states of being into perspective in a very complex manner. They also enable her to establish distance between the different subjects (the “I”s); the observer can, for example, express criticism of the acting subject in past time, as in Line 8: “I never did anything about.” By establishing this temporal distance Peggy can create an inner dynamic in her narrative between different perspectives of time (then and now), between different vantage points (observer and observed), and in any combination of these polarities. It is crucial in the telling of this story that the implicit contract with the listener (the interviewer) states that the physical teller of this story is identical with or is the same as all the different “I”s in the storyworld. That is, the teller is claiming to have actually experienced all these things; she has thought the thoughts, felt the emotions, and so on. In other words, the interviewee is claiming not only that all the versions of herself have existed historically and that all the experiences and reflections have taken place. She is also claiming that she owns these experiences, that they are part of her, defining who she is now in the present situation (the interview). In other words, when telling autobiographical stories the teller claims to be not only the actual physical person standing before the audience, but also several other versions of him- or herself. The teller asks the listeners to allow her (or him) to have the right of claiming the experiences established in the story and letting all these other versions define her. Why could anyone ever want to claim these things? One reason is that by expanding one’s identity, one’s relation to the other persons in the speech event is altered — and probably also the person’s relation to him- or herself. Telling autobiographical stories is a way to expand the present reality and thus expand one’s own identity. By introducing new versions of the self, the teller is able to relate to these figures, by identifying with them, by rejecting them, or by claiming that a change or development has taken place, a development that may be continuous or discontinuous. Through this narrative expansion of identities, the teller is able to put forward something new about him/herself; something that he/she wants to highlight at a certain moment in the ongoing interaction. In this way the teller is able to negotiate his or her identity with the audience by presenting contrasts and alternatives,

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by stressing continuity or discontinuity. The teller to some extent becomes someone else, or becomes at least a bit different compared to before the telling of the story. Presenting several versions of identities in the story is something that is done in relation to the ongoing social interaction. It is done in order to persuade the audience to think about the teller’s identity in new ways. To use Erving Goffman’s terminology, it would be possible to regard this kind of discursive organization of the autobiographical story as a move in the ongoing social interaction (Goffman, 1981). By introducing new versions of the self, the teller changes both his or her relation to him- or herself as well as to the other participants in the interaction. As a consequence the relationships between the participants are redefined, making it possible for the teller to claim a new social status. In the interview above, Peggy positions herself as a person who has gone through a long process of change, from being a person who without much reflection rushed through life, to a person who has created a distance to that self, living a different life — and being a different, transformed person. In this case it is the interviewer who has to be persuaded about these changes and as a result hopefully will regard her as a successful psychotherapy patient. It is all these various identities that Peggy makes available through her storytelling.

Performing autobiographical stories Sometimes narratives become part of the illness process. This is especially true when a person’s ability to tell and use stories is affected by the disease, and the telling of stories at the same time becomes a central part of the life with the disease. This is true, for example, for persons suffering from certain forms of brain trauma (aphasia) or age-related dementias like Alzheimer’s disease. To these persons the struggle to tell stories, and in that way sustain their senses of self, could be regarded as a way of dealing with the new brains the disease gives them, with which they have to make a life. Persons suffering form this kind of disease can make use of narratives and the telling as a way of creatively dealing with their communicative limits (Medved & Brockmeier, 2008). This often includes telling stories by using other communicative means besides the traditional verbal ones, for instance gestures and body movement, but also by engaging other participants in the storytelling in order to be able to tell the stories using their voices (Goodwin, 2004; Hydén, 2008). Suffering from traumatic brain injuries, Alzheimer’s disease, or other types of dementias generally implies either a disruption or a gradual change of identities. One aspect of this change has to with the question of whether the person is the



Chapter 3.╇ Identity, self, narrative

same as before the onset of the disease or the trauma. That is, if the person is identical with his or her “pre-morbid” self or has become a different person. This has been called the idem-aspect (or sameness aspect) of identity and one of the crucial questions concerns the limits of sameness. Paul Ricoeur has suggested that although the idem-aspect of identity has been the one most discussed, another, maybe even more important aspect of identity has to with what he called selfhood (ipse-identity). According to Ricoeur, selfhood has to do with what kind of person one is. It concerns, for instance, the person’s moral values and is central to understanding the commitments of the person. The ipse-identity is of course something that can be described and explained using words. It is probably even better to be able show whom and what one is. This is something that can be accomplished through the telling of autobiographical stories. In stories characters act (or refrain from action, which also is an action), they do things to themselves or others — things that are displayed through the story. By telling about actions it becomes possible for the audience to make moral inferences about the story characters and in that way appreciate what kind of person the teller is. The teller has a further possibility to claim his or her moral value by evaluating the events depicted in the story. This is accomplished through the evaluation. William Labov, who introduced the term story evaluation, defines the evaluation as “the means used by the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative, its raison d’être: why it was told, and what the narrator is getting at” (1972, p.â•›366). In other words, the evaluation in the narrative is important not only to account for the storytelling, but also as a way of conveying the point of the story. In autobiographical stories and stories about personal experience, the evaluation also tells the audience something about the teller or the narrator. By crafting the evaluation it becomes possible for the teller to highlight the way an event is handled and hence the moral commitments of the teller. In stories evaluation is often placed after the core (or complication) events and actions in the story — those events that answer the question, “What happened?” The evaluation of the events in the story can be accomplished in more than one way. One is to let the teller evaluate the events in the speech situation (external evaluation). This means that the teller in the present looks back at the events that took place at another time than the present speech situation, and evaluates these events. In an autobiographical story this means that the teller steps out from his or her story to directly address the listener, explaining his or her own view about the event. Another possibility is either letting the main protagonist evaluate what happened at the time of the event, for instance by a quotation, or letting someone else

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in the story make an evaluative statement at the time of the events (embedding of evaluation). The evaluation part of the story is complex in that it connects life events and makes them meaningful, and requires simultaneous involvement of the audience. In terms of interaction, the evaluation is often an occasion for the listeners to actively engage in the storytelling by showing emotion, empathy, and shared appreciation of the story. This is accomplished with devices like evaluative statements, dramatized engagement in the story, laughter, gestures, rewordings of central parts of the story, expressions of surprise, and other communicative means.

Alzheimer’s disease, identity, and narrative Researchers interested in how persons with AD tell stories have primarily been interested in the discursive organization of autobiographical narratives, especially the temporal and referential aspects of narratives. Focus has been mainly on the ability of the person with AD to remember or retrieve and present memories of certain events correctly, and to elaborate and connect them into a story. This approach tends to preclude other ways for persons with AD to use autobiographical narratives in order to sustain their identity. In order to avoid these limitations in previous research an ethnographic study based on collecting naturalistic data was conducted (Örulv & Hydén, 2006; Hydén & Örulv, 2009; Hydén & Örulv, 2010). Over a period of five months video recording was done at an elder center in Sweden serving eight residents, seven of whom were diagnosed with some form of dementia, mostly of the Alzheimer type. Two elderly ladies living at the nursing home are sitting and talking to each other. No staff is present, just the researcher behind the video camera. One of the ladies, Martha, tells stories about when she learned to drive and bought a car. At that time, neither her husband nor her father believed she would be able to learn to drive and then afford to buy a new car. But she surprised both of them. Catherine is her listener. Catherine has difficulties finding words and hence to actively tell stories, but she is a great audience. Before the example starts Martha has been telling stories for some 30 minutes about getting a driver’s license and buying a car. Some of these stories are told three or four times in a row; sometimes she mixes the stories, making them quite confusing. But one thing she never gets wrong, and that’s the evaluative sections of the stories. Just before the beginning of the example starts, Martha has told Catherine about when she asked a professional driving teacher to teach her to drive. The teacher’s answer is shown in Line 1.



Chapter 3.╇ Identity, self, narrative

Example 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Martha:

Catherine: Martha:

Catherine: Martha: Catherine: Martha:

16 17 Catherine: 18 Martha:

” you want to” he said. ”Yes that’s what I want” I said. ”My … my brother has a driver’s license but (..) but he ehh (.) It’s better if I can learn from a real teacher”. Yes that’s right. =Yes ”You are really careful” he said ((puts her arm on Catherine’s, moves close to her and looks into her eyes)) ”so you’ll be okay whatever happens” he said [((leans backwards and laughs))] [That was nicely put!] ((laughs)) *Yes.* ((points towards Catherine)) She got these nice words! *Yes ((makes a pointing gesture towards Catherine again and keeps the gesture until the sentence is completed)) that’s what he said. Yes.* ((nods and glances at Catherine)) ehh Yes that’s what I think too (xx xx) =Yes.

What we see here is Martha’s evaluation of the events in the story. She quotes the driving teacher when he says: “You’re really careful. You’ll be okay whatever happens.” This is an evaluation of Martha — not Martha of today, but Martha as a young person. She’s a careful person that will manage, whatever happens. Catherine supports this evaluation several times (Lines 6, 11, 13, 17). If we look at the non-verbal aspects of the interaction it is possible to notice that Martha and Catherine are also physically close to each other. Martha puts her arm on Catherine’s, leans towards Catherine, points towards her, and looks directly at her. They also have overlapping talk. All these non-verbal actions signal closeness, support, and agreement. Although Martha has problems organizing her stories, particularly the temporal organization of events in the stories, she is good at organizing the point of the stories. This is true of most stories she tells. The evaluation is a way for Martha to show who she used to be. By quoting her driving teacher she also shows that other persons appreciated her as a careful and independent person. By adding non-verbal actions she also dramatizes the telling and actively involves and engages her listener. And her listener supports and confirms the evaluation.

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The evaluation concerns Martha as a young person, but by telling it as an old person, she gives her listener the possibility to re-consider her character; she not only used to be a careful and independent person, but she still has at least some of these traits at present. As a consequence of the disease Martha has severe problems organizing her story according to the conventional norms of storytelling. She has special difficulties with the temporal and referential organization of the events in the story — that is with certain aspects of the cognitive organization of the narrative. The events tend to be presented without temporal progression, something that generally creates confusion in most listeners who are expecting a temporally well-ordered story. However, Martha still masters the social interaction in storytelling. She is even very good at organizing her interaction with her audience; this is not yet been affected by the disease. This is evidently something she can use creatively in her attempt to present herself to her audience, in this case to her friend Catherine. Martha successfully engages her listener in the storytelling using her body, eye contact, etc. Although unable to position herself as a morally capable person through the discursive organization of the story — the way Peggy did in the preceding example — Martha uses the social interaction as her means towards an end. In other words, the telling of autobiographical stories is not necessarily about positioning oneself in a story, but also about positioning oneself as a teller in relation to the audience (cf. Bamberg, 1997; Wortham & Gadsen, 2006). Moreover, it is about the creative use of all available communicative resources in order to present and sustain identity. This example highlighted the performance of the story and its telling, rather than the use of the story’s discursive organization. In this way the organization of the storytelling event can be used as a tool for presenting identity. It still concerns how the telling of autobiographical stories can be used to change the audience’s perception and definition of the teller — and probably also the teller’s perception of him- or herself.

Telling the right story In both of the cases I have discussed so far, parts of the content of the narrative are important to the organization of the telling and the performance of the narrative. I would like to argue now that in some cases the content of the narrative is of less importance. Instead, it is important who is telling the story and to what audience. This is the case when stories are told that are fairly standardized or well known by both tellers and audience. A good example of this is stories about religious conversion or stories about turning points in connection with problems like drinking or drug abuse.



Chapter 3.╇ Identity, self, narrative

Most of these kinds of stories are stereotypical. They are quite often divided into parts having to do with life before the turning point, the turning point itself, and life after the turning point, that is, the new life. The life before the turning point is generally characterized by a life full of sin, drinking, smoking, criminality, use of violence, or some other undesirable behavior. The turning point itself can consist of an encounter with God or some other deity, or a sudden insight as when an alcoholic wakes up in an emergency ward, or someone falls in love. That is, the turning point generally is an event that results in a sudden change and re-evaluation of the actual lifestyle. Life after the turning point is characterized by the striving towards a new life, the avoidance of temptations and sins, and all the benefits of the new life. This is a type of story that we trace back to at least the fourth century in Western culture. It is quite important to remember that this story doesn’t depict the actual life of persons or the actual events leading up to a new life. Rather, it is the telling of this type of story that is important in order to be able to claim an identity as a changed person — an identity that presupposes a radical disruption between the past and the present. Several researchers have studied this type of storytelling. Let me give an examfrom research on the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) movement by Carole Cain, ple an American anthropologist (Cain, 1991). She found that in order to become a member of the AA movement in the US — and this is probably true all over the world — you had to learn to tell your life story in a specific way. The typical AA story includes certain topics, like drinking career, drinking experiences, family, religious life, and so on. It also has to include certain cognitive elements that have to do with how to interpret and describe life as a life in terms of being a recovering alcoholic. New members of the AA movement have to learn to tell this story first by listening to “old-timers” telling their stories; and later on by telling their own stories with support from more experienced members. Finally, you can tell your own story, and create new stories around new themes in your life. Telling a personal story at a speaker’s meeting signals membership because it is interpreted as the member “belonging” enough to “carry the message” (p.â•›232). Here is one small story, told by Gary at a meeting where members shared anecdotes about things they had done while they were drinking (p.â•›231; transcription changed): Example 3 One morning I woke up after a night of drinking and I thought I’d had this bad dream about running into the side of a bridge at 55 miles an hour Then I went outside

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Three inches off the side of my car were gone And I thought: “Man, I’ve got to stop driving.”

Carole Cain points out that the telling of this type of story is a way of learning to tell a new life. The story includes certain episodes, but above all it displays the views of AA concerning alcoholism. In this way learning to tell these stories is a way of re-interpreting your identity, creating an AA identity. It is also a way of being a recovering alcoholic. That is, when a member tells this story he or she performs the identity of a reformed, recovering alcoholic. Put another way, being a recovering alcoholic in AA implies telling stories about yourself as a recovering alcoholic. It’s especially important to tell these stories to other members of AA. In other words, one important aspect of identities is that they are performed through the storytelling event. That is, certain stories have to be told at certain moments to certain persons. This is something that is probably true of most families; being a family member implies being able to tell stories — often well-established ones — about the family, its members, and its past (Langellier & Peterson, 2004). What is important is not basically what the stories are about, but rather the fact that you tell a certain type of story to the right audience; this establishes your identity. Similar ideas have been advanced by researchers studying religious conversions (Stromberg, 1993) or various forms of healing (Kapferer, 1979). In this way, telling autobiographical stories could be thought of as an example of what Erving Goffman calls a ritual (1967). By performing a ritual the status of the participants changes to a new one, like when a couple is married by a priest; they enter as two individuals, and exit as a married couple. In a similar way, the telling of autobiographical stories to an audience is a way of ritually changing the relationship and social status of the participants. The audience can take the telling of a certain type of autobiographical story as a sign of an identity change. In this sense the storytelling has a performative force; by telling the story a certain identity is put in place.

Conclusions I have tried to argue that how we think about the relationship between narrative and identity is to a large degree dependent on what type of examples we use. By tradition many narrative researchers have focused on interview narratives and especially on their discursive organization in terms of coherence and referentiality. Even if interview narratives are used it is possible to regard the interview in terms of social interaction and the ensuing narrative as co-constructed (see Mishler, 1986 and 1999 for further arguments along this line). One analytical



Chapter 3.╇ Identity, self, narrative

implication of this approach is to regard the narrative less as a finished product and more as an ongoing activity in a specific social situation. In this way telling an autobiographical story is a move in an ongoing interaction with other participants, a move that aims at redefining the relationships between the participants. In this perspective it could further be argued that the telling of autobiographical stories is a tool that can be used in order to establish, negotiate, and redefine identities. This means that identities are found rather in the way narratives are organized and performed in relation to the ongoing interaction than ”inside” the narrative. Michael Bamberg (1997) has presented a similar argument in terms of positioning. Methodologically this implies that it is important when studying identity in social scientific contexts to not only study stories, but also the way stories are told, received and negotiated. In other words, for social scientists it is important to challenge the traditional literary idea about narratives, and regard narratives and storytelling rather as performance and social action.

References Bamberg, M. (1997). Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7, 335–342. Bruner, J. (1987). Life as narrative. Social Research, 54, 11–32. Cain, C. (1991). Personal stories: Identity acquisition and self-understanding in Alcoholics Anonymous. Ethos, 19, 210–253. Clark, J.A., & Mishler, E.G. (1992). Attending patient’s stories: Reframing the clinical task. Sociology of Health and Illness 14: 344–371. Eakin, P. J. (2001). Breaking rules: The consequences of self-narration. Biography, 24, 113–127. Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual. Essays on face-to-face behavior. New York, NY: Doubleday. Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goodwin, C. (2004). A competent speaker who can’t speak: The social life of aphasia. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 14, 151–170. Hydén, L.C. (1995). The rhetoric of recovery and change. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 19, 73–90. Hydén, L.C. (2008). Broken and vicarious voices in narratives. In L.C. Hydén & J. Brockmeier (Eds.), Health, culture and illness: Broken narratives (pp.â•›36–53). London: Routledge. Hydén, L.C., & Brockmeier, J. (2008). Introduction: The field of illness narratives. In L.C. Hydén & J. Brockmeier (Eds.), Health, culture and illness: Broken narratives (pp.â•›1–15).London: Routledge. Hydén, L.C., & Örulv, L. (2009). Identity and narrative in dementia. Journal of Aging Studies, 23, 205–214. Hydén, L.C., & Örulv, L. (2010). Interaction and narrative in dementia. In D. Schiffrin, A. De Fina & A. Nylund (Eds.), Telling Stories: Building Bridges among Language, Narrative, Identity, Interaction, Society, and Culture. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

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48 Lars-Christer Hydén Kapferer, B. (1979). Mind, self, and other in demonic illness: The negation and reconstruction of self. American Ethnologist, 6, 110–133. Kerby, P. (1991). Narrative and the self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Labov, W. (1972). The transformation of experience in narrative syntax. In W. Labov (Ed.), Language in the inner city (pp.â•›354–405). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Langellier, K.M., & Peterson, E.E. (2004). Storytelling in daily life: Performing narrative. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Medved, M., & Brockmeier, J. (2008). Talking about the unthinkable: Neurotrauma and the “catastrohic reaction.” In L.C. Hydén & J. Brockmeier (Eds.), Health, illness, culture: Broken narratives.London: Routledge. Mishler, E.G. (1986). Research interviewing: Context and narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mishler, E.G. (1999). Storylines: Crafts artists’ narratives of identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Örulv, L., & Hydén, L.C. (2006). Confabulation: Sense-making, self-making and world-making in dementia. Discourse Studies, 8, 647–673. Ricoeur, P. (1992). Onseself as another. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Sacks, O. (1985). The man who mistook his wife for a hat. London: Duckworth. Schafer, R. (1992). Retelling a life. Narration and dialogue in psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Basic Books. Stromberg, P.G. (1993). Language and self-transformation: A study of the Christian conversion narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, G. (1984). The Genesis of chronic illness: Narrative re-construction. Sociology of Health and Illness, 6, 175–200. Wortham, S., & Gadsen, V. (2006). Urban fathers positioning themselves through narrative: an approach to narrative self-construction. In A. De Fina, D. Schiffrin, & M. Bamberg (Eds.), Discourse and identity (pp.â•›314–341). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, K. (1997). Presence in the flesh: The Body in medicine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chapter 4

‘Mind-reading’, a method for understanding the broken narrative of an aphasic man Tarja Aaltonen

University of Tampere, Finland

An aphasic man tells, an extremely fragmented, excited, and hard-to-comprehend “story.” The aim of this article is to mobilize ideas from conversation analysis (CA) and cognitive narratology, in particular those related to “mind reading,” in making sense of the problematic story and the interactional process in which the story was processed and endorsed. In cognitive narratology, it is widely assumed that people routinely interpret and misinterpret other people’s minds. This capacity to cross over the limits of the “intramental” mind and to flexibly use the resources of the “intermental” mind may become vital in situations involving severe speech and communication impediments. The experience from such cases of storytelling and comprehension may enhance the understanding of co-authoring of narratives in general. Keywords: mind-reading, understanding, aphasia, cognitive narratology, talk-in-interaction

Introduction This chapter sets out to explore real world mind-reading in the context of a clinical encounter using literary scholars’ works about fictional mind-reading as a guide. I will apply the tools of literary theorists to the reading of a transcribed data. Alan Palmer’s (2004) book Fictional minds has especially guided me throughout the journey. I have sought expedients to include ‘mind’ into the analysis of face-to-face interaction when using conversation analysis (CA) as an analytical tool. The mind is a phenomenon that has not been commonly dealt with in articles reporting conversation analysis studies.1 In this article I use the term ‘mind’ in the study of 1.╇ However, the concept has not been altogether missing; see, e.g., Drew (2005), Heritage (2005) and Mondada (2006).

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face-to-face interaction arguing that mind-reading in the form of thought reporting occurs in episodes of oral storytelling (cf. Mildorf, 2008). I claim that the act of mind-reading supports the mutual understanding of the narrated storyworld and participation by way of shared storytelling. I will draw from the narratological point of view and assume that the theory of understanding a novel by reading the minds of its characters is applicable to both my study and analysis. Face-to-face encounters between an aphasic speaker and so-called normal speakers compose the field of interaction I explore more closely in this article. My data is the broken narrative of an aphasic man told in the institutional setting of a rehabilitation encounter. As a pathological phenomenon, ‘aphasia’ “refers to a family of clinically diverse disorders that affect the ability to communicate by oral or written language, or both, following brain damage” (Goodglass, 1993, p.â•›1). In conversation, aphasic speakers have problems due to difficulties for instance in finding words or constructing sentences (Ahlsén, 1985). Aphasia may manifest itself in different ways and the constellations of syndromes vary a great deal. Aphasias also differ in severity from total speechlessness to only a mild ‘aphasic accent’ in speech. The common feature in all aphasias is that the linguistic syndrome affects the person’s ability to take part in social interaction and to tell stories in a common way (see, e.g., Goodwin, 1995, 2003). Aphasia is not a condition that causes so called “mindblindness” common to autism. People suffering from autism have no ability to ascribe mental states to others because of a neurologically based problem that manifests as a lack of flexibility, imagination and pretence. They do not spontaneously interpret their own experiences or the observed behaviour of the other person’s in terms of mental states, minds. (Frith, 2001; Gopnik, 2001; Zunshine, 2006, p.â•›7). However, every person with or without linguistic capacities narrates in multimodal ways. Every utterance is authored and behind utterances, there is an actual human subject. Utterances are therefore personal; they have a voice, “the voice of someone´s mind” (Brockmeier, 2005, p.â•›436). The form of the utterance and the manner it is interpreted cannot be understood separately from the social context in which the narrative discourse takes place. In my example of understanding the speech of an aphasic person, more than one semiotic channel is used to evoke a storyworld. The semantics of interaction is closely linked to the elements of the situation and as Doležel (1998, p.â•›97) has put it “the semantics of narrative is, at its core, the semantics of interaction”. During the encounter, the interlocutors are using many “communicative affordances” (Gibson, 1979/1986; Hutchby, 2001; Raudaskoski, 2003), namely those action potentials that structure and maintain mutual understanding. Speech is only one of the communicative affordances used. Charles Goodwin (1995, 2003) has written of an aphasic man who was able to communicate and co-construct



Chapter 4.╇ ‘Mind-reading’, a method for understanding

meanings with other people, though he only had three words left. Goodwin’s research has been an inspiration to me. However, in this article I take cognitive narratology as my primary point of departure. ‘Mind-reading’ is a term commonly used by cognitive psychologists to describe our efforts to explain people’s behaviour in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires (Nichols & Stich, 2003). We explain and predict the everyday behaviour of ourselves and others by assuming the mental states have a role in our social life, for example we monitor other people’s attitudes or feelings when interacting with them. Cognitive narratologists have used the term to refer to the manner in which readers understand a novel by imagining the functioning of the minds of its characters in the novel’s storyworlds, that is, by reading the characters’ minds from the text. I work with an incomplete narrative trying to figure out what takes place between its “characters” and what is happening between the interlocutors when the story is told. The text I analyse is composed of the transcription of the narrative discourse. I draw parallels with reading a novel but at the same time stay in the field of social psychology and the study of oral narration. The “story” I study in this article was told during a rehabilitation meeting in the Tikoteekki Technology and Communication Centre. Tikoteekki is a unit of the Tampere University Hospital where the staff is specialised in Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) methods. This particular piece of the data is collected in the natural setting of clinical work2 and analysed by using qualitative methods; the tools of cognitive narratology and conversation analysis (CA) in particular. CA requires fairly strict transcription conventions (Appendix) that I have used in this article. The strict transcription, I hope, makes it easier to follow up the logic of interpretations I have made from the data.3 The studied episode lasts for two and half minutes. As a story it represents a ‘small story’, by which Alexandra Georgakopoulou (2007) refers to non-canonical narratives. According to Georgakopoulou small stories have been under-represented data in the field of narrative studies. She describes how small stories may be only a “fleeting narrative orientation to the world” and hence dissimilar to fully2.╇ The whole database of my study consists of video recorded rehabilitation meetings of three people suffering from a severe aphasic syndrome. The meetings take place in the Tikoteekki or in the homes of the clients. The purpose of the Tikoteekki meetings is to identify the best practices to support an aphasic person and his or her friends and family to cope with the language impairment. During the rehabilitation process it is essential to figure out what kind of AAC methods, if any, could be used in each case. 3.╇ Medved & Brockmeier (2004) have used both narrative and conversational analysis in their research. Their article concerning Fragile X Syndrome has been very helpful for me when doing my own research.

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fledged stories such as autobiographical life stories (pp.â•›vii, 31). If we follow Peterson and Langellier’s point, exploring the data of small stories is congruous with the performance turn4 in narrative studies. As a performance, narrative is “embodied in communication practices, constrained by situational and material conditions and embedded in fields of discourse” (2006, p.â•›173). The article begins with a theoretical description of the main concepts ‘mindreading’ and ‘storyworld’. Next, the case analysed in this article is introduced. The article continues by exploring the practice of mind-reading through extracts from the data, and then discusses my way of reading the data before making concluding remarks. The act of mind-reading is seen as a very pragmatic endeavour when read from the video recorded and transcribed data. I make interpretations on how understanding is achieved largely through the mind-reading abilities of the other participants and through a wider knowledge of the situation. I argue that the mind-reading abilities and contextual knowledge have left readable traces on the data. From the data I examine thought reports (Palmer, 2004) as if I would analyse a novel. Instances of thought reporting in the text of the transcribed data are also instances of mind-reading in situ. I also attempt to find the mind of the whole situation in the co-operation of the interlocutors.

Reading the mind and creating the storyworld Mind-reading, or the theory of mind, refers to our propensity to represent (either correctly or incorrectly) the intentions, beliefs, and desires of others as well as our own (Gallese & Goldman, 1998; Vogeley et al., 2001). The encounters between people are meaningful and full of meaning-making but also full of gaps. We apply mind-reading to be able to fill in the gaps in understanding. In most intersubjective situations we have a direct, paradigmatic understanding of the other person’s intentions because their intentions are explicitly expressed in their embodied actions (Gallagher, 2001, p.â•›86). Thus we need not to always postulate a hidden belief or desire in the other person’s mind.5 However, we have the effortless, automatic 4.╇ For more about turns in narrative studies see e.g. Hyvärinen 2006. 5.╇ Yet, according to Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich (2003), imagination and pretence representations are phenomena essential to understanding others. Nichols and Stich also provide a detailed and integrated account of the complex web of mental components underlying the multifarious skill of mind-reading, as they define it. In their model, a mental workplace called the Possible World Box, which is a part of the architecture of the human mind, has an important role in understanding the other. In The Possible World Box we build and store, if necessary, representations of one or another possible world (hypothetical situations). The box-metaphor



Chapter 4.╇ ‘Mind-reading’, a method for understanding

and intuitive understanding that people have mental states and we apply that “knowledge” in social encounters. Only individuals with autism fail to appreciate the role of mental states in the explanation and prediction of everyday behaviour because of a developmental disorder of the brain. (Frith, 2001.) The term ‘mind-reading’ is not to claim that the mind is readable as such. On the contrary, an individual mind is never transparent and ‘mind-reading’ as it is used here has nothing to do with telepathy (cf. Zunshine, 2006, p.â•›6). It is rather its contents that are hypothetically reconstructed and represented to its modes in language sensitive ways that are readable (see, for example, Cohn, 1978, p.â•›56). Moreover, our minds are social by nature. Antonio Damasio (2000, p.â•›12–13) proposes that consciousness and the mind are private first-person phenomena, but at the same time closely tied to observed external behaviour. Therefore, it is possible to argue that our minds can be perfectly visible to others (Palmer, 2004, p.â•›133). The mind is a dynamic, continuous process and discourse captures the interactive as well as intersubjective nature of the mind (Brockmeier, 2005, p.â•›437). ‘Mind’ and ‘mental action’ can appropriately be predicated of dyads and larger groups as well as of individuals (Wertsch, 1991, p.â•›14), thus those terms can refer to the mind of a group of people or the social mind of the situation, as well. For Alan Palmer, the mind is essentially ‘intermental’, or a joint, shared group; hence the mind also extends far beyond the skin. The mind is active, social and contextual; neither isolated within individuals nor simply the object of discourse, but the agent of action (2004, p.â•›53). In our minds, we construe the storyworlds of novels while reading them. We are interpreters of those imagined worlds in the same way as we are interpreters of real world encounters and situations. As interpreters, we try to reconstruct what happened — who did what to or with whom, for how long, how often and in what order. The surrounding context of what happened is equally important and interpreted by us. The term ‘storyworld’ is David Herman’s (2002) extension of the ‘story’ (of classical, structuralist tradition of narratology). By the concept of storyworld Herman sifts the focus from the linearly plotted happenings and events of the story to the construction of a whole world as an interpretational basis for comprehending the narrative. He emphasises that “the term storyworld better captures what might be called the ecology of narrative interpretation” (p.â•›13–14). It can be used when talking about fictional narratives as well as non-fictional ones. What they have in common is the world-creating power of all kinds of narratives. (pp.â•›5–7, 13–16.) Storyworlds are created in the mind of an individual or a group of cognitive psychologists links nicely with the idea of possible worlds applied in the theorising of cognitive narratologists. Storyworlds can be said to be possible worlds, Doležel writes in his book Heterocosmica — Fiction and Possible Worlds (1998).

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of individuals. A storyworld opens up a frame of reference for one’s thoughts and sense-making of surroundings, actions, and the utterances of others. I explore how mind-reading is a mechanism used to create the storyworld shared at least partly by all participants during an encounter. Participants use verbal and non-verbal means to make themselves understood and to understand each other. The speech is understood through the way it is tied to emerging courses of action. In order to construct relevant interpretations, participants attend to the details of emerging talk, each other, as well as relevant structures in the environment or even larger cultural context (Goodwin, 2007, p.â•›57). Among other things, participants try to interpret the minds of each other. Mind-reading is an act of interpretation and understanding, and as such an essential part of that interaction.

The Tikoteekki case The client is a 65-year-old aphasic man who suffered a stroke one and half years before coming to the Tikoteekki for the first time in April 2006. He speaks fluently, but frequently the uttered words are not correct Finnish. Instead, he produces classic errors, called paraphasias. Existing words may be paraphatic if used in the wrong context (for example, herkku (delicacy) instead serkku (cousin)) or they may be non-existent in the vocabulary of the speaker’s native language (like kirvee instead of hirvee (horrible)). (Laakso, 1997, p.â•›25.) In short, due to his aphasia the client’s speech is often unintelligible or hard to understand. However, his comprehension seems to remain unaffected. The speech therapist, the aphasic man’s wife, his sister-in-law and her husband are gathered in the Tikoteekki tiny room, where I am also video recording. The excerpt I analyse in more detail is a recording from the client’s third visit in the Tikoteekki. The analysed episode takes place towards the end of the meeting, when the participants are discussing the rehabilitation process as a whole and the opportunities for aphasics and their relatives to take part in an adaptation course. The husband of the wife’s sister has asked about adaptation courses and the wife of the aphasic man has commented on that by saying “For some reason we have not been accepted to those courses.” Aligned with this argument, the topic and the mood of the whole episode can be read as a story of ‘who has access to rehabilitation and who pays for it?’ The mood is like the tone or colour of the whole episode. The aphasic man takes the turn to speak and starts to recount something. What is he saying and how is he understood? The data is in Finnish and the interaction was transcribed by using simplified conversation analytical notation (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984, pp.â•›ix–xv). The transcription is given in three lines: the first line is the original talk in Finnish, the



Chapter 4.╇ ‘Mind-reading’, a method for understanding

second line is the translation into English, and the third line is for gestures and some observations on the situation. Paraphatic, non-Finnish words are transcribed by using ‘x’, prosody (for example, capital letters when the speaker uses a loud voice), pauses, and other non-verbal elements of the speech have been preserved. All the words understandable in Finnish have been translated, even though some words are obviously used incorrectly in the context. I have also translated my own assumptions of what some of the used words mean even if they are not pronounced quite correctly. In those cases I have entered both the word used by the speaker (though contextually wrong or paraphatic) and the word I think he was looking for in the transcription. The word I assume he is seeking appears in brackets. Aphasic problems in speaking and in the comprehension of speech are a concrete danger for mutual understanding. In aphasic conversation, sequences of searching for the correct word, for example, are often long and complex. Long and complex is also my example, and that is why I cut it in pieces in order to make it more readable. The original transcription of the episode consists of 55 lines. In this article I present only 25 lines that are linked to my analytical remarks. Those 25 lines are divided into three excerpts analysed from two points of view: (1) reading the mind of an individual; and (2) reading the social mind of the situation.

Reading the mind of an individual The dialogue between the speech therapist and the aphasic man is essential in the process of joint meaning-making and also a focal point of my analysis. In general, the speech therapist treats the speech acts of the aphasic man as if they were coherent in the conversation. His utterances are treated as utterances of a personal mind. The aphasic speaker’s speech is regarded as if it had a point, not as mere nonsense. It is treated as if it was meaningful. Meanings are fluid in themselves and always dependent on the listener as well (Kohler Riessman, 1993, p.â•›13–15). Thus, the speech therapist (co-participant, someone the aphasic person is communicating with) fulfils in her speech-acts the gaps of meaning and interprets the “nonFinnish” words within a certain shared content. The speech is treated as if it reflected the speakers’ intentions in an intersubjectively understandable way. This kind of an action is analogical to the ideas of mind-reading. Concrete examples of mind-reading can be found in the data by juxtaposing it with the idea of thought report (Palmer, 2005). Through thought report the narrator can present a character’s consciousness of and connectedness to the surroundings. Participants are the actors in a storyworld and their reasons, intentions, motives, and so forth form an indispensable part of the characters’ embedded narratives that can be recovered by readers from the discourse in the book (Palmer, 2004).

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Thought report has a linking function. It is by thought report and surface description of the storyworld that the narrator links the thought of the characters to the existing social and physical context. By using thought report a narrator presents the thoughts and consciousness of the characters in the narrative (for example, “He wondered where he was.”) and connects it to its surroundings. The mode of thought report is applicable for the presentation of a variety of mental events, including mood and emotions. In certain cases thought report also contains a sense of the broader social context. It can have a double-voiced nature that on closer inspections turns out to be the expression of a consensus. (Palmer, 2004, pp.â•›54–76, 80–85.) In my example case I found similarities with these usages of the mode of thought report in written texts. Participants, especially the speech therapist, use utterances with the same kind of a linking function. The speech therapist refers to consensual beliefs, experience and emotions. For me, these are the moments (I call it thought reporting) when the act of mind-reading is concretised and captured within the flow of interaction. Those are also the instances where shared narration takes place. As mentioned above, the episode originated in the wife’s frustrated opinion — “For some reason we have not been accepted into those courses” and it continues: Excerpt 1. Consensual belief A = an aphasic man, W = his wife; S = the speech therapist, K = the wife’s sister and H = the sister’s husband 1 →A: se on suattava se suart mä oo tää o se kun eren yl it is xxxxxxxx it xxxxx I am this is it when xxxx xx Reaches for the ballpoint pen. 2

(( rykii )) kuuskytäviis ↓voimat ni (.) se on (.) ((clears his throat)) sixty-five ↓forces yah (.) it is (.) Writes something on the paper.

3

↓vään. ↓xxxx

[↑ikäkö. 4 K: ai do you mean [↑age. (.) 5 K: liian vanha? too old? 6 A: ↑tässä on ↑tässä niin ↑here it is ↑here, yes Nods



Chapter 4.╇ ‘Mind-reading’, a method for understanding

7

W: Looks at her sister.

8 → S: siin on semmonen [rajapyykki. there is a sort of a [border mark. 9

[se on se [ei (°mitään°) [it is it [no (°nothing°) Gesticulating with his hands.

The speech therapist’s turn on line eight “there is a sort of a border mark” can be interpreted as a double-voiced expression of consensus that Palmer considers to be one possible version of thought report in novels. It is like a summary of opinions just revealed in the previous turns of other discussants, the aphasic man and his sister-in-law. The aphasic man’s only understandable word “sixty-five” (line 2) is interpreted by his sister-in-law as referring to age; specifically, to an age too high — being too old (lines 4 & 5). In her mind, that may be the reason not to be accepted in the previously mentioned courses. The aphasic man’s turn on line six can be understood to be an agreement to this; he is nodding while saying “here it is, here, yes”. And at the end, according to my interpretation, the speech therapist concludes the notion by referring to the age as a border mark of something. The aphasic man agrees “it is it” (line 9) even before the speech therapist has ended her turn of speaking. The consensus echoes the shared knowledge that older people are not taken care of or rehabilitated as readily as younger ones. During the whole episode (not included in the excerpt) the sister-in-law’s husband uses a term ‘prioritising’ by which he is referring to the same phenomenon. In the excerpt above, conversation flows quite smoothly and it is almost as if the deficits of one of the interlocutors did not disturb the others at all. Nobody even once notes that they do not understand what the aphasic man is referring to or what he means. Research on strategies people use when communicating with aphasic individuals have shown rather unanimously that communicative partners attempt to support the smooth flow of conversation and try to resolve the problems created by aphasia (e.g., Milroy & Perkins, 1992; Goodwin, 1995). The fluency is supported by the speech therapist when she uses a strategy of thought report in her concluding turn. By doing so, she strengthens the atmosphere of consensus. In excerpt two, again analogous to thought reporting in a novel, the speech therapist articulates the aphasic speaker’s experiences or mood aloud like a narrator of a book. She is guiding the participants or the listeners of the tale to follow up what is happening to the character; the aphasic man, and how he is experiencing his life in the storyworld of rehabilitation.

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Excerpt 2. Experience 1 A: se on ihan (°kelvoton°) it is quite (°useless°) Gesticulating with his hands 2 S: se on esimerkiks [KELAn kanssa [sillä tavalla että it is for example [with KELA6 [so that 3 A:

[ni [yes

[niin on kaikki [yes it is everything

4 K: aivan. absolutely. 5 → A: kaikki nää kaikki merekurk kaik nää kaikki jutut (0.5) all these all xxxxxxxx all these all things (0.5) Gesticulating with his both hands. 6

↓antaa ja ↓perkele. ↓give and ↓hell.

7 → S: sulla on semmonen kokemus [nyt tässä syntynyt (.) joo: such an experience has [emerged for you now (.) yes: 8 A: [on kyllä [yes it has

In her turn, on line seven: “such an experience has emerged for you now” the speech therapist describes the character’s frame of mind — he has realised something. The mood is accompanied by spontaneous physiological events (Doležel, 1998, p.â•›68). The mood is observable in the manner with which the teller is using his hands (line 5) and audible in the ways the aphasic speaker uses his voice. These are signs of emotions connected to the experience. A referent to the word ‘perkele’ (hell, line 6) is obvious, he is not happy with the situation. He uses intensifiers, such as gestures and expressive phonology, to strengthen some aspects of the told story (Labov, 1972, p.â•›378). The aphasic man is decidedly telling about his own experiences and experience is an essential feature of a narrative. Monica Fludernik (1996, p.â•›13) considers experientiality, “the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience’↜” to be the most important constituent of narrativity and narrative. In her model of ‘natural’ narratology there cannot be any narratives without a human experiencer. The studied episode is emotionally laden and in that sense reflects the prototypical instances of narrative by representing what it has been like to live through the events of stroke, aphasia and rehabilitation (Herman 2007, p.â•›9). Telling a story is 6.╇ KELA is the Social Insurance Institution of Finland.



Chapter 4.╇ ‘Mind-reading’, a method for understanding

an act of mind-making, and mind-reading plays a role in understanding a story. This becomes nicely visible in the excerpt above. Yet again, in line five in excerpt three, the speech therapist sums up what has been meant according to her interpretation. She words the aphasic speaker’s previous turn as an indication of being insulted. Thought report is a common way of conveying the feelings of another person (Mildorf, 2008). In emotion, our thought can become public and shared (Palmer 2004, p.â•›115). That is exactly what happens in the next example from the data. Excerpt 3. Emotion. 1 A: mut ainaha ain haavimman veh kuh ko but always xxx xxxxxxxxx xxx xxx xx He mimes as if he was writing something. 2 H: [aina halvimman lääkkeen ottaa. [always takes the cheapest medication. 3 A: [mutta sitten aina sijs ra ma ri ni sie ((sihahtaa)) [but then always xxxx xx xx xx xx xxx ((hisses)) 4

kyllä (0.5) hulluje hullu. yes (0.5) the craziest of all.

5 → S: jhoo se on hirveen loukkaavaa joo yeah it is very insulting yes 6 → A: on (.) onon (0.5) MÄ OO MAKSANU VERISUONIA IHAN it is (.) yes (0.5) I HAVE PAID BLOOD VESSELS (taxes) QUITE He is very angry and uses his hands and voice to make it clear. 7

TARPEEKSI. ENOUGH.

8 S: niin (0.5) joo. I see (0.5) yes.

The mood of the situation is still the same; frustrated and negative. This time the speech therapist calls something ‘insulting’ (line 5) and not merely experienced. She is referring the aphasic speaker as being insulted; she uses a description of an emotion behind which it is quite easy to imagine a conception. In a way the speech therapist explains the speaker’s behaviour: the speaker is very upset because he is offended, and that is why he uses his voice and gestures the way he does. That is also the reason why the understandable words are negatively loaded words like ‘hell’. Presenting the explanation for behaviour is one of the most important functions of contextual thought report (Palmer, 2004, p.â•›216; Mildorf, 2008). The speech therapist is mediating the meaning between the speaker

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(the character) and the “audience”, which is also what the narrator can do by thought reports. The mediation is required due to the speaker’s lack of words to explain himself.

Reading the mind of the situation As was already mentioned, here the term ‘mind’ refers not solely to an individual but also to a social, shared, and intersubjective phenomenon. In her interpretation process the speech therapist is filling in the gaps by combining the information she gleans from both what the aphasic speaker says and the prosodic and nonverbal communication, but she also draws from her knowledge of rehabilitation practices in Finland. Interpretative hypotheses are made rapidly, “on-line”, and in parallel. The speech therapist’s understanding of the other is not based solely on language, but rather more reminiscent of Donald Davidson’s passing theory. For Davidson (2005, pp.â•›101–104), passing theory is essentially what is needed for success in communication. According to him, for example, passing theory considers every deviation from the habitual use of a word a feature of what the word means on that particular occasion, as long as this is agreed upon for the moment and the participants have the ability to understand the speaker’s intentions even when he is using words incorrectly or in a novel way. Davidson’s contribution to the debate on the relationship between language and understanding emphasises the situatedness of meanings and understanding, as well as language used as an idiolect instead of being a universal syntactic and semantic system. John Heritage also emphasises the situatedness of the meaning by noting that “the meaning of the actor’s action is potentially accessible, but the observer’s understanding is not thus guaranteed to be correct but the co-actor must ‘take chances’ in responding on the basis of an interpretation of the other’s action which may yet turn out to be incorrect because all the facts were not, at the point, available.” (1984, pp.â•›60–61) In the excerpts the speech therapist takes a chance; she makes guesses and uses her contextual and cultural knowledge, as well as her mind-reading ability, in order to understand and to reformulate the aphasic man’s utterances in such a way that she can offer interpretations to him in a propositional form to accept or reject. She is reading both the individual mind as well as the social mind of the situation and the meaning of the utterances is linked to both minds. When we examine the way that we construct and understand meaning we are actually studying the mind (Brockmeier, 2005, p.â•›443). In concrete utterance (i.e. in live usage of words) emotions, evaluation, and expression are born (Bakhtin, 2002, p.â•›87). The meaning is crystallised in action and takes the form of an intermental thought as Palmer (2004) would say.



Chapter 4.╇ ‘Mind-reading’, a method for understanding

Salient meanings of language offer some guidelines for mind-reading as well. Our linguistic behaviour is shaped by socially shared salient meanings and senses of words, as well as by fixed expressions in addition to contextual information (Giora, 2003, p.â•›9). Language is always occupied with the meanings of its earlier use and populated with intentions and expectations (Brockmeier, 2005, p.â•›438), some of them being more salient than others. When we select words for an utterance (a unit of speech communication), according to Bakhtin (2002, p.â•›87) we usually take them from other utterances and adopt with them the meanings and expressive tones of genres. There are authoritative utterances (cf. salient meanings) we rely on and every unique speech experience is shaped and developed in continuous and constant interaction with other’s utterances (p.â•›89). The repertoire of the salient meanings of words is also used when trying to guess what the aphasic storyteller is referring to. ‘To pay blood vessels’ (Excerpt 3, line 6) is not an appropriate phrase in any context; however, ‘to pay taxes’ is. In Finnish both words begin with the same letters VER (verisuonet and verot) and the syllable ver is a sufficient clue to understand the salient meaning ‘to pay taxes’ that is also contextually appropriate, albeit linguistically uttered by using incorrect words. In my example the meaning was caught, even though incorrectly uttered by using wrong words, and it was accepted as an appropriate turn in the conversation. A more peculiar connection between the words ‘blood’ and ‘taxes’ can be found from our cultural vocabulary in the form of “taxes drink the blood of the proletariat”.7 It would be an untenable interpretation to argue that the aphasic man meant the political content and the particular line of the song, The Internationale, by his utterance “to pay blood vessels”. However, it is interesting that the sentiment of his utterance resembles that in the song, namely exploitation and unfairness. The storyworld is reconstructed not only on the basis of language or gestures but also on the basis of contextual knowledge. Communication is made possible by metacommunicative devices or contextualisation cues. Participants use such cues to signal what sort of contextual knowledge should be drawn on to frame the ongoing interaction. (Herman 1999, p.â•›237.) The aphasic man’s most intelligible word ‘sixty-five’ (Excerpt 1, line 2) is such a contextualisation cue that it is enough for the speech therapist (as well as for the other interlocutors) to understand what he is referring to. The most common age of retirement in Finland is 65, and this age is also seen as a “borderline” (criterion) to gain access to the rehabilitation activities covered 7.╇ This is a line from the Finnish translation to ‘The Internationale’, original French lyrics by Eugéne Pottier (1871). Retrieved April 6, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale

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by KELA (The Social Insurance Institution of Finland). After the age of 65 accessing rehabilitation services paid for by KELA can be much more difficult, if not totally impossible. This is “a fact” contained in our encyclopedia8 or reservoir of knowledge we possess and bring to the encounter in order to comprehend what is actually said when KELA is referred to in an angry voice. Thus, this example of interpretation concurs with Marcia Cavell’s (2005, p.â•›xvi) formulation that “the birth of meaning takes place through interpersonal communication about shared, public world, and depends in the fact that human creatures have shared needs and interests.” Contextual frames are for supplementing any propositional information with situation-based information (Emmott 1997, ref. Herman 2002, p.â•›270), and in my example case the situation-based information can be argued to be even primary information on which the interpretation is based.

How was the data read? Herman (2002) states that the real target of narrative analysis is the process by which interpreters reconstruct the storyworlds encoded in narratives. While reading the data, I am reconstructing the storyworld of the encounter from my own point of view. I claim that I am doing narrative analysis when trying to reconstruct the process of understanding the broken narrative and narration of an aphasic man. Particular emphasis is given to the interaction between the speech therapist and the aphasic man. I read the process of the co-construction of the meaning and the way the aphasic man’s utterances and non-verbal messages are interpreted and made a coherent part of the storyworld. In the example case all the cues are utilised in order to make sense of the narrative the aphasic man is telling, because the propositional meanings of the words are not constantly available. While analyzing the data I picked up those instances where, according to my interpretation, mind-reading took place. The term ‘mind-reading’ is a description of one step of my analysis, an analytical tool. As I was going through the data I asked myself: “can I find sequences of action one can call mind-reading, i.e. moments in the flow of interaction where someone is explaining overt behaviour in terms of underlying states of mind?” The chosen three excerpts that I introduced were results of that reading and answers to the question. In the analysed episode the mutual understanding was co-constructed, and in the construction process the speech therapist had a pivotal position. Some of her 8.╇ Encyclopedia is defined as “shared communal knowledge that varies with cultures, social groups, historical epochs, and for these reasons relativizes the recovery of implicit meaning” (Doležel, 1998, p.â•›177).



Chapter 4.╇ ‘Mind-reading’, a method for understanding

speaking turns can be interpreted as analogous to the use of the mode of thought report in a written text. With “thought reports” the speech therapist ascertains that joint, intersubjective understanding of what the aphasic man is telling can emerge. Lots of gaps are present in the analysed episode. Participants try to “read” the situation and the minds of others in order to explain what is going on and what is said or argued either with words or without them. Not everything is present for the participants to read (their knowledge is necessarily incomplete), and therefore they use frames, scripts, and preference rules (Palmer, 2004). They also rely on the salient meanings of the words or idiomatic phrases in order to fill in the gaps. The messages are interpreted and the storyworld is created. The storyworld provides the presuppositions that enable the reader or the listener to construct a coherent understanding of the narrative that is told. The man’s speech, his story, has a sufficient structure and contains enough words and intensifiers for recipients to understand meanings, actions and entities of the storyworld. We were able to recognise that he was telling us a story even without knowing from time to time what that story meant.

Concluding remarks I chose one very short example of only two and half minutes duration from my data to work with while doing my experiment on how some cognitive narratological concepts operate in a real world episode of narrating in a clinical setting. I asked if the concept of mind-reading can help me to add the ‘mind’ to my analysis when using conversation analysis as a method and when reading the broken narrative of the aphasic man. Mind-reading was concretised as thought reporting and used as a mechanism to create joint understanding, or intermental thought, in a face-to-face interaction. I have, in a way, read the mind of the speech therapist. I claim that she reads the mind of the aphasic man and the mind of the whole situation, and reports her interpretations in the mode of thought report in situ. That can be interpreted as a strategy for shared storytelling, and as such it illuminates the co-authoring of a narrative from a new perspective. While Palmer (1994) considers the reader’s means to access the storyworld of a novel, I found a link with my own experiences as a researcher trying to access the storyworld created by the participants in the rehabilitation encounter when one of them had difficulties to speak. In the analysed episode the aphasic man invited us to share his experiences and to co-construct a storyworld of the aphasia rehabilitation encounter. This article is my response to that invitation.

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References Ahlsén, E. (1985). Discourse patterns in aphasia. Gothenburg monographs in linguistics 5. Göteborg: University of Göteborg. Atkinson, J.M., & Heritage, J. (1984). Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (2002). Speech genres and other late essays (V.W. McGee, Trans., C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds.). Austin TX: University of Texas Press. Brockmeier, J. (2005). The text of the mind. In C. E. Erneling & D. M. Johnson (Eds.), The mind as a scientific object: Between brain and culture (pp.â•›432–449). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavell, M. (2005). Introduction. In Donald Davidson: Truth, language, and history (pp.â•›xii–xx). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohn, D. (1978). Transparent minds. Narrrative modes for presenting consciousness in fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Damasio, A. (2000). The feeling of what happens: Body, emotion and the making of consciousness. London: Heinemann. Davidson, D. (2005). A nice derangement of epitaphs. In Donald Davidson: Truth, language, and history (pp.â•›89–107). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drew, P. (2005). Is confusion a state of mind? In H. te Molder & J. Potter (Eds.), Conversation and cognition (pp.â•›161–183). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doležel, L. (1998). Heterocosmica — fiction and possible worlds. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Emmott, C. (1997). Narrative comprehension: A discursive perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fludernik, M. (1996). Towards a ‘natural’ narratology. London: Routledge. Frith, U. (2001). Autism. In R.A. Wilson & F.C. Keil (Eds.), The MIT encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences (pp.â•›58–60). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Gallagher, S. (2001). The practice of mind: Theory, simulation or interaction? In E. Thompson (Ed.), Between ourselves: Second-person issues in the study of consciousness (pp.â•›83–108). Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic. Gallese, V., & Goldman, A. (1998). Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind-reading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2(12), 493–501. Georgakopoulou, A. (2007). Small stories, interaction and identities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gibson, J. J. (1979/1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. Hills Dale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Giora, R. (2003). On our mind: Salience, context, and figurative language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gopnik, A. (2001). Theory of mind. In R. A. Wilson & F.C. Keil (Eds.), The MIT encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences (pp.â•›838–841). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Goodglass, H. (1993). Understanding aphasia. Foundations of neuropsychology. A series of textbooks, mongraphs, and treatises. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Goodwin, C. (1995). Co-constructing meaning in conversation with an aphasic man. Research on language and social interaction, 28(3), 233–260. Goodwin, C. (2003). Conversation and brain damage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.



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Goodwin, C. (2007). Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse & Society, 18(53), 53–73. Retrieved February 2, 2007, from http://das.sagepub.com Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Heritage, J. (2005). Cognition and discourse. In H. te Molder & J. Potter (Eds.), Conversation and cognition (pp.â•›184–202). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herman, D. (1999). Toward a socionarratology: New ways of analyzing natural-language narratives. In D. Herman (Ed.), Narratologies: New perspectives on narrative analysis (pp.â•›218– 246). Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Herman, D. (2002). Story logic: Problems and possibilities of narrative. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. Herman, D. (2007). Introduction. In D. Herman (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to narrative (pp.â•›3–21). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchby, I. (2001). Conversation and technology from the telephone to the internet. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hyvärinen, M. (2006). Towards a conceptual history of narrative. In M. Hyvärinen, A. Korhonen, & J. Mykkänen (Eds.), The travelling concept of narrative. Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (pp.â•›20–41). Retrieved November 30, 2007, from http://www.helsinki. fi/collegium/e-series/volumes/volume_1/index.htm Kohler Riessman, C. (1993). Narrative analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Laakso, M. (1997). Self-initiated repair by fluent aphasic speakers in conversation. Studia Fennica Linguistica 8. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city. Studies in the black English vernacular. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mondada, L. (2006). Participants’ online analysis and multimodal practices: Projecting the end of the turn and the closing of the sequence. Discourse Studies, 8, 117–129. Medved, M., & Brockmeier, J. (2004). Making sense of traumatic experiences: Telling your life with Fragile X Syndrome. Qualitative Health Research, 14(6), 741–759. Milroy, L., & Perkins, L. (1992). Repair strategies in aphasic discourse: Towards a collaborative model. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 6(1&2), 27–40. Mildorf, J. (2008). Thought presentation and constructed dialogue in oral stories: Limits and possibilities of a cross-disciplinary narratology. Partial Answers, 6(2), June, 279–300. Nichols, S., & Stich, S. P. (2003). Mindreading: An integrated account of pretence, self-awareness, and understanding other minds. Oxford cognitive science series. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Palmer, A. (2004). Fictional minds. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. Palmer, A. (2005). Thought and consciousness representation (literature). In D. Herman, M. Jahn, & M-L. Ryan (Eds.), Routledge encyclopedia of narrative theory (pp.â•›602–607). London: Routledge. Peterson, E. E., & Langellier, K. M. (2006). The performance turn in narrative studies. Narrative Inquiry, 16(1), 173–180. Raudaskoski, S. (2003). The affordances of mobile applications. A refereed conference paper. The Good, the Bad and the Irrelevant. The user and the future information and communication technologies. Conference Proceedings: COST 269, Media Lab UIAH, 130–136. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (2002). Pragmatics, modularity and mind-reading. Mind & Language, 17(1&2), 3–23. The Internationale. The song, original French lyrics by E. Pottier (1871). Retrieved April 6, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale

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66 Tarja Aaltonen Vogeley, K., Bussfeld, P., Newen, A., Herrmann, S., Happé, F., Falkai, P., Maier, W., Shah, N.J., Fink, G.R., Zilles, K. (2001). Mind reading: Neural mechanisms of theory of mind and selfperspective. NeuroImage, 14, 170–181. Wertsch, J. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zunshine, L. (2006). Why we read fiction: Theory of mind and the novel. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press.

Appendix Transcription conventions: [] Overlapping utterances (0.0) Timed pause: silence measured in seconds and tents of seconds (.) A pause of less than 0.2 second . Period: falling intonation ? Question mark: rising intonation ↑ Rise in pitch ↓ Fall in pitch xxx Underlining is indicating emphasis °â•… ° A degree sign is used to indicate a passage of talk which is quieter than the surrounding talk XXX Capital letters are used to indicate an utterance, that is spoken much louder that the surrounding talk x Letter X is used when the utterance is not Finnish (( )) Double parentheses are used to enclose a description of some phenomenon like details of conversational scene or various characterisations of the talk. ( ) Single parentheses are used in doubt or guesses of transcriptionist → The left-hand marginal arrows are markers for the lines in the transcript where the phenomenon of interest occurs

Chapter 5

Broken narratives, visual forces Letters, paintings and the event Maria Tamboukou

University of East London, UK

In this chapter I look into letters and paintings of Gwen John’s, an expatriate Welsh artist who lived and worked in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century. John’s epistolary narratives and paintings are placed within a conceptualization of time as duration, a continuum where past, present and future coexist and wherein sequential linearities are broken, nomadic subjectivities emerge and forces of narratability are released. What I argue is that John’s letters and painting create a plane for broken narratives and visual forces to be explored as events that form a different image of thought about the ethics and aesthetics of what human communication entails. Keywords: broken narratives, Deleuzian analytics, events, nomadic subjects, visual forces

To me the writing of a letter is a very important event. I try to say what I mean exactly. It is the only chance I have — for in talking, shyness and timidity distort the meaning of my words in people’s ears. That I think is one reason I am such a waif. … I don’t pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.  (Lloyd-Morgan, 2004, p.â•›22).

In March 1902, Gwen John, a Welsh artist, who studied at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London but mostly lived and worked in Paris was writing to her friend Michel Salaman a letter expressing her thoughts about happiness, the momentary pleasures of doing art, problems, misunderstandings and gaps in human relations and particularly among friends. In John’s perception, the writing of a letter was ‘an important event’ in that it allowed for her thoughts to be articulated properly — something that she feared was often distorted when speaking. In this chapter I make connections between this letter and a painting of Gwen John’s —

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Figure 1.╇ Gwen John, ‘Self-portrait with a letter’, watercolour and pencil on paper, (22.3â•›×â•›16.1) Rodin Museum, Paris, no. D.7210, photographed by Jean de Calan.

Autoportrait a la lettre [Figure 1]. In this self-portrait — the only finished watercolour amongst her work — the artist paints herself vacillating between speaking and letter-writing: she holds a letter in her hand, her mouth is slightly open and her expression shows intense anticipation. This self-portrait was sent to Augustus Rodin, with whom she had a passionate relationship for over ten years. What I suggest is that both the letter and the self-portrait create a narrative plane, an interface between the textual and the visual wherein John’s ambivalence towards speech becomes a sign1 of her will to solitude and makes forceful connections with an ethico/aesthetic practice of striving for human communication, while critically problematizing it. Gwen John’s auto/biographical archive2 reveals that there are different milieus for her ‘will to solitude’ to be contextualized. In the four years preceding her move to Paris (1888–1903), she was living in a series of gloomy London flats one of 1.╇ Signs in Deleuze’s analysis of Proust’s work (2000) are not perceived within the signifiersignified relation, they are not something that we can recognize; they are rather encounters that can only be sensed or felt through a form of violence that they exercise on our thought. Put simply, signs forces us to think differently. 2.╇ The archive my research has drawn on includes two extended bodies of correspondence — her letters to her life-long friend and fellow student at the Slade, Ursula Tyrwhitt (National Library of Wales) and Augustus Rodin, (Rodin Museum Archives), a publication of selected letters and notebooks (Lloyd-Morgan, 2004), two biographies, (Chitty, 1987; Roe, 2002), exhibition catalogues ( Langdale & Jenkins, 1985; Jenkins & Stephens, 2004) and other art publications on her work (Taubman, 1985; Langdale, 1987; Foster 1999). I am indebted to the AHRC and the University of East London for funding my work at the archives.



Chapter 5.╇ Broken narratives, visual forces 69

which has been described by her famous brother Augustus John3 as ‘a dungeon … into which no ray of sunlight could ever penetrate’ (cited in Langdale, 1987, p.â•›21). John’s obsession with literally living underground in the company of her cat, puzzled and problematised the bohemian circles of London, who labelled her as a recluse. This marginalization however, also worked as a force of deterritorialization. As a young woman trying to pursue her artistic aspirations and live independently, John left behind the suffocating spaces and places of London. Her move to Paris however, was not to be an intermission of an artist’s life as it was the case with many of her contemporaries.4 Paris and later Meudon, a nearby suburb was to become her home for the rest of her life. As she was writing to Rodin: ‘I was very troubled, since I had dreamt that I was in England and I could not come to you in Paris. Before going to sleep I was thinking of my brother and how he was making me miserable in England and how I was miserable in England’ (MGJ, B/ J5/undated letters with an address). John went to Paris deterritorialized by her desire to become an artist, but her lines of flight were soon to be reterritorialized on other regimes of fear, the striated spaces of heterosexual love.5 Her fear of speech becomes a constant theme of her many letters to Rodin, which appear to be filling the gaps of her silence: 3.╇ Augustus John (1878–1961), a British Camden Town Group Painter studied at the Slade School of Art like his sister and was considered to be the most talented artist of his generation. In 1894 he won the Slade prize and by 1914 he was the best-known artist in Britain, while by the 1920s he became Britain’s leading portrait painter. Some critics thought that his art ultimately degenerated. To get an idea about his art, you can visit http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/ john_augustus.html. 4.╇ See Perry’s (1995) study of women artists in Paris in the early twentieth century. 5.╇ Deterritorialization, reterritorialization, lines of flight, striated spaces and smooth spaces are central notions in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical writings, particularly elaborated in A Thousand Plateaus (1988). A common aspect in all these notions is the importance of the relations we have with space in general and the earth in particular. We experience the world as a continuum of striated and smooth spaces: ‘smooth space is constantly being translated, transvered into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p.â•›474) Striated spaces are hierarchical, rule-intensive, strictly bounded and confining, whereas smooth spaces are open, dynamic and allow for transformations to occur. In this light, ‘all becoming occurs in smooth space’ (p.â•›486). As a matter of fact we constantly move between deterritorialization — freeing ourselves from the restrictions and boundaries of controlled, striated spaces — and reterritorialization — repositioning ourselves within new regimes of striated spaces. As Deleuze and Guattari warn us: ‘You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject.’ (p.â•›9) However in the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy, where we start from or where we end up — beginnings and endings — are not so important. In their writings,

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If it weren’t for my letters I would be a mute girl for you. Wouldn’t I? My letters are my conversations. When you hold my body in your arms, remember that I also have a spirit, otherwise you will find me very stupid — don’t forget that I have my thoughts but I can’t talk about them. [my emphasis] (MGJ/B.J5, undated)

John has written repetitively and at length about the importance of letters in her life in general and in her relation with Rodin, in particular. Letter writing was saturating her daily life, creating multifarious effects on various levels. It was through writing letters that she could express herself and grapple with existential difficulties, reflect, remember and communicate. As clearly put in the extract that initiated this chapter, the writing of a letter was for her ‘a very important event.’ But what is an event? Is it just something that happens? Or is it something that makes new things happen disturbing the order of what we do, the certainty of how we perceive the world and ourselves? Philosophers of the event have seen it as a glimpse into the unreachable, the yet to come (Nietzsche, 1990); a transgression of the limitations of the possible (Foucault, 1987); a flash in the greyness of the virtual worlds that surround us (Deleuze, 2001). As Deleuze has poetically put it: ‘The event is not what occurs (an accident), it is rather inside what occurs, the purely expressed. It signals and awaits us … it is what must be understood, willed and represented in that which occurs’ (p.â•›170). Departing from good sense, the event sticks out from the ordinary, marks historical discontinuities and opens up the future to a series of differentiations. In working with the concept of the event, Deleuze (2001, p.â•›7) has traced a line of philosophical thinking that goes back to the Stoics and their distinction between bodies and events — incorporeal effects of the interrelation of bodies. In this light, the writing of a letter is an event, an effect of the interrelation of bodies — the addresser, the addressee, the epistolary materiality. As an event however, the writing of a letter is not simply what occurs, but rather ‘inside what occurs’, John’s ‘purely expressed’ desire to reach the other. In writing letters she strives to become worthy of what happens to her and thereby to be reborn as a friend, a lover, an artist.6 Thus the letter-event transgresses the limitations of the space/time block they have actually put forward: ‘other ways of moving and traveling: proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going, rather than starting and finishing’ (p.â•›25). What is critical in the experience of freedom is our movement in between, when we follow lines of flight or escape, the intermezzo, the process of becoming other. In this light, Deleuze and Guattari prioritize lines of flight to conflicts and battles which are so central in the Foucauldian conceptualization of power: ‘a social field’ they write, ‘is defined less by its conflicts and contradictions than by the lines of flight running through it.’ (p.â•›90) 6.╇ Paraphrasing Deleuze who actually writes: ‘to become worthy of what happens to us […] and thereby to be reborn’ (2001, p.â•›170)



Chapter 5.╇ Broken narratives, visual forces

within which it is actualized — John writing in the solitude of her room — and opens up yet unrealized possibilities: communication to come, words to recapture the meaning that speech could have distorted, the power of love to be discursively expressed. Moreover the epistolary event initiates diverse series of events to come: Some letters will be sent, received, read and maybe responded. Some will be cherished, and kept, others will be lost, destroyed or given to archives to be analyzed and rewritten by researchers like me. Or maybe the letter is ‘dead’ at the very moment of its writing — it never arrives anyway in a Derridean image of thought.7 Deleuze has argued however, that the event cannot be reached, ‘has no present’ (2001, p.â•›73). The event is always elusive being the perpetual object of a double question: ‘What is going to happen? What has just happened?’ (p.â•›73) In this sense, narrative becomes a medium for the event to be expressed or rather leave its signs: ‘The pure event is tale and novella, never an actuality.’ (p.â•›73) Following Deleuze, Gibson (1996) has therefore suggested that postmodern trends in narrative should liberate narrative as an event and the event in narrative and in this context he has explored narrative modes, which have allowed the event to emerge in novels and films. Taking up Gibson’s suggestion I have worked with John’s letters and paintings raising a two-fold question: can letters and paintings function both as events and as milieus within which events can be traced? It is exploring this question that the discussion of the paper now turns.

Letters and paintings as events in time reconsidered In his philosophical discussion of the concept of the event, Deleuze has drawn on the Stoics’ two-fold conceptualization of time: (a) as Chronos and as (b) Aion: ‘Briefly there are two times, one of which is composed of interlocking presents; the other is constantly decomposed into elongated pasts and futures.’ (2003, p.â•›73, emphasis in the text) Chronos delineates a cyclical succession of movements, marking occurrences and their causal links: John is desperate or lonely, then she writes letters. However the event can only be conceptualized within an image of time as Aion, a continuum wherein past, present and future co-exist, an unfolding time, wherein events — forces that effectuate changes — emerge. In Deleuze’s thought:

7.╇ Drawing on Derrida, Stanley has commented how all letters are ‘dead’ in the sense that ‘the letter that was written and sent is rather different from the one that arrives and is read because it has changed by its travels in time and space from the there and then of writing to the here and now of reading’ (2004, p.â•›208)

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‘Time itself unfolds (that is, apparently ceases to be a circle) instead of things unfolding within it (following the overly simple circular figure). (2004, p.â•›111) The writing of a letter is in this sense conceptualised as an event, with a limitless capacity in expressing forces of narratability, John’s desire to relate to others through exposing her vulnerability and dependence.8 As put in one of her letters to Rodin: ‘I have a great fear of despair … but I got out … once I was able to write these letters, I gathered hope in writing them’ (MGJ, B.J3, undated). The whole letter is a reflection on how difficult it is to identify the ‘reasons’ for writing letters, trace the causality underpinning them: ‘This was not the reason that I wrote these letters … I don’t know all the reasons. Fear was one. I have a great fear of despair … but I got out … once I was able to write these letters, I gathered hope in writing them’ (MGJ, B.J3, undated). In this light, writing letters is an event opening up striated regimes of fear, creating possibilities for hope — life can be different when John writes a letter about her fears, acts upon them, faces her ghosts, exposes her weaknesses. This is very different from placing the letter within the closed causality of the occurrence: John was afraid; this is why she wrote those letters. What I further suggest is that John’s narratability, her desire for her story to be expressed springs forcefully from her ‘Self-portrait with a letter’ [Figure 1] In creating an artistic image of her ambivalence between speaking — her mouth slightly open — and writing — the letter in her hand — John releases visual forces of her anxiety, invites her viewers to make connections with the ethical problem of what human communication entails. Her self-portrait raises a series of questions: Why is her mouth open? Is she saying something about the letter she is holding? Who is she talking/writing to? What is the connection between speaking and letter-writing? As shown above, John had explicitly written that ‘my letters are my conversations’, but then again, is it possible that fragmented sentences or phrases from her letters can fix anything about the meaning of her paintings? Can we assign any meaning at all to a work of art?

8.╇ The very act of narration is immanently political, relational and embodied, as Cavarero following Arendt has forcefully shown. To the Arendtian view that human beings as unique existents live together and are constitutively exposed to each other through the bodily senses, Cavarero adds the narratability of the self. The self emerges as narratable in that it is constitutive of the very desire of listening to her story being narrated. This desire is interwoven with what Cavarero (2000, p.â•›35) conceives as ‘the unreflective knowledge of my sense-of-self through [which] I know that I have a story and that I consist in this story’. Moreover, the narratable self is not reducible to the contents of the story either as ‘a construction of the text or the effect of the performative power of narration’; in this light, narratability is not about intelligibility, but about familiarity with the ‘spontaneous narrating structure of memory’ (Cavarero 2000, pp.â•›35, 34). For a discussion of how John is constituted as a narratable subject, see Tamboukou, 2008.



Chapter 5.╇ Broken narratives, visual forces

Keeping the analysis of this paper within the anti-representational image of though of Deleuze’s philosophy I have made connections with his suggestion of seeing paintings as fields of forces rather than semiotic registers. The very task of painting according to Deleuze is ‘the attempt to render visible forces that are not themselves visible’ (2003, p.â•›56). What I therefore propose is that the Self-Portrait with a letter creates a field where forces of narratability are rendered visible. Taken as a field of forces, John’s self-portrait intensifies our ambivalence about what have remained unsaid, blends the boundaries between oral and written communication. What springs from the canvas is the force of the desire of the narratable subject for her story to be told. The sitter of the self-portrait however, can never be reducible to the content of her story or the figural image of the painting. Self-portraiture is an autographic9 practice rather than an autobiographical one: an artistic intervention on the experience of the self, a response to the self, not a representation of it. What is further strikingly interesting about this self-portrait is that it was sent to Rodin as a message, a sign of love transformed in a sign of art. Being invested with strong epistolary elements — it was painted to be sent — the portrait becomes a kind of a postcard, a Derridean envoy (1987, p.â•›22): I have so much to tell you and it all will have to hold on snapshot postcards — and immediately be divided among them. Letters in small pieces, torn in advance, cut out, recut. So much to tell you but all and nothing, more than all, less than nothing — to tell you is all and a postcard supports it well […]

To tell the other is all, but so much for John to say, and her letters and portrait/postcard seem to support it well; they become events opening up her time, releasing virtual forces of narratability, creating images of new worlds, anticipating limitless future possibilities: friendship to come, love to be expressed, the artist to emerge: I was so glad to get your letter. Your letters always give me a certain pleasure, which I never find in anything else except painting. Whatever you talk about in them it is the same, you belong to a part of my heart and mind — the same part where my love of art is — which is undisturbed by the events and difficulties of life. (NLW MS 21468D, ff.31–3)

In the letter above written to her friend Ursula Tyrwhitt on February 17, 1909, John binds epistolary friendship with the pleasure of painting. Her correspondence with Tyrwhitt was a source of artistic inspiration and emotional and practical support throughout her life in Paris. John’s friends in the UK and even her lover in Paris were all artists. It was a propos of their art that they would often communicate, exchanging views about trends in art or sharing anxieties about the state of

9.╇ For a discussion of the autograph see Stanton (1987).

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their own work: ‘Are you painting?’ was a constant question that John would address to Tyrwhitt and other artist friends in the UK — both men and women. Art was opening up windows of communication between friends and lovers: I received your card my Master10 this evening on returning from my [modelling] session. It gave me a great joy. My room is calm. I thought for a long time of the letter that I am going to write to you I thought that in this calmness I can easily talk to you about my passion and of all the little things that are born from this and of the dreams that I had these last nights … you can judge from the insufficiency of this letter that it is very difficult to write about a great love.  (MGJ/BJ3, undated letters without address or name)

As the above extract from a letter written to Rodin so passionately conveys, letters cannot really express the immensity of love — they can only carry or emit signs of it. What letters can do however is to contract the experience of the present moment, disrupt the ceaseless linear continuity of time, become an event in the experience of duration, allow time to be sensed as Aion. The following letter is a contemplation of the moment of writing as an experience of the pure present: I think of tomorrow when I will see him and I forget sometimes the infinite present. This is neither intelligent, nor sage! No, but I live in the present when I write to him and when I prepare to recite my poetry to him and when I look after my health! And I am going to gradually learn not to forget the infinite present!  (MGJ/BJ4/Letters to Julie 1906–7)

John’s letters carry traces of how she experiments with love as force, disrupting the order of the present, a process of living through what can only be experienced in fractured moments of being — the moment of writing, as in the letter above. John’s postcard-portrait and event-letters carry traces of virtual forces, narratives of intensities and passions, messages for the yet to come; they do not represent ‘realities’ — they are pure events emitting signs and releasing forces. They thus become vectors of deterritorialization, uprooting John from striated geographical, cultural, emotional and gendered spaces, gearing the speediness of her becoming a minoritarian figure of her social milieu: a solitary non-bohemian artist, a mad Anglaise in Paris: ‘It is so cold in my room and I haven’t the energy to light the fire so I’ve come here to write to you, there is a band here and a lot of startling ladies amongst the men but I have books and writing paper all over the table so they think me only a mad Anglaise. (John to Tywritt, 4-2-1910, NLW MS 21468D, ff.38–40). 10.╇ Rodin was often addressed as ‘the master’ by his circle. Rilke for example who worked with Rodin as his secretary would always address him as ‘My dear Master’, a salutation that John would also use to open her letters to Rodin.



Chapter 5.╇ Broken narratives, visual forces

In writing letters John follows nomadic passages through different subject positions and yet she cannot be pinned down to any of them. John is not reducible to the content of her letters and they cannot establish any causal relationship between what she does, why she does what she does and who she is. This is the point of taking letters as events: placing them outside the temporal causation of Chronos, transferring them in a different register — the time of the immeasurable Aion. Being conceived beyond the boundaries of sequentially structured narratives, psychosocial states of mind and semiotic registers, John’s letters carry traces of deterritorializations, lines of flight and eruptions; they become planes for the emergence of the unconditioned, the unthought of; they compose a world of verbs not of subjects — becomings not states of being. After all the question of who writes or paints keeps evading, it is actually irrelevant in the philosophies of the event, as I will further discuss.

Who writes or paints? Gibson has noted that in classical narratology, events are always conceptualised in relation to actors by whom ‘they are caused or experienced’ (Bal, cited in Gibson, 1996, p.â•›181) and who can further be detached from the event and become consistent characters, carrying the sequential order of the narrative. As discussed above, Chronos — a linear measurable conception of time — is the condition of possibility for the narratological conventions of sequence and character, but instead of being recognised as just a variable it becomes naturalised, closing down possibilities of open futurity and of subjects who cannot fit within any kind of temporal or logical sequence. Troubling the universality of a chronological conception of time, what I have suggested is that instead of being sequentially ordered, John’s letters and paintings — conceived as events — become assemblages of forces and affects within an image of time as duration, the Stoic Aion. In this sense, subjects are dispersed, sometimes even emerging in the text as pre-individual singularities rather than coherent characters. As John wrote once in expressing the intensity of her passion for Rodin: ‘I am nothing but a piece of suffering and desire’. (MGJ, B.J5, undated) Seeing the self as ‘a piece of suffering and desire’, not as a person, initiates the Nietzschean process of subjectification which is not about recognizing yourself as a subject, but rather about depersonalizing yourself, dispersing existence in nomadic passages around events, inventing new possibilities for life. As Deleuze has put it: ‘Individuals find a real name for themselves,… only through the harshest exercise in depersonalization, by opening themselves up to the multiplicities everywhere within them, to the intensities running through them. (1995, p.â•›6)

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Opening up herself to the intensity of pain and passion, John finds a way to the self through depersonalization. She does not recognize herself as ‘the new woman’ she has been educated to become, but as an assemblage of multiple forces traversing the immanence of her existence: nothing but a piece of suffering and desire at least at the moment of writing a letter about it. When denoting herself as ‘nothing but a piece of suffering and desire’, does she become a subject in bad faith then, incapable of transcending her immanence — as an existentialist take on consciousness would have it? For Deleuze, consciousness does not derive from a unitary self; it rather emerges as a contraction of machinic11 repetitions, dispersed and multiplied: ‘Underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject. We speak of our “self ” only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who says “me”. (2004, p.â•›96) Among these thousands of little witnesses the subject is tentatively constituted in the moment, through the event itself, as an effect of haecceity — the accidental constitution of the moment, the intersection of the subject with the event (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, p.â•›296). John’s letters and paintings emit signs of non-subjectified affects and contingent encounters. Indeed, machinic consciousness nominally emerges in her letters: ‘I don’t know what character I have when you leave me for a long time; it seems to me that I have no character, I am a kind of machine, a machine which suffers.’ (MGJ/BJ3/undated letters without name or address) However, being ‘nothing but a piece of suffering and desire’ or ‘a machine which suffers’ is an experience that does not become an attribute of what John is, does not categorise or enclose her within the box of patriarchy. Her letters and paintings both establish and disperse the kind of uniformity expected by essentialist categories of identity or even subjectivity attributes: a woman, an artist, a lover, a recluse. John becomes a Spinozist subject by increasing her power to affect and be affected 11.╇ Unlike closed organisms and fixed identities, machines in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy are assemblages without any organising centre, who can only function as they connect with other machines in a constant process of becoming: ‘a machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks […] Every machine, in the first place, is related to a continual material flow (hylè) that it cuts into.’ (1984, p.â•›36) The machine has no ground or foundation: ‘it is nothing more than the connections and productions it makes; it is what it does; it therefore has no home; it is a constant process of deterritorialization, or becoming other than itself.’ (Colebrook, 2002, p.â•›56) Colebrook further explains that ‘there is no aspect of life that is not machinic; all life only works and is in so far as it connects with some other machine; […] so life is a proliferation of machinic connections.’ (p.â•›56) The concept of the machine allows for the possibility of open configurations, continuous connections and intense relations, incessantly transforming life: ‘everywhere there are breaks-flows out of which desire wells up, thereby constituting its productivity and continually grafting the process of production onto the product.’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984, p.â•›37)



Chapter 5.╇ Broken narratives, visual forces

through writing letters and painting pictures, amongst other practices. Taken as events, her letters and paintings generate propositions that defy conventional notions of space/time pinned identities: a new woman, a good artist, a woman in love. Instead, John follows nomadic paths in between space/time positions. Her letters carry traces of a divergent series of states, difficult to be enveloped in the sequential unity and structure of classical narratology: they become broken narratives of nomadic distributions, while her paintings release forces of her narratability. Through her letters and paintings — and mostly her self-portraits — John emerges as a fascinating figure. She becomes able to depart from good sense, the image of the artist which has been constructed in the process of measuring time against unusual but still regular events: girl goes to the Slade, trains as an artist, starts exhibiting, lives in the bohemian circles of London, gets married or not, goes on working or gives it up to support her artist partner.12 John’s space/time blocks — her chronotopes — are disrupted, her narratives and the narratives around her have been irrevocably broken: she does not survive the freedom of the bohemian circles in London and becomes a minoritarian subject even amongst the margins, goes off travelling, ends up in Paris, has to work as a model to support herself and her art, meets Rodin, falls in love, her lines of flight become reterritorialized within Rodin’s circle, but once again she becomes a minoritarian figure within the Parisian artists’ colony. John abandons common sense for visceral experiences of unlimited passion and uncompromised solitude: she paints, writes letters to her lover and friends and looks after her cat. In this light her life unfolds against the rhythm of a specific set of occurrences structuring Woman’s time or even the bohemian/artist’s time: she lives out of order and her letters and paintings carry traces of disjointed space/time blocks. Having displaced herself in space and time John paints portraits of women who appear to do nothing more than reading a book or a letter, holding their cat in their lap or just looking. These women seem to have abandoned conventional tasks of their femininity: being busy within the world of domesticity, holding babies, being beautiful, offering themselves to the gaze of the other. What John paints is the force of women’s space/time as momentarily undisturbed by the anxieties of the earthy care for others; put simply, women who think. Indeed, these seemingly motionless portraits release forces of pure thinking: the almost monochromatic planes that John adopts in most of her paintings13 seem to absorb the figure, mak12.╇ Indeed, these were more or less the regular events structuring the life of many of her contemporaries as a series of studies on fin-de-siècle women artists has shown. See amongst others, Chadwick, 1990; Perry, 1995. 13.╇ As an indicative list of John’s monochromatic paintings, see, Langdale, 1987, Young Woman in a red Shawl (cat. no. 103, p.â•›99), Girl in a green dress, (cat. no. 99, p.â•›96), Girl holding a rose,

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ing visible the forces of her ‘becoming imperceptible’ as the coded Woman of patriarchal semiotic registers, while shedding light on the invisibility of the Deleuzian moment of contemplation — the ecstatic time when the larval subject emerges as an effect of pure intensities. John’s figures are like Virginia Woolf ’s characters: ‘Thus if you talk of a beautiful woman you mean only something flying fast which for a second uses the eyes, lips or cheeks of Fanny Elmer, for example, to glow through’ (Woolf, cited in Gibson, 1996, p.â•›204). In a parallel way, if you talk of a thinking woman in John’s portraits, you mean only a gesture, a direction of the gaze, a body posture, a turning of the head, or just a colour that enwraps the viewer in the milieu of pure thinking. In the same way that the novel becomes for Kundera, ‘the imaginary paradise of the individual’ (cited in Gibson, 1996, p.â•›190), letters and paintings create an imaginary world for John wherein she makes connections with the virtual forces that surround her actualized space/time lived experiences. There are many and different Johns and her character has both an actual and a virtual dimension. John becomes an event in the sense that she is complicated, keeping all the selves that compose her in a continuous state of intensity. Her letters hold differences together, not as oppositions but as multiplicities: despair — and — hope, woman — and — artist, inside — and — outside, solitude — and — communication. As Deleuze has noted, ‘even if there are only two terms [woman and artist], there is an AND between the two, which is neither the one nor the other, nor the one which becomes the other, but which constitutes the multiplicity’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, pp.â•›34–35). In this sense, dualisms can be dispersed working in the intermezzo between the two terms: what is happening in the middle, becomings between being a woman and an artist, lines of flight between despair and hope, deterritorializations between inside and outside, connections between solitude and communication. This is where I have worked with John’s letters and paintings: in the intermezzo of narrative sequences, in the gaps and interstices between broken narrative lines, in milieus where the event emerges. It is further tracing signs of these events that the discussion of the chapter now turns.

Tracing events in letters and paintings In tracing events in John’s letters I will take up the question of ‘what modes of narrative simulation of the event are possible’ (Gibson, 1996, p.â•›199). As already (cat. no.83, p.â•›94) Young woman holding a piece of sewing, (cat. no. 79, p.â•›94), Young Woman holding a Black cat (cat. no. 73, p.â•›92), Young woman in a Mulberry dress,( cat. no. 134, p.â•›90), The Pilgrim, (cat. no. 107, p.â•›87), Girl in blue, (cat. no. 82, p.â•›78), Girl in rose (cat. no. 65, p.â•›74)



Chapter 5.╇ Broken narratives, visual forces

discussed, the event is always elusive and narratives can only carry traces of its emergence or passage. Clearly, narratives can take many forms, but not all of them can create conditions of possibility for the event to emerge. John was writing letters regularly narrating her experiences of living and working in and around Paris. She would further write letters about her paintings — the ways she worked, the difficulties she had, the pleasures she took, her aspirations and plans. Her letters open up trails for nomadic becomings, the ways she keeps constituting and reconstituting herself as an artist, a woman inhabiting public spaces, a woman in love, a woman-who-loves-her-cat. In this sense John’s letters can be read in terms of how they narrate events, albeit not wholly marked by them. What I suggest is that her letters constitute a matrix, an assemblage of narratives of events and other narratives, and it is on poetics of the event in her letters that I will now focus. 1. Accidental encounters, polyphonies and paradoxes: to laugh or to leave? I have just returned from a café where I was drawing horses. A man dressed as a dandy came near and started talking to me. I had gone there to draw and not to talk to him, so I told him that I could not understand French. To my surprise instead of going away on hearing that, he sat next to me, ordered a coffee and started talking to me […] I could not understand what he was saying because I was focusing on my drawing but I could follow some of his words. In the end, people would stop and look at us and I was feeling very agitated and could not concentrate. I could hear him saying that he was a journalist and that he was very annoyed with the conductors who were staring and laughing at us. I was designing the ears of a horse and he was saying that when I would design the conductors I should make them with donkey ears […] I could not help laughing […] but still I was very an(MGJ, B.J4, undated) noyed and I left since so many people were staring …

John has frequently written about her frustration of being in public places as in the letter above where she recounts her experiences of painting tram horses in a Parisian café. There is nothing unusual with the situation: a single woman being harassed while drawing in a café. What is interesting however in John’s narrative is the ambiguous way that the story unfolds, different voices and perspectives merge and the overall effect is finally becoming both funny and unbearable, stretched to opposite directions in its logic of sense. Clearly John did not want to be distracted. However, is it the journalist that mostly annoys her or the people staring and laughing at them? And who is laughing at whom? Is it the conductors at John and the journalist, is it the journalist at the conductors or is it John at the journalist? John had been both annoyed and amused before taking the decision to leave. But what is the overall feeling conveyed in this narrative? Is it irony, humour, indignation or even signs of love emitted while evoking Rodin’s jealousy? The event emerges as an occurrence at the point where common sense causalities have been

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disrupted or broken and the logic of sense emerges within the affective milieu of forces and intensities: Is John annoyed, amused or unbearably in love? And what can this particular narrative of the café encounter convey about who she is and how she feels? The event emerges as a paradox according to Deleuze, in that it shakes common understandings, sequential orders and semiotic registers, creating a different logic of sense: ‘Paradox is initially that which destroys good sense as the only direction, but it is also that which destroys common sense as the assignation of fixed identities’ (2001, p.â•›5). In this light, the letter about drawing tram horses in a Parisian café is a narrative of the paradoxical events emerging in a woman’s lived experiences of the urban spaces of modernity — being in the crowd but not of it. It further carries signs of John’s nomadic passages: an artist in a café, a harassed woman, a woman who laughs, a woman who loves. As an event itself, the letter unveils the complex ways that John experiences space in terms of pure intensities rather than prescribed movements in between gendered divided spheres. Indeed, John has written extensively in her letters about her love of the Parisian quarters, the city gardens and the grand boulevards. She has painted her room, but also urban scenes seen from the Parisian cafés and restaurants where she used to sit, draw, read books and write letters. She has equally expressed her love for the countryside and the sea and has written about her walks in the woods and her boat rides on the Seine. Her letters narrate events that chart a unique map of real and imaginary spaces within which she keeps redistributing and consequently reinventing herself; they narrate events of paradoxical experiences in surpassing boundaries between the public and the private, the inside and the outside.14 2. Drafting the self My dear Master, I am sad that I cannot write to you in a beautiful language. Sometimes I am like a poor spirit always being around and trying to be loved without being able to speak — mute like the birds. I hope that one day I will find beautiful and eloquent words that will attract your attention and then I will be able to stay with you more often. But maybe I will never find them […]  (MR,MGJ,B.J3, undated)

As already discussed John’s letters and paintings create a plane of consistency for human communication to be problematized. In the letter above, John cannot find eloquent words to express her love. However it was not only the poetics of love that she was worried about. There were basic grammar and syntax problems that were preoccupying her. John never felt comfortable writing in French; copying her letters and proof reading them would became part of her daily epistolary practices: 14.╇ For a discussion of John’s spatiality, see Tamboukou, 2007



Chapter 5.╇ Broken narratives, visual forces

‘I have copied a letter that I wrote yesterday but I didn’t give it to you, since I saw that there were spelling mistakes and a fever came down to me which prevented me from copying it yesterday’ (MR,MGJ,B.J3, undated). As a matter of fact, she would often copy her letters ‘several times’ before sending them as revealed in a postscript to an undated letter: ‘Sometimes I copy my letters several times because of my bad writing.’ (MR,MGJ,B.J3). If oral and written communication is boldly articulated as an issue in John’s letters to Rodin in terms of her difficulties with the French language, her letters to her friends in the UK and particularly her life-long correspondence to Tyrwhitt equally express difficulties with choosing words in English: ‘No doubt all these words are not chosen well. It is difficult to express oneself in words for painters, isn’t it?’ (NLW MS 21468D, ff.31–3, 15/7/1927) Painters do not express themselves well in words, is the idea here, a statement that it was impossible to be raised with Rodin, since the subject position she was writing from, was that of the model/ lover/protégée, not that of the artist. John’s letters were therefore always in a draft form. She was continuously drafting them and even when they were sent there were always oscillations, ambivalences and regrets: ‘I have just read the letter that I wrote on Thursday morning […] and after reading it I realized that this letter has not said anything that I have tried to make it say. It says almost nothing.’ (MR,MGJ,B.J3). John considered her letters to be irresolute and incomplete — there is no closure in her epistolary narratives. However, her draft, inconclusive letters are a constant reminder of things that are continuously excised from our communication with others, things that are left unsaid or incomplete, narratives that have broken but whose fragments remain hanging in the virtualities that surround the actual moments of our communication. 3. Gaps, lacunae and broken narratives My dear Master, I have returned from a walk in the Boulogne Forest, the weather is so nice there … I have a big desire to see the sea and the country, but I could only go there with you, even if this perhaps will never happen. I see the sky and the stars from my window, I know that we are on an island and that the sky is like the sea, all around — I wonder why I am here, what to do and what is this world and where we go after we die … It is very strange that you know the answer no more than I do. All the people I see in the street seem so preoccupied with themselves and in their own world my Master. Myself, I am a stranger not only in this country but in the world; I don’t feel at home and I am always wondering why I am here … when I am not with you, or writing to you or drawing my cat to show it to you, always the same questions come to trouble me. Now I am going to lie in and read in bed.  (MGJ/BJ5/undated letters with a name of place)

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Written on a Sunday night between 1906 and 1907, the letter above recounts a day out in the countryside, raises metaphysical questions, exposes John’s existential fears and expresses her love for Rodin. These themes recur in the many love letters she wrote to him for over ten years and create an epistolary rhythm of seemingly unmatched associations: a landscape and the beloved — the Boulogne Forest and Rodin; unanswered questions — why am I here; gaps in communication that are filled in with reading or sleep — now I am going to lie in and read in bed. John was a painter, not a writer, but the poetics of her letters contain the complication of multiplicities that Deleuze has identified in Proust’s narrative art: a rhythm of gaps, interruptions and broken narratives, creating a plane of consistency without forming a homogeneous unity: ‘By setting fragments into fragments, Proust finds the means of making us contemplate them all, but without reference to a unity which they might derive or which itself would derive from them’ (2000, p.â•›123). John’s letters narrate unmatched events, ‘crammed together to the point of bursting’ (122); they constantly evoke the gaps, misunderstanding and ruptures in the way we communicate, the impaired ways we love, our ultimate failure to reach the other. But the force with which events are narrated in her letters disrupt the certainty of our perceptions about who she is and how she relates to the structures and axes along which her world has been analysed: a patriarchal regime of private/ public dichotomies. John’s letters create an assemblage, a matrix of gaps and lacunae wherein the meshwork of her/our social world can be unveiled; they project a vision of life which is not attached to fixed subjects or segmented structures. The blurring of pronouns, figures and subjects in her letters is a forceful sign of this complexity, as I will further discuss. 4. Meddling with grammatical subjects, names and signatures My dear sister, When I think that it is to you that I write Julie, I am more daring than if I was told that it is my Master who will see my letter. So, I will always imagine your little eyes when I write my letter […] I fear that my Master will grow weary of my uniformity […] However, I tell myself that perhaps in the garden a small tree straight and strong has as much value as the bright flowers […] in my heart, not just in my mind I find a force (and if I didn’t have anything that I would ever dare talk or write to my Master, I sense in myself a force that I can talk about without vanity)  (MGJ/BJ4/Letters to Julie)

On a Monday night between October and November 1909, John was writing to Julie, articulating her need and desire to create her as an imaginary addressee of things that were hidden deep down in her heart and had to be expressed in the narrative form of the epistolary novel. As revealed in one of her letters to Rodin, the idea to create Julie as her imaginary confidante occurred to John after reading



Chapter 5.╇ Broken narratives, visual forces

Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’, a novel that made a great impression on her. John’s letters — addressed to Julie, but written for Rodin — create a maze wherein the distinctions of first, second and third persons are blurred. And this maze becomes even more chaotic by the fact that Gwen John signed her letters to Rodin and Julie as Marie, the middle name of Gwendolen Mary John, which had actually become her first name for Rodin and his circle. Rodin knew John as Marie; he would even send her wishes on her name day as their correspondence reveals. When writing to Rodin, John recognized and signed herself as Marie, she even took joy in the idea of having a name day: ‘You could not have imagined my Master anything more comforting and sweet and charming for me than to have greeted me for my name day. It is so charming and exquisite! (I didn’t know I had a name day. You know, we don’t have this in England) (MGJ/BJ5/15-8-1910) Marie was then her name for Rodin and his circle and Mary the name she used in her brief correspondence with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. At the same time however, John would sign all her letters to friends and family in the UK as Gwen. As Israel (1999) has commented: ‘a name denotes a subject in a story and masks other names and narratives (p.â•›6). There is indeed a playful relation between nomination and narration in John’s letters creating a field of narrative forces, ‘I sense in myself a force that I can talk about’, wherein many epistolary figures emerge and move along different subject positions of the correspondence: Gwen the artist, Marie as Rodin’s model and lover, and Marie as Julie’s sister, Rodin as her lover and mentor and Rodin as the recipient of Julie’s letters. Rodin as the primary ‘you’ of Marie’s letters becomes Julie, an imaginary ‘you’ for Marie but also a third person for the writer and reader of the letters. Rodin as a third person ‘he’ in Julie’s letters, is actually the ‘you’ of the addresser. Marie the sister, as the addresser of Julie’s letters is also a third person ‘she’ for Gwen the artist. The order in the logic of sense of John’s letters has been irrevocably shattered but it is losing or rather dispersing the self in this maze of addressers and addresses that John comes closer to pure communication. As put in the letter above: ‘When I think that it is to you that I write Julie, I am more daring than if I was told that it is my Master who will see my letter.’ This might seem as a paradox: losing the self to reach the other. Multiplicities and dispersions therefore create a third eye or maybe what Deleuze (2001) perceives as a ‘fourth person singular’, ‘the always displaced aleatory point’ of the language of the pure event (p.â•›160).

Broken narratives, visual forces John lived in a world of fragmented debris: the unbearable exuberance of the bohemian circles in London, the Slade influence and the imperative of becoming a

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professional artist, the imaginary of the Parisian escape, the harsh reality of working as a model, the force and passion of unconditional love, the difficulties of being an alien in language within a terra incognita. Her letters and paintings respond to rather than represent these conditions; they refer to a life that passes through her rather than a life that leaves a mark on her as a subject that she should be. It is for this reason that John is not reducible to the contents of her letters and any biography based on them is inherently fraught with difficulties. Her letters however can be the expression of a life as an experiment, a becoming other. Their overall effect is usually inconsistent, non-sequential, and irresolute. John’s letters and paintings create an assemblage, a machine of broken narratives and visual forces, a plane for the emission of signs and for encounters between words and images. In this light, John’s archive becomes an event acting on several important themes: nomadic existence as a challenge to identity, epistolary narratability as a mode of expression of the will to solitude, art as a way of life, virtual forces inhering in actual encounters, haecceities disrupting the flow of linear time. Conceived as events, John’s letters and paintings respond to the Leibnizian problem of how the sealed monads that have neither door nor window’ can possibly communicate. (Deleuze, 2000, p.â•›163) It is — in Deleuze’s commentary — by enveloping the whole world and unfolding their own viewpoints that monads ‘set up among their solitudes a spontaneous correspondence.’ (p.â•›164) John’s letters and paintings express her world and it is through the unfolding of broken narratives and visual forces that lines of communication among solitudes are being created, then and now. What is interesting in tracing these lines is not accessing any kind of truth around the subject but rather the possibility of working within their narrative machine, exploring its modes of operation, tracing signs of events, entering a new image of thought about reaching the other, doing art, becoming a woman.

Archival sources National Library of Wales, Archives, Gwen John’s papers (NLW MS) Rodin Museum, Marie Gwendolen John’s boxes (MR\MGJ)

References Cavarero, A. (2000). Relating narratives: Storytelling and selfhood. London: Routledge. Chadwick, W. (1990). Women, art and society. London: Thames and Hudson. Chitty, S. (1987). Gwen John. New York: Franklin Watts. Colebrook, C. (2002). Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge.



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Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations (M. Joughin, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1990). Deleuze, G. (2000). Proust and the signs (R. Howard, Trans.). Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1964). Deleuze, G. (2001). The logic of sense (M. Lester, Trans.). London: Continuum. (Original work published, 1969). Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2002). Dialogues II (H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, Trans.). London: Continuum. (Original work published 1977). Deleuze, G. (2003). Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation (D.W. Smith, Trans.). London: Continuum. (Original work published 1981). Deleuze, G. (2004). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). London: Continuum. (Original work published 1968). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1984). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H.R.R. Lane, Trans.). London: Athlone Press. (Original work published 1972). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). London: Athlone Press. (Original work published 1980). Derrida, J. (1987). The postcard: From Socrates to Freud and beyond (A. Bass, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1980). Foster, A. (1999). Gwen John. London: Tate Gallery Publishing. Foucault, M. (1987). A preface to transgression. In D.F. Bouchard (Ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice: Selective essays and interviews (pp.â•›29–52). Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Gibson, A. (1996). Towards a postmodern theory of narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Israel, K. (1999). Names and stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, D.F., & Stephens, C. (Eds.). (2004). Gwen John and Augustus John. London: Tate Gallery Publishing. Langdale, C. (1987). Gwen John: With a catalogue raisonné of the paintings and a selection of the drawings. New Haven: Yale University Press. Langdale, C., & Jenkins, D. (1985). Gwen John: An interior life. New York, NY: Rizzoli. Lloyd Morgan, C. (2004). Gwen John: Letters and notebooks. London: Tate Gallery Publishing in association with the National Library of Wales. Nietzsche, F. (1990). Twilight of ohe idols, or, how to philosophize with a hammer; The anti-Christ (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). London: Penguin. (Original work published 1895). Perry, G. (1995). Women artists and the Parisian avant-garde. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Roe, S. (2002). Gwen John: A life. London: Vintage. Stanley, L. (2004). The epistolarium: On theorizing letters and correspondences. Auto/Biography, 12(3), 201–235. Stanton, D.C. (Ed.). (1987). The female autograph: Theory and practice of autobiography from the 10th to the 20th century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tamboukou, M. (2007). Interior styles/extravagant lives: Gendered narratives of sensi/able spaces. In E.H. Huijbens & Ó.P. Jónsson (Eds.), Sensi/able spaces: Space, art and the environment (pp.â•›186–204). Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Tamboukou, M. (2008). Re-imagining the narratable subject. Qualitative Research, 8(3), 283– 292. Taubman, M. (1985). Gwen John: The artist and her work. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Chapter 6

Artists-in-progress Narrative identity of the self as another Linda Sandino

Camberwell College of Arts, Victoria & Albert Museum

Following Paul Ricoeur’s formulation of narrative identity as the dialectic of sameness (idem-) and change (ipse-)identity, this chapter explores the trope of incompleteness in extracts from two artists’ life stories to suggest that the synthesizing totality of the life history is continually interrupted, or broken, by accounts of new creative directions and the search for symbolic expression which mark the ipse-identity of the artist’s selfhood. A coherent identity does not just refer to the singularity of that self but must also contend with the ascription of ‘artist’, the historical and cultural contingency of which is made manifest in the testimony of the life stories. Rather than seeing narrative emplotment leading towards a culmination or conclusion [“I became an artist”], narrative constitutes the means whereby the ‘discordant concordance’ of the temporal aporia of becoming and being an artist is enabled via the reflective ipseity that marks narrative identity’s fractures and disruptions. Keywords: artists, narrative identity, affinity, Ricoeur

Introduction This chapter draws on life stories of applied artists undertaken as part of an oral history project,1 focusing in particular on two ceramicists: one who works within a functional tradition, and another whose work is abstract. The project provides 1.╇ VIVA [Voices in the Visual Arts] oral history project is the author’s on-going research project based at the University of the Arts London, following on from life history recordings held at The British Library National Sound Archive http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/nlsc.html for Artists’ Lives, Architects’ Lives, An Oral History of British Fashion, and Craft Lives. VIVA consists of life history interviews with a small number of practitioners in the visual arts whose professional practices includes painting, graphic design and branding, publishing, ceramics, curatorial practice, art writing and criticism. For more information see http://www.vivavoices.org.

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the occasion for the artists to reflect on their past, and like all historical narratives, “Rethinking has to be a way of annulling temporal distance” (Ricoeur, 1988, p.â•›146), a means of closing the gap between the self-that-was, the speaking, current self, and the projected self. Life stories occupy a position between autobiography and biography in that they are assisted narratives, the product of an interaction between interviewer and interviewee who engage in a quasi-conversation where one tries to understand the other. From the very outset, the adventure is shaped as a quest in search of a totality (the life), which the dialogic structure subverts by questions, observations, comments. To record life stories means to engage with others, and “an abandonment of the self in a quest to enter the world of another” (Andrews, 2007, p.â•›15). A text that is created from this encounter, supposedly the life of the artist’s self becomes nevertheless an account of encounters with the world (people, objects, artworks) that show how identity created in narrative (narrative identity) is always in process and incomplete. The two examples below provide an opportunity for seeing narrative at work in artists’ life histories as the means whereby narratives about their objects are, for artists, narratives of identity; to talk about the work is to talk about the self. The two accounts are not presented as privileged representations of the authorial voice, nor am I endorsing “the core assumptions of the interview society” which, as has been argued, assumes that personal narratives provide “uniquely privileged means of access to biographically grounded experiences and meaning” (Atkinson & Silverman, 1997, p.â•›304). My aim is rather to show how the presumed coherent identity of artists is subject to breaks and re-fraction in stories about encounters with others. Rather than the autonomous, creative individual, these extracts show how artists are situated in a network of relationships with things and people that configure the stories they are able to tell about themselves as artists, as selves that are relational, in terms of others, and in terms of themselves as other in narrative (Ricoeur, 1992). Although the figure of Artist can be said to provide the overall plot which brings the narrative together, the artist-self is never complete and it is in encounters with others in and through their works that the project of becoming an artist is achieved, but not completed.

Fits and Starts In his account of an artist’s inability to progress meaningfully in his life story, Mark Freeman (2004) has proposed the concept of ‘narrative foreclosure’. As a mature artist, Freeman’s subject has so internalized cultural scripts about ageing and what



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it means to be an artist that he cannot continue as before.2 Echoing Ricoeur’s emplotment as synthesis, Freeman’s study is extremely helpful in thinking about artists’ life narratives ‘fit’, ‘understood as that measure of consonance which derives from the retrospective ordering of a life and its ability to be figured into a ‘plot’ (p.â•›81). Art History also provides a plot with ‘canonical characters’ (Bruner, 1986, p.â•›66) which, for Freeman’s subject (‘Samuel’) has been disrupted by postmodernism’s challenge to the linear development of modernist art production. Added to the fact of his ageing, Samuel’s story is “stuck”. However, this narrative of an artist unable to move forward is a familiar one throughout artists’ lives and not unique to older artists. Making art is a constant project, and there is no conclusion or significant ending except in the finishing of actual works, ready to be exhibited, and sometimes not even then.3 Samuel’s history, according to Freeman, is “less characterized by a series of meaningful episodes than be a series of fits and starts” (p.â•›87). This, I would argue, is the danger of adhering to the sense of an ending; fictions may have endings but in life histories plots can more fruitfully be thought of in terms of plotting, points in the journey of becoming. The spatiality of the mapping metaphor might also provide a way for understanding points of reference in a less linear way, while not abandoning the overall sense of meeting points, junctures, cross roads, which mark out life histories’ encounters (to be developed elsewhere). The theoretical focus of this paper aims, however, to explore the dialectic of idem and ipse identity, of sameness disrupted by the ‘fits and starts’ of the otherness of the other, by drawing on some aspects of the work of Paul Ricoeur.

Narrative Identity As noted, all life narratives contain stories not just about the self but also about other people and things. By showing how when speaking about and referring to the self, different pronouns are used, Ricoeur proposes the concept of narrative identity, created in a dialectic between a constant self articulated as ‘I’, and a self capable of change (Dauenhauer, 2005; Reagan, 1996; Ricoeur, 1988, 1992). The reflective self is constructed in narrative, through 2.╇ ‘Samuel’ was one of the artists who were part of a large research project at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Freeman explored these case studies in Finding the Muse: A Sociopsychological Inquiry the Conditions of Artistic Creativity, New York and Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. 3.╇ Artworks are also often ‘incomplete’ despite being exhibited, as for instance in the work British Pop Artist, Peter Blake. See my life history recording with him Tape 8 F13771A, The British Library National Sound Archive http://cadensa.bl.uk/uhtbin/cgisirsi/vFMs6fn8Gd/32140042/9.

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the interconnection of events constituted by emplotment [that] allows us to integrate with permanence in time what seems to be its contrary in the domain of sameness-identity, namely diversity, variability, discontinuity, and instability. (1992, p.â•›140)

Life history narratives, therefore, provide the occasion for an account in which the ‘I’ of the narrator is constant but in which events and encounters are the occasions for actions which initiate and articulate change in the narrator’s self and his/her work which stands for the artist’s self but is recounted as a reflexive disassociation in which the ‘I’ is othered as the self. Significant others, or the characters that appear in the emplotment, or I would prefer, plotting or mapping of the life history function to reinforce the narrator’s ‘I’, but also to signal both transformations, and reinforcements of identity: “Recognizing oneself in contributes to recognizing oneself by’↜”(1992, p.â•›121). Ricoeur’s conception of the dialectic of idem- and ipse-identity as set out in Oneself as Another (1992) is especially useful in understanding artists’ life histories.4 Artists are consistently identified through their work; it is common to talk of them being ‘known’ for a particular body of work. Damien Hirst, we might say is ‘known’ for his shark in formaldehyde (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991). Conversely, when referring to the artwork, people typically name the artist instead of the work, as in “Did you see the Hirst?” This is not just a shorthand reference but evidence of how artists and their artworks are combined, fused together; they signify each other. In 2007 Hirst created For the Love of God, a diamond encrusted platinum cast of an 18th century skull. “Have you seen Hirst’s skull?” was then the question people asked each other. Satisfying the demand for continual, outrageous, and dramatic reinvention, the synecdoche of a Hirst and the Hirst conflate person, artist, and work, a totality that narrative is able to break apart and ‘bridge’ (a metaphor Ricoeur uses frequently). Ricoeur’s definition of character is also helpful in unpacking the problematic of artists’ selfhood since it is “the set of lasting dispositions by which a person is recognized” (1992, p.â•›121). These dispositions are two-fold: one is habit, which “gives a history to a character… a history in which sedimentation tends to cover over the innovation which preceded it”. The other is trait, “a distinctive sign by which a person is recognized, reidentified as the same” (p.â•›121). How does this contribute to understanding artists’ identity? If habit is history, then one could argue that it contributes to the consistency of the attribution of ‘artist’ while trait identifies the signs by which we recognize the artist’s work and person. However, Ricoeur goes on to 4.╇ The term ‘artist’ is used here to denote practitioners in the graphic and plastic arts. Although the paper focuses on ceramic artists, Ricoeur’s thesis can be applied equally to creative practitioners across the arts.



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propose that character can nevertheless be subject to reinterpretation through “acquired dispositions”, such as “values, norms, ideals, models, and heroes, in which the person … recognizes” him/herself and which become traits by which the person can be recognized by (p.â•›121). The identifying reference with heroic figures, he suggests, is therefore also identifying with a set of values that lead to loyalty to a “cause” (Art) and this fidelity leads towards “maintaining the self ”. For Ricoeur this is an important congruence or concordance between ipse and idem identity, the moment at which trait and habit meet. However, he is not clear at what points in a life history narrative this occurs, and I would like to suggest that the acquisition of traits are not always moments of coherence in narrative, that stories of affinities can be about affirmation but can also resist narrative coherence. Ricoeur proposes that narrative emplotment is “the synthesis of heterogeneous elements” that is able to bring together and make sense of the “discordant concordance” of temporality, of a life’s experiences, and turn it into a comprehensible story (Ricoeur, 1988, 1991); both the creation of the narrative, and reading or hearing it are sense-making, explanatory activities. As Ricoeur neatly summarizes it: “To explain why something happened and to explain what happened coincide. A narrative that fails to explain is less than a narrative. Narrative that does explain is pure, plain narrative” (1985, p.â•›148). Explanation provides meaning and, therefore, coherence, but as I demonstrate below, the emplotment of the character of the artist is made up of ‘fits and starts’ rather than describing a coherent, stable selfhood.

Artists Stories of Self and Others The convention of the Artist’s Statement is a well-established genre. Such documents usually begin with the phrase “My work is about…”. In no other profession is there such constant demand for a declaration that, in effect, conjoins subject and object. Moreover, the increasing pressure to communicate with the public, to make the visual arts accessible and meaningful is becoming an ever more important skill for artists to acquire and as such it forms part of their training with inevitable consequences for artists’ narratives as they constantly articulate self as another, person/subject and artist/object. Artists, therefore, are acutely conscious of themselves in the third person of their work. To paraphrase the statement: “My work is me; it signifies my self ”. In artists’ life narrarives, the making and meaning of work often provide the plots along which much of the adult life stories are mapped. Ricoeur’s proposition of the three-fold mimesis of narrative: prefiguration, configuration and refiguration (Ricoeur, 1985) is helpful in unpacking the function

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of life stories. Briefly, prefiguration is the competence we bring to a narrative that enables us to understand it as a story and to know what the appropriate questions are such as: Who, What, How, Why? Refiguration is “the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the reader or hearer” (Ricoeur quoted in Simms, 2003, p.â•›85), and makes the narrative meaningful for the reader/listener. In between these two figurations lies configuration, or emplotment that synthesises the “heterogeneous elements” into a totality — most easily grasped in terms of the novel, more problematic when addressing ‘real’ life histories. In life history work, the narrator must grapple with all three mimetic registers at once: the knowledge of elements which might constitute a life story and an artist’s life story, the ability to gather together, to remember the “heterogeneous elements” of the life, and to make sense at the point of refiguration, rather than at the point of configuration which in the told life story is more a matter of bricolage. Consequently, in life narratives the subject “appears both as a reader and the writer of its own life” (Ricoeur, 1988, p.â•›246). The theory can also be extended, to encompass the layers of arts production and reception, not just the artwork-as-artist synthesis of narrative identity. All artworks embody the hidden narratives of their conception and making (which these interviews below draw out). Looking at, or rather ‘reading’ other’s artworks, is the refiguration that drives the creation of artworks as well as the re-creation and re-reading of artworks over time. Making an artwork is a process of configuration through the prefigured knowledge of arts practices, but its meaning (refiguration) is never stable but always alive to reinterpretation especially in the life stories. Furthermore, refiguration is also the process which leads to the conception and production of other, new, different objects/stories.5 These new objects nevertheless bear the characteristics of their makers but not their totality, which the stories either reinforce, or break up. As the following sections below suggest, narratives of affinities may be used to reinforce identity (of the work and the self), but they can also function to resist narrative completeness and to uphold the cultural distinction between words and things. Both artists work in the same medium (clay), and were fellow students at Camberwell College of Arts in the mid-1970s, a school with a distinguished history in the field of ceramic art but which also produced some notable ‘potters’ whose work does not claim the status of ‘art’ but leans towards the aesthetics of use most clearly propounded in Oriental ceramics seen as outdated, even reactionary, by the majority of the emerging generation of the 1970s and 1980s. However, as the first example below demonstrates not all students were prepared to reject functionalism. Complementing each other in time and place (and gender, though this is not my focus here) these two life histories 5.╇ I am grateful to Matti Hyvärinen for suggesting this line of inquiry.



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shed light on how the symbiosis of the artist/self and work as art/pottery/ceramic is unpacked in narrative.6

Towards Completeness The first extract is a segment within a life history, a turning point for the artist, Julian Stair7 as a student at the Royal College of Art in London who had been struggling to locate his position as a functional potter in opposition to the dominant abstract forms of expression not only of his fellow students, but of the ceramic art world in general (Harrod, 1999; Sandino, 2007). The story concerns a visit in the mid-1970s to the studio of an important figure in the world of ceramic art. The visit was, he says “really interesting”, a “great chance to meet Lucie Rie for the first time, to see her studio, to hear her talking about her pots”. These comments are the standard evaluation of such student trips. However, he goes on to describe “a kind of epiphany”, or “very strong insight” on seeing the work of another ceramic artist who was very much a figurehead to the abstractionists, a point emphasized in the story. Moving from the abstract of the story, and its orientation, Stair provides an evaluation of Hans Coper: “[He] broke with the notion of potmaking, and introduced the whole idea of collage and sculptural forms”; he was “a mentor behind all the RCA [Royal College of Art] graduates … who were in full swing at the time”, “but I realized that that wasn’t necessarily a simple kind of case as it was being portrayed” (JS Track 14/2006). The resolution of the story, is the description of seeing Coper’s work in Rie’s studio full of red tulips: In many ways it was an absolute reinforcement of the pot not just as a vessel, as a container, in a theoretical or abstract sense but literally as a practical container for flowers … You had wonderfully interesting forms which were incredibly, kind of resonant, and made references through to, to all, you know, to history, and to the beginnings of European art with the Cycladic forms in particular. But were terribly 6.╇ ‘Artist’ is used here to include all arts practice especially since both Radstone and Stair both attended art college, the principal means by which professional status is initially instituted. Other terms used can specify material specialisms e.g. ceramicisit, ceramic artist. Although there are other current terms such as ‘maker’ and ‘practitioner’, the interviewees refer to themselves as artists and only very occasionally as ceramcists, or ceramic artist, rarely if at all as practitioners or makers. This will be the subject of another paper. 7.╇ Julian Stair is a British ceramicist whose work is in many public collections. See http://www. julianstair.com As a former student of ceramics at Camberwell College of Arts, he has taken part in the viva oral history project http://www.vivavoices.org, at the University of the Arts London, Camberwell College of Art. All the interviews have been conducted by the author.

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modern and were still pots but were also formally incredibly interesting. So that was, was a mini-epiphany, if you like, to show that pots can actually have, can combine, if you like, all the kind of, the classic virtues but transposed into a modern and contemporary interpretation and still work in the domestic environment. So that, that was something that really has stayed with me ever since. (JS/Track 14/2006) (Emphasis added)

This emphatic account is an example of the refiguration that can occur for artists on seeing significant works which make a lasting impression but whose meaning is made manifest through configuration since the narrator is both author and interpreter. Despite the story’s resolution focusing on the meaning of the pot, for Stair Coper is reconfigured, or re-identified, able to “combine” “classic” and modern “virtues”. No longer outside the “full swing” of the time, the story functions to connect Stair to one of the key figures of ceramic history in which the distinction and hierarchy between the functional and domestic potter, and the art and abstractionist ceramic artist is critical. The conflicting dualism of function versus abstraction is resolved but more importantly the significance of the resolution is made manifest through refiguration without which it would have remained simply a mental image or memory. Narrative subverts the opposition between image and word, but not simply as an illustration or caption, but as the intersection where meaning is produced, here through the reconfiguration of the pot as both artwork and domestic object, and the ‘I’ as both functional potter and conceptual artist. As a young practitioner, unable to fully identify with the dominant ideology, yet aware of its cultural power, Stair uses this story of a “kind of epiphany” to mark the point that is able to bridge two seemingly opposing art historical categories, or, in Ricoeur’s terms, traits, which up until that point had functioned to threaten the artist’s identity as a maker of significant, contemporary work. The studio visit story presents the artist with an image (artwork as vase) that resolves the incomplete identity of a maker working in a traditional ceramic idiom but who felt himself to be part of the new, contemporary world of ceramic art practice. It may also be of some significance that at the time, its most successful, emerging practitioners were women. The impact of the visit as something that has “stayed with me ever since” becomes a defining trait of this artist’s work. Epiphanies, as Norman K. Denzin has noted, are “connected to moments of breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration or schism” ( 2001, p.â•›39). This studio visit story seems to fit in Denzin’s terms a “minor epiphany, which symbolically represents a major, problematic moment… in a person’s life” (1989, p.â•›71) which for Stair was about how to resolve the duality of art and utility. Denzin suggests that a major epiphany is one, which “which touches every fabric of a person’s life” (p.â•›71), and common sense might dictate that this studio visit cannot fit this description.



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However, at the end of the story, Stair states that the image of this resolution was “something that has stayed with me ever since”. Given the synthesis of self and work, it could be argued that this is, indeed, a major event, which has enabled the artist to conjoin an incomplete narrative identity of the object, into a coherent, anti-dualism where utility and art can meet. The studio visit story, therefore, is one example of how an incomplete narrative identity is refigured through an epiphanic encounter with an object and its maker. This story is particularly important in understanding how narrative identity is deployed by an artist to create coherence, in the face of the art world’s consistency in maintaining its binary oppositions.

Towards Incompleteness The second account by the ceramic artist Sara Radstone8 who is of the same generation as Stair, reinforces the concept of interactional refiguration, which intermingles the self, the other’s self, and the work. I draw here on more than one episode in the life story interview to demonstrate further how objects and the lives of other artists can confront and disrupt the narrative flow of artists’ samenessidentity. While the minor epiphany story above functioned to heal the schism, the transformational moments recounted below demonstrate the resistance to coherence in artists’ talk and yet shows how it is nevertheless revealed in narrative. If Stair’s story is evidence of the artist’s search for the coherent expression over time of idem-identity, Radstone’s account below demonstrates the tentative reflection of a narrative identity-in-process in which the narrative itself remains incomplete and partial as different ‘canonical characters’ appear in Radstone’s stories. The extract is from a section of the recording focusing on what drew her to the work of Eva Hesse, a question she counters by saying she will find it “hard to articulate precisely” but then continues by situating it historically, in the past, at a moment when she was “going through a phase of finding my work quite difficult” during the mid to late 1980s. The artist describes being “introduced” to Hesse’s work by a sculptor who suggested: “↜‘… you ought to look at this work’ and lent me a book, and I immediately felt quite sort of overwhelmingly drawn to the work that I could see, and reading a bit about her” (SR Track 19/2006). Hesse was therefore encountered through multiple sites through the work and her life in the text.

8.╇ Sara Radstone is a ceramic artist whose work is also represented in many public collections. See http://www.stubbs24.fsnet.co.uk/ She was a contemporary of Julian Stair at Camberwell College of Arts, and a contributor to the vivia oral history project http://www.vivavoices.org, at the University of the Arts London, Camberwell College of Art.

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In relation to the interpretation of reading literary texts, Ricoeur proposes three dimensions: referentiality, which is the mediation between the individual and the world, communicability as that between individuals, and self-understanding as that between an individual and him/herself (1991, p.â•›27). Ricoeur is adamant in his commitment to narrative as emplotment, or configuration, but artists’ accounts show how the reception of artworks and their producers are also subject to these three dimensions. As noted above, refiguration, the point at which the reader’s, or viewer’s world is brought to bear on the understanding of the text/ work, is embedded in these stories about Hesse and her works. Reading or viewing these is transformed “into a guide for reading, with its zones of indeterminacy, its latent wealth of interpretation, its power of being reinterpreted in new ways in new historical contexts” (p.â•›27). Continuing with her reflection as to what it was about Hesse’s work that engaged her so, the artist continues: I think, I think it’s slightly to do with a sense of still being tentative. That there was something about a lot of the work that she made that had evidence of struggling to get at something rather than any sense of “Right. This is resolved”. That was a very personal interpretation which may be completely wrong but the wonderful sense of the absurdity, in a way, of the objects, seemed to bring me back to questioning what, in a sense, I was trying to do in my work and what it was all about, I guess. (SR Track 19/2006). (Emphasis added)

The character of Hesse provides a plot with which Radstone is able to identify and to tell her own story. Although this is more commonly simply described as empathy, this term shuts down narrativity by focusing only on the emotion of empathy, rather than its narrative. Rather Hesse provides the artist with the opportunity to reconfigure her difficulties as an abstract artist, to move on from work that was at the time “a bit tight and contrived” (Track 19). More than just looking at Hesse’s work, and reading her writings, Radstone remembers being struck by …a particular sentence about trying to achieve a kind of non-form which struck a chord with me incredibly deeply even though on the surface it sounds like the opposite of what I’ve been trying to do, because my work was all about form and trying to get it right but it made me realize that actually there was something beyond that I was trying to do that I wanted to achieve which was about being right on the edge, and getting to something that was only just something, which I felt was what she was trying to do. And, about dipping into an imaginative and interior world that you can only do by really getting around the edge of things and being suggestive and not overt and work that’s very sort of physical and provokes a certain kind of, how can I describe it? A sort of very physical response, I suppose, in a particular way. (SR Track 19/2006) (Emphasis added)



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The reference to form is particularly important here because it marks the beginning of narrative incompleteness in that it begins to make manifest Radstone’s wish to escape the definitive, the categorical conclusiveness of form, the wish to get “something that was only just something”. It is also a compelling example of encountering sameness in difference: “the opposite of what I’ve been trying to do”, and the continual project that is art production. As a story of interaction of the world of the text with the world of the reader, this extract articulates how words and images mediate between art-as-thinking and art-as-practice. Out of this encounter, Radstone is able to pursue a visual and imaginative dialogue “lived in the mode of the imaginary” as Ricoeur so aptly describes it (1991, p.â•›27). The artist’s interest in Hesse is always in a position of creative interaction; it is not fixed and finite. Just as this interaction is maintained over time, the artist’s inter-subjective identification with Hesse as a female artist also continues over time. Reading Hesse’s autobiographical writings prompted this observation: And there might have been something about reading her writings a bit as well and knowing her troughs of insecurity that she went through, and it was reassuring to see the work and that sort of tremendous incredible ideas that were coming out of that lack of confidence very often as much as that sort of sureness I could see around in a lot of other artists… (SR Track 19/2006).

Although such “troughs of insecurity” are evident in male artist life histories (Freeman, 1993a; Mishler, 1999), in this story it becomes contrasted specifically with an aesthetic “of sureness” associated with the later work of Catalan artist Antonio Tapiès (which forms part of the earlier section in the recording describing the space of one of her studios). On being pressed to explain why her interest in Tapiès’ work had diminished, and despite not wanting to disparage him/his work, Radstone searches for the reason: I think I find his work a bit too studied, and a bit contrived now. I think its….oh, it’s hard to explain. Something about it that jars with me these days whenever I see it. I don’t feel it’s quite as true as I used to think it was, or… oh, it just seems… It’s hard to put into words, that feeling. I feel it’s a little bit mass-produced [laughs]. Not quite true to what it was… (SR Track 14/2006).

Interestingly what Ricoeur refers to as ‘aiming at the “good life” with and for others, in just institutions’ (1992, p.â•›172) is extended here into the arts not in terms of being avant-garde and original but as evidence of work that maintains its meaningfulness as art by not being mass-produced when that has not been Tapiès method, (unlike say, Andy Warhol whose tools and concepts drew on the means and meanings of mass-production and popular culture). The hackneyed phrase in life and art of the injunction to be ‘true to myself ’ is evidence of the intersection of idemidentity and ipse-identity since it articulates the moment at which the possibility

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of self as another or as the constant ‘I’ is pronounced. Hesse functions to articulate a becoming self, whereas Tapiès works are used to show the problem of an inauthentic artistic production.

Resisting Completeness As noted above it was the “incredible ideas” coming out of insecurity that was noteworthy, which led to the attempt to translate things into words by focusing on the impact of one particular work by Hesse titled ‘Hang Up’, described by Radstone as “one of the most incredible pieces of art I think that’s ever been made really. It’s just absolutely staggering… Through its incredible simplicity, it makes me feel that it sums up so much of what abstract art practice is about” (SR Track 19/2006). However, as she reiterates throughout this section: “It’s very hard to put into words”. Towards the end of the recording, in which the discussion about Hesse has turned briefly to the interest in archaeological books also kept in the studio, Radstone sums up the importance of seeing objects which “seem to have a profound meaning and reason for being” and remind her “that there’s a point to what I’m doing” (SR Track 19/2006). So, of course I ask “What is the point?”, a question which invites an examination of the ‘who’ Radstone is an artist, and what it means to make work with these particular traits (form-less abstraction). After some laughter, her reply is: Terrible question! I shouldn’t have said that. Oh. Well. I think what it always comes back to is trying to express things that don’t have a language, a spoken language, really. So really it can’t be put into words but trying to express a sense of existence, or a feeling, or just raise a question in an object. I’m always trying to make something that would just have a [pause] possibly make someone walking past it then stop and minute and look again, and think ‘What on earth is that?’ Or, enframe a little bit of space and give it a substance it didn’t have before. But it’s all too kind of tenuous to really put into words, somehow. But that point somehow keeps me going (SR Track 19/2006). (Emphasis added) I think it’s about trying to express a sense of a combination of extreme [pause] fragility, tentativeness, and yet a kind of, [pause] sort of stoic structure and strength at the same time. So the feeling that there’s a sort of element of existence that’s [pause] about, sort of around that somehow. [pause] A little, a little, there’s a little bit of space that’s surviving. Sounds mad. I mean whenever I try to put these things into words, it sounds completely bonkers (SR Track 19/2006). (Emphases added)

Phrases like “kind of ” or “sort of ” resurface continually in her description of her artworks. They signify the resistance to narrative completeness, paralleled by



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artwork that aims to just be, “to enframe a little bit of space”. Rather than deleting these terms of approximation, they are integral to the narrative in its articulation of an aesthetic of tentativeness. The fact that the artist sees this articulation as “mad” and “bonkers” sustains the division. In reflecting on the work as a text for self-understanding, coherence is resisted. This incompleteness is not, however, simply a desire to uphold the distinction between words and things, or that artworks resist language altogether. There is no hesitation or tentativeness in the description (the referential communicability) of ‘Hang Up’: it is composed of “a frame with a big bit of wire coming out of the frame looping down almost to the floor and then going back to the frame again”. The device of the frame as enframing is key in that it works as a form of visual configuration: I love the fact that it’s, the work is the frame, which is something that fascinates me. It fascinates me in terms of what ceramics is as well because you get, you know, you make a hollow ceramic object, it’s as if the object is the frame, in a strange sort of way, and the subject is inside and you can’t see it. I’ve always sort of had this feeling about it. So she’s made this frame, which is kind of wrapped. So in itself it’s a very kind of seductive object. There’s nothing as such inside it so it’s just framing space and calling into question the whole nature of art. And then by putting this eccentric wire thing coming out, it pushes that idea so much further because it makes the whole sculpture into that, you know, that frame is the sculpture. And it’s looping out into the room saying “Come on”, come into it, and bringing the whole space of the gallery, or wherever it is, around into it (SR Track 19/2006).

This above description is linked to actually seeing it for the first time at an exhibition rather than in a catalogue. As such it returns the artist to the experience of being there emphasized by the use of the historic present tense. However, it also indicates how artworks are constant even though their meanings may change. Narrative identity, it is argued, is the sense-making capacity of life histories (Eakin, 1999; Freeman, 1993b; McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2006; Plummer, 2001; Ricoeur, 1990, 1991) but as Radstone’s reflections on her work demonstrate, her sense-making is to resist it. While remembering other artists’ works, coherence is not avoided as she explains un-problematically her affinity with Hesse, and the diminished relevance of Tapiès. The narrative identity produced here at the intersection of idem and ipse-identity is one that adheres to an incompleteness through narrative, the constancy of sameness achieved by narrative breakdown. The story of the encounter with the work and personhood of Eva Hesse can be seen as enabling narrative; in talking about one (or several artists), who have appeared as characters in her life, Radstone produces a narrative identity of sameness and change. The Hesse story also functions as a relational story of narrative identity. It recounts the narrator’s sense of a consistent ‘good’ artistic identity

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demonstrating the conflation between self and work in which the self-as-artist is articulated as the self-as-other.

Towards a Conclusion Life stories, as the studio visit story demonstrates, are used to open up the congenital silence of objects in order to make sense of their meanings, not just to listeners but also to the artist-narrator. Makers of functional work can use language to expand the aesthetic dimension of their objects and resolve a conflicted identity. As they appear in the life stories, other artists/works perform an important work of referentiality whereby narrators are able to make sense of their place and their work by reference to another’s, achieved within the context of the life story where sense is made of the self and his/her actions through the configuration of episodic narratives which enable a form of temporal reflexivity absent from the Artist’s Statement or manifesto. Another outcome of these stories is that they provide a way of unpacking the linear projection of the idea of ‘influence’. Stories about others provide a communicative referentiality that situates the individual artist within a community that makes certain stories possible, one of which is about what it means to be an Artist and identified as such: it is not enough to ‘be’ one but to be recognized as one. Despite the historical and temporal gap between the narrators’ former selfhood and others, the latter are used to articulate a relatively fixed ‘folk’ concept of the artist as individualist. Folk psychology, as Bruner has argued is significant because it “mediates between the canonical world of culture and the more idiosyncratic world of beliefs, desires, and hopes” (1990, p.â•›52). This is the psychologist’s perspective on the changeable/unchangeable dialectic of ipse/idem identity. In talking about other artists, narrators demonstrate the interactivity of characters in their stories since, “Every character in a story of any complextity both acts and is acted upon” (Dauenhauer, 2005, p.â•›12). This differs slightly from explaining artists as part of their historical contexts, in that it focuses on how artists narrate interaction with artworks and artists to make sense of themselves and their work. Nor is it tantamount to reading the work through the causality of biographical incidents. Narrative is the means by which the works ‘live’ in stories (to appropriate Mallarmé) through the constitution of the artist’s ipse-identity, their narrative identity. These stories of encounters with others document the changes effected over time in self and artworks but are also stories of the I as ‘the same’ and the artist’s self experienced through, in, and as other. Ricoeur suggests that this dialectic, achieved in narrative, is how the self is ‘made’ through stories but it must be kept in mind that identity narratives are always subject to re-tellings, and re-visions



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thereby ensuring that identity narratives, like on-going life histories narratives are never final but ever, like art, in process. The trope of incompleteness is a fruitful addition to thinking through narrative identity in relation to the problematic of life history interviews, which can never be complete. They can only ‘stop’ or ‘pause’. Nor are the stories told within the overall history totally realized or final: “the story of a life continues to be refigured by all the truthful or fictive stories a subject tells about him or herself ” (Ricoeur, 1988, p.â•›246). Artists’ lives, bound up as they are with the lives of the work they produce, are situated in a network of other works, other artists, recounting a narrative identity where work and person are enmeshed with one another. Ricoeur’s thesis of the dual aspect of identity made up of constancy and change provides a way to unpack the ‘who?’ of artists’ life stories, the intersection of ipse and idem identity as it is recounted in the interview. The prefigured character of Artist is configured in the life story but is continually reconfigured through events, actions, and encounters with others and objects. Initially, my interest was in how stories about others functioned in artists’ life narratives as tales of identity. As Bruner, in another context has noted: ‘Achieving joint reference is achieving a kind of solidarity with someone’ (1986, p.â•›63). How these allegiances are narrated, I realized, was a function of the two-fold character of narrative identity, the dialectic of sameness and change proposed by Ricoeur. However, emplotment can never ‘complete’ narratives of the self which are broken up into the ‘fits and starts’ of description and reflection. The first example (Stair) confirmed a moment of coherence experienced in the minor epiphany of seeing another artist’s work. The second example (Radstone) demonstrated a resistance to completeness that in some sense can be seen as maintaining the distinction between art and language, but this only occurred in talk about her own work, not that of others. This, as I have proposed, is because the project of being an artist is always a work-in-progress.

References Andrews, M. (2007). Shaping history: Narratives of political change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Atkinson, P., & Silverman, D. (1997). Kundera’s Immortality: The interview society and the invention of the self. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(3), 304–325. Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dauenhauer, B. (2005, 3 October). Paul Ricoeur. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 30 May 2007, from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ricoeur/index.html#note-6 Denzin, N.K. (1989). Interpretive Biography. London: Sage.

102 Linda Sandino Denzin, N.K. (2001). Interpretive Interactionism (Applied Social Research Methods vol. 16) (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Eakin, P. J. (1999). How our lives become stories: Making selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Freeman, M. (1993a). Finding the muse: A sociopsychological inquiry into the conditions of artistic creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freeman, M. (1993b). Rewriting the self: History, memory, narrative. London: Routledge. Freeman, M. (2004). When the story’s over. In M. Andrews et al. (Eds.), The uses of narrative. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Harrod, T. (1999). The crafts in Britain in the 20th century. New Haven, CT: Published for The Bard Center for Graduate Studies by Yale University Press. McAdams, D. P., Josselson, R., & Lieblich, A. (Eds.). (2006). Identity and story: Creating self in narrative. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Mishler, E. G. (1999). Storylines: Craftartists’ narratives of identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plummer, K. (2001). Documents of life 2: An invitation to critical humanism. London: Sage. Reagan, C. E. (1996). Paul Ricoeur: His life and work. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1985). Time and narrative (K. McLoughlin & D. Pellauer, Trans. Vol. 1). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1988). Time and narrative (K. Blamey & D. Pellauer, Trans. Vol. 2). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1990). Time and narrative (K. Blamey & D. Pellauer, Trans. Vol. 3). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1991). Life in quest of narrative. In D. Wood (Ed.), On Paul Ricoeur (pp.â•›20–33). London: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. (1992). Oneself as another (K. Blamey, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sandino, L. (2007). Crafts for craft’s sake, 1973–1988. In J. Aynsley & K. Forde (Eds.), Design and the modern magazine (pp.â•›177–195). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Simms, K. (2003). Paul Ricoeur. London: Routledge.

Chapter 7

Breaking of self-narrative as a means of reorientation? Vilma Hänninen and Anja Koski-Jännes

University of Kuopio, Finland / University of Tampere, Finland

Autobiographical texts written by “ordinary people” usually relate the life of the author in a more or less linear, chronological order. In narrative psychology, a coherent self-narrative is often celebrated as psychologically “good”. We suggest that sometimes incoherence may be functional. The chapter focuses on a short autobiographical text written by a middle-aged female artist “Anna” about her attempts to quit drinking and smoking. Anna’s text does not proceed chronologically but mostly making loops backwards in time. No links of cause and effect are narratively constructed. The flow of narration is repeatedly broken by ironic remarks questioning the narrator’s ability to see her real motives. We suggest that the author’s intent is to create an anti-narrative which would help her find a personally convincing new self-narrative. Breaking the conventional narrative structure serves as a psychological means to leave the past behind and yet to avoid premature commitment to a new self-narrative. Keywords: narrative, autobiography, coherence, chronology, addiction, recovery

Introduction In the tradition of narrative psychology (e.g. Bruner, 1987; Crossley, 2000; Sarbin, 1986) it is customary to think that people have a natural or at least culturally pervasive tendency to mentally organize their life by construing it as a linear, temporally unfolding story in which they, as relatively unitary subjects, act as protagonists. By creating such a story of their life they also create their identity, thus this story can be called the self-narrative (see e.g. Bruner, 1987; Polkinghorne, 1988, pp.â•›105–107). The typical form of autobiography, a chronological rendition of the author-narrator-protagonist’s life can be seen as an expression of this tendency (e.g. Eakin, 1999, pp.â•›99–101). In recent years the idea that a temporal organization of experience is psychologically or ethically superior has, however, been questioned (Strawson, 2004), evoking lively discussion about the matter (Phelan, 2005;

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Battersby, 2006; Eakin 2006). The far ends of the debate are Eakin’s (1999, p.â•›124) suggestion that “narrative disorders and identity disorders go hand in hand” and Strawson’s (2004) “guess” that “the Narrative tendency to look for story or narrative coherence in one’s life is, in general, a gross hindrance to self-understanding”. While Strawson’s critique of narrative psychology can be seen as rather simplified, it should in our view be taken as a serious reminder that the unstoried forms of writing about one’s life deserve as full attention and respect as the storied ones. In the tradition of literary autobiography, the conventional form of chronological and linearly progressing rendition of one’s life has prevailed at least since the appearance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions in the 18th century (see Kosonen, 2000). Since the 1970s, however, some post-modernist authors have sought to break these conventions (e.g. Barthes, 1975; Kosonen, 2000). However, as Jens Brockmeier (2001) has noted, the “everyday forms of life accounts … are generally characterized by closed plots, a standardized repertoire of genres, and other common narrative structures.” This assertion corresponds to our experiences of reading autobiographical texts produced for research purposes. Researchers who want to study life narratives of “ordinary people” tend to seek relatively well-formed narratives as their data: they may select published autobiographical narratives, they may send out a writing request asking people to “write their story”, or ask their interviewees to tell the “story of their life”. And this is more or less what they usually obtain — at least in our experience. Sometimes it happens, however, that a research participant tells or writes about her life in a non-canonical form. A researcher who has set out to find well-formed narratives from the data is tempted to relegate a non-chronological text to the margins in presenting her results. When she, however, starts to analyze an autobiography that deviates from the typical characteristics of the genre she can, depending on her level of commitment to the canons of narrative psychology, either see it as indicating some kind of abnormality or as a reminder that it can, after all, be quite normal not to write, indeed not even to grasp one’s life, according to traditional narrative conventions. In narrative psychology, the self-narrative is seen as both a form of self-representation and an instrument of self-understanding (to use the expression of Eakin, 2006). According to our view, while the story a person tells about her life to others (the told narrative) usually more or less reflects the way in which she mentally organizes it for herself (the ‘inner’ or private narrative), these two ‘sides of the coin’ are, nevertheless, different (see Hänninen, 2004). The concept of inner narrative is adapted from Lev S. Vygotsky’s (Vygotsky, 1962, pp.â•›149–153) notion of ‘inner speech’ which he sees as developing on the basis of outer speech but still differing from it in terms of it’s mode of existence and its functions. Thus it is possible that a



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person with a fully coherent inner narrative may write about her life in an experimenting fashion, or a person with just a hazy idea about how her life has come to the current point may be able to tell about it in a superficially conventional way. So there’s no one-to-one relation between the narrative text to the author’s inner life (as e.g. Eakin, 1999, seems to suggest). In times of crisis and life change people often undergo narrative reorientation (e.g. Frank, 1995; Hänninen 2004). Writing about one’s life can be seen as an attempt to raise this process to a more conscious and controlled level. Incoherence of the written text at this point may reflect both the turmoil of the author’s inner life and her deliberate attempt to break the old narrative in order to make space for a new one. In this chapter we analyze an autobiographical text written in the context of alcohol treatment. The text under scrutiny deviates in many ways from the typical form of (lay) autobiographical text. Our aim is to understand the psychological functions of this deviation in the context of addiction and recovery. The background of our reflections in this chapter is our long-standing interest in problems related to addiction and recovery, and the role of narratives in the recovery process. Some years ago we studied the recovery stories of 51 media recruited people who had managed to quit their addictive behaviors and to maintain the change at least three years. In their (mostly written) accounts we discerned five more or less consistent story types: ‘AA story’, ‘personal growth story’, ‘love story’, ‘codependence story’ and ‘mastery story’. (Hänninen & Koski-Jännes, 1999.)1 Since their authors had maintained sobriety on the average for about ten years their stories reflected the solidified nature of their recovery. Typically they described events that had taken place before, during and after the addiction in the chronological order. A few stories deviated from this pattern, but these deviations were mostly stylistic. We concluded that forming a coherent story which explained the addiction and showed the way out could be seen as an essential part of the recovery process. This raised our interest in how these stories actually develop in the course of desistance from addiction and what is their role in the change process. In our next study we, therefore, tried to recruit people who had recently sought help for their dependence problems and who had maintained the change for less than six months (Hänninen & Koski-Jännes, 2004). The idea was to study how these still unfolding stories would differ from the finished ones we had studied previously. Writing requests were delivered in treatment units for addictive behaviors. Similarly to the previous study, the target persons were asked to write in the third person about their addiction and attempts to recover. During the fifteen months’ recruitment period we received only ten stories. This was in stark contrast 1.╇ About one fifth of the texts could not be fitted under any of these common story types and only a couple of them did not have any narrative structure, being just lists or short statements.

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to the previous study in which the volunteer participants’ response was immediate and enthusiastic. The difficulty of getting stories from people who were still in the initial phase of change seems to display the difficulty of writing a story that is under way and unfinished. The ten stories we got could be divided into two groups. In the ‘resolved stories’ the protagonist appeared as having found some kind of key to recovery, whereas the ‘unresolved stories’ were more incoherent and contradictory, without a clear plot or a sense of anticipated closure. The text we chose for closer scrutiny in this chapter is an extreme example of the latter group. The writer of this text was given the pseudonym Anna. As the focus of our interest mainly lies in the clinical uses of narratives we tend to read Anna’s essay not purely as a text but as an expression of a living person sitting somewhere at her desk trying to grasp her life. This means that we read the text intentionally (Abbott, 2002, pp.â•›95–97), trying to understand the actual person behind the textual “Anna”.

The author and her text Anna is a middle-aged female artist. She lives alone and has no children, but she has an intimate relationship with a man who lives elsewhere. Anna has suffered from both mental and physical illnesses and has had problems with both drinking and smoking. Two weeks prior to writing her story, she had sought help for her problems from an outpatient clinic for alcoholics. We’ll give Anna the opportunity to introduce herself and her style of writing by quoting the passage in which she mentions the social categories by which she can be described: She is an intellectual or what is she. Unemployed, an artist or rather an amateur, or perhaps a half-professional, or a jack-of all-trades in this field. Sick. Yes, and an alcoholic, a nicotinist, a slave… (Lines 26–28).

Anna’s text consists of fourteen tightly filled pages (670 lines). Although it includes references to events from her childhood up to the present, it is not a full life story but rather an autobiographical essay. The text consists of five types of passage. In addition to narration of events and descriptions of Anna’s immediate surroundings, there are commentaries on many levels, internal dialogues as well as reflections about her mental and physical state, work, and social relations in different phases of her life. Moreover, depictions of dreams and images take a considerable share of the text. The references to events cover only about 40% of the text. The narrative is fragmented by mixing different passage types as well as by continuously moving back and forth between different



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points of time. There seems to be neither a clear beginning nor a clear end to the story. The text remains ambivalent about the problems it set out to tackle with, while at the same time it leaves the reader with a sense of surprise and admiration due to its many astute observations about the author and the world around. From a purely literary point of view Anna’s essay reveals remarkable talent in verbal expression. It is full of poetic metaphors, intelligent comments about social life and evocative descriptions of her mental states. Thus its unconventionality is definitely not a result of the authors’ incompetence as a writer. However, the text does not display high ambition in essay writing either. In between the gems of thought the author describes her difficulties in writing and leaves the new starts visible. Punctuation marks or paragraph divisions are often neglected. The text gives the impression of not having been edited. Anna also wrote another, shorter text on our request two years later than the first one. We concentrate, however, on the main text.

Specific features of Anna’s writing In the following, we analyse the ways in which Anna’s text was unusual as a piece of autobiographical writing. Transparency. The first thing to be noted about Anna’s text is its transparency of writing process. Instead of leaving the frames of writing invisible, which is usual in lay autobiographies, Anna writes about them explicitly. She depicts the physical surroundings (her home) and the historical context (around 9/11, 2003) of her writing. She is also explicit about her idea of the addressees and the purposes of her writing. She tells that she’s writing to us as researchers, on our request, but also for herself, for the purpose of her own self-understanding. She asks herself what she wants “to tell the researchers who try to find ways to alleviate addiction, who want to find the essence of dependence?” (lines 174–175). Later on she tells that she “tries to find the plot of her life, the events that have shaped her to be what she is now” (lines 642–643) and notes that writing makes her realize things she hasn’t understood before. Multiple positions. One of the characteristic features of Anna’s text is that she moves between varying positions in relation to her life and to the text: between the hierarchical positions of a protagonist, a narrator and an author, between the immediacy of narration and distanced reflection, and between multiple same-level perspectives to her problems. By definition, in an autobiography the protagonist, the narrator and the author inhabit the same person (e.g. Eakin, 1999, p.â•›3). These modes form a hierarchy in the sense that the narrator is above the protagonist by being able to see the

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protagonist’s life from the point of view of the present; the author in turn is above the narrator. In Anna’s text these hierarchical positions are made explicitly visible: the text tells (in the third person) about Anna-the-protagonist as well as about Anna-the-narrator. Above those layers there is also a third layer, which Anna calls that of the “outside observer”. It could be seen as the position of the author. This third layer can be discerned, e.g., in the next two excerpts, in which Anna assumes the position from which she can criticize and evaluate what the narrator is saying. Let’s give Anna the opportunity to tell her story and let’s forgive her hesitation and untruthfulness. (lines 4–5) Anna, says the outside observer, how does this pertain to your dependence problem? You try to hide your problem in world encompassing musings… So, you are evading and playing pious! (lines 373–376)

In several passages Anna also tries to look at her problems from a distance by taking the role of a philosopher or a scientist and analyzing, for instance, the phenomenon of dependence: Dependence. To depend. To hang on… To be disconnected. To take hold of air. Is it rootlessness… I hang on alcohol. I take hold of something to avoid drowning, disappearing, being carried away by the winds. (177–183)

The diversity of different positions suggests that Anna wants to approach her life and dependencies from as many different angles as possible. We suggest that in this way she can keep her options open and avoid premature commitment to one interpretation of her life. This accords with the tradition of modernist autobiography, which “does not have as its goal an unbroken continuous story but an account in which the memories and anecdotes are left loose, without the seal of ultimate meaning and truth” (Kosonen 2000, 20.) Dialogue between inner voices. In addition to the multiple layers of Anna’s text, it is also at times populated by different same-level voices addressing, condemning and even haunting each other (Bakhtin, 1981; Bahtin, 1991). This is marked by her moving from the third person position to the first and second person positions. The dialogue is particularly apparent in the passage describing an episode after a drinking bout: Soon a week has passed. She has lain in bed and drunk cider. How much? Her eyes register the collection of bottles and astonishment roams in Anna’s eyes. She packs the bottles in a bag, lifts them to the corridor, away from her eyes. Pictures in the television glide without touching her awareness and pity, the overcoat of depression, jeers triumphantly: – “Was this really my life, did I end up here, in this room in loneliness no-one is my friend I don’t have anybody. My attempts have failed, I am a misfit why did



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mother kill herself why didn’t I take care of my father when he asked for it, I was selfish I kept to my unrealistic dream and wish yet I didn’t do anything even then.” – “You were not able to choose right things you did not keep your promises you failed your dream.” – “But I did try and I have done I have reached”. “You are no good, you will be nothing, look how the others do and strive, you are not able to do anything your pictures are nothing you pretend to be an artist yet you are nothing but a dilettante…” (Lines 60–74)

These conflicting voices of self-accusation and self-defense are a familiar feature of withdrawal symptoms. After a period of sobriety, however, Anna is able to stand back and assume a more analytic perspective on her dependence. Here she writes in the third person again: And Anna realizes that she always returns to these no good things to cling to, she returns to them when the frames of her life and security falter, when change appears as inevitable or if something more or less catastrophic happens in life. It’s her refuge. Her pause in thinking. (lines 190–193)

Distrust of language. During the last decades, social constructionist thinking in human sciences has emphasised the power of language to construct social reality. Although Anna does not mention being familiar with such discussions, she seems to be well aware of the constructive nature of words. She admits the usefulness of language by telling that “organizing her experience with the help of words” is a part of her recovery process. However, she also realizes that words and concepts are not innocent organizers of experience, but carry differing connotations and are valued differently. Anna is not happy with just any linguistic meanings imposed on non-linguistic reality. She emphasises the importance of the reality behind words that she sees as demanding authentic expression without escape to euphemisms. Words, concepts. What kind of images do they provoke? … Words are dead, roles, role costumes. (Lines 336–343) …it was better to talk about ‘suicide’, not about killing oneself… Killing and murder are equal to violence, but ‘suicide’ is English, it generates in mind some learned meaning, not an emotion-laden image of the event, it is clinical, neat. (Lines 326–332) This is her life. She lives and breathes regardless of concepts. Her life at this moment is sitting in this room and writing. (Lines 351–352)

Anna also criticizes the use of empty words, declarative speech that has no connection with actual deeds:

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Anna, Anna, you sat in pubs talking and talking. You wove a web of words around you, an imago for yourself. Those were your deeds, big words that flew in the air. (Lines 76–77)

Anna is well aware of the rhetorical and strategic uses of language; for example, she knows that she can use telling about her mother’s suicide as a means to elicit sympathy, interest or irritation: Sometimes she told about it in order to shock her acquaintances who lived in a rosy bourgeois dream …. She used it as her alibi, to gain sympathy. (Lines 326– 329)

At several points Anna criticizes the silencing of important and compelling issues that has taken place in her social milieu. Thus she also reminds the reader that in an autobiography there may also be significant gaps; consequently the most painful experiences may escape being told. Understanding the discrepancy between life as told and life as lived seems to make Anna suspicious: how can she know that the words she uses to tell about her life are accurate and honest, not misleading and deceptive? It is as if Anna wants to remind both the readers and herself that her life could also be told in a different way, and the meaning would then be different. Lack of chronology. The most prominent feature of the text is its lack of chronology; it does not proceed neatly from past to present, as most other stories we received. On the contrary, its event structure is totally broken. In spite of positioning herself in the physical and social world, the major part of her story dwells in the “timeless” internal universe of crisscrossing thoughts and memories. Why did she choose to write like this? Is it because of her conscious decision to write a “postmodern” text to us researchers, or was it rather an intuitive choice that reflects her relationship to her current life problems? To explore this issue we will lean on the distinction developed by Russian formalists between the material (Fabula) of the story and its form or plot (Suzhet). The material is what is readily available for the writer, such as the characters, the events and the relationships between people, whereas the form reflects the arrangement of this material with the laws of artistic construction. So when focusing on what happened we deal with the material of the story and when paying attention to how the story was told we focus on its form. The material relates to the form as colors to a painting, or notes to a melody. Lev S. Vygotsky (1971, pp.â•›145–146) used this distinction in analyzing Ivan Bunin’s short story “The Gentle Breath”. Later, the same distinction has been drawn between “story” and “narrative discourse” (Chatman, 1990; see also Brockmeier, 2001; Hyvärinen, 2008). In order to get a picture of what has happened to Anna during her life course in relation to how she tells about it, we follow Vygotsky’s example by juxtaposing



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the sequence of events (disposition scheme) with the order or form into which she organized this material in the text (composition scheme). Some of the scenes and events in Anna’s narrative are described at length; some are only mentioned in passing, as the line numbers in Table 1 show. Table╯1.╇ Disposition and composition schemes of Anna’s text Disposition Scheme (Fabula/Story)

Composition Scheme (Shuzet/Discourse)

1.╇childhood: parental discord, father’s drinking 2.╇mother’s suicide 3.╇abortion, separation from boyfriend 4.╇unsuccessful attempts to get into art schools 5.╇successful studies in an art school 6.╇rape 7.╇father’s death 8.╇moving to the current neighborhood 9.╇life in the corner pub, drinking 10.╇destructive relationship 11.╇1st abstinence 12.╇psychosis 13.╇separation from destr. relationship 14.╇two suicide attempts 15.╇new male partner 16.╇physical illness 17.╇2nd abstinence 18.╇gradual increase of drinking 19.╇growing dissatisfaction, disengagement 20.╇entering alcohol treatment 21.╇3rd abstinence 22.╇current situation

22.╇current situation (lines 7–22) 9.╇life in the corner pub (lines 40–52) 20.╇entering alcohol treatment (lines 98–99) 16.╇physical illness (lines 99–108) 11.╇1st abstinence (lines 113–123) 20.╇entering alcohol treatment (lines 125–129) 21.╇3rd abstinence (lines 125–129) 17.╇2nd abstinence (lines 196–199) 18.╇gradual increase of drinking (lines 199–205) 19.╇growing dissatisfaction, disengagement (lines 246–256) 20.╇entering alcohol treatment (lines 258) 11.╇1st abstinence (lines 270–275) 12.╇psychosis (lines 271–274) 5.╇successful studies in an art school (lines 275–276) 2.╇mother’s suicide (lines 314–335) 16.╇physical illness (lines 362–371) 8.╇moving to the current neighborhood (lines 420–427) 9.╇life in the corner pub (lines 420–427) 7.╇father’s death (lines 430) 4.╇unsuccessful attempts to get into art schools (lines 431) 6.╇rape (lines 431) 12.╇psychosis (lines 443–510) 10.╇destructive relationship (lines 512–529) 13.╇ending this relationship (lines 530–543) 14.╇two suicide attempts (lines 545–549) 15.╇new male partner (lines 595–603) 1.╇childhood: father’s drinking, parental discord (lines 607–620) 2.╇mother’s suicide (lines 625–630) 3.╇abortion, separation from boyfriend (lines 636–640)

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It was no easy task to reconstruct the order of Anna’s life events from her essay and we do not claim to have completely succeeded. This is not, however, essential. Even this level of precision is enough to illustrate certain features of her text. As can be seen from Table 1, the composition of Anna’s text is far from chronological. In fact, most of the events of her youth and childhood are told at the end of the text, while the beginning deals mostly with recent events. The composition does not, however, display a strictly reversed time order either. Her writing is highly elliptical, that is, many themes are taken up time and time after again. Telling of events is often cut by reflections and descriptions of the present moment (all of which are not shown in the table). What we have, then, is a text that starts from the present and then makes loops to earlier times. As the text proceeds, the loops reach ever more distant time points, as if the narrator were digging deeper and deeper into the past. In his analysis of Bunin’s short story, Vygotsky (1971, Chapter 7) claims that in a work of art the function of breaking the chronological order lies in the aesthetic effect achieved: while the essence of Bunin’s short story deals with “life’s troubles, or its turbid waters” and the events themselves are gloomy, due to the reversal of time the story leaves the reader with a totally different feeling of “liberation, lightness, the crystal transparency of life” — “a gentle breath” (pp.â•›153–54). In the same way we could say that Anna’s text tells mostly about sad and adverse, even severely traumatic events, but owing to the breakdown of chronological order and to the “resting places” provided by reflective passages, it does not feel as depressing as it might. Instead, it presents the events from a dreamlike distance. Maybe some of these devastating events are made bearable also for the author by this kind of distancing. Breaking the chronological order also means that the causal connections between events are not presented as fixed or known. In an ordinary narrative causal links are established just by telling that one event was followed by another (Abbot, 2002, pp.â•›37–40). In Anna’s text, the transitions between points of time are made by association, one memory bringing to mind another. Thus no strong connections of cause and effect are narratively constructed in her story. Instead, Anna openly ponders on the possible causes of, e.g., her falling into psychosis. This kind of explicit reflection does not make hidden causal claims in the way narrative implication does. The result is that in addition to finding it difficult to identify the exact order of events we also found it impossible to identify a plot in the presented sequence of events. Still another interpretation for the lack of chronology can be found if we look at the nature of events that are mentioned. The texts proceeds from more familiar and ordinary themes towards more sensitive, dramatic, and discriminating issues and events. Some of the most painful events, e.g. the death of Anna’s mother and



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being raped, which have taken place in Anna’s youth, are dealt with at the end of the text. In her second text she actually deals with her sexual trauma at length. It seems that writing her story has been to her like an expedition to the past, during which she has gathered courage to tackle ever more daunting memories. The reason she has started such an expedition is probably the psychodynamic idea that in order to get rid of her addictions she has to become aware of the basic problems from which the addiction has stemmed. As Anna had just started therapy before the writing process, this may reflect either the mode of her therapy or the way Anna expects it to proceed. Priority of inner over external reality. Jerome Bruner, referring to Greimas, makes the distinction between two essential elements of narrative: the landscape of action and landscape of consciousness (1987). Greimas has noted that in modern novels the landscape of consciousness has become more prominent; modern literature thus becomes “less ontological and more epistemological”. This means that the “hard-core reality” gives way to subjective perceptions, and the omniscient narrator disappears. All this is evident in Anna’s text. A major part of it does not tell about external life events but presents her reflections and observations of herself. The actual events are displayed almost as if they were only the background of her internal life, which is presented as far more essential. Anna’s inner reality is often depicted by making a metaphorical association between her mental life and her immediate material surroundings. The studio where she works is an important mirror of her self. It is full of unfinished paintings and drawings and sometimes also of empty bottles. In the beginning of the text it is told that Anna has just burnt a piece of decoration designed to welcome friends, because there’s no use for it anymore. Throughout the text Anna refers to her mental enemy, the “black devil”, which raises her anxiety, tortures her with accusations and ridicule, and tempts her to succumb to her unhealthy desires. This mental enemy is one among the central actants in the story. During this summer she realized that these two dependencies were one and the same thing. They were reflections of the same unknown devil, that which moves around and changes its form like a chameleon… (Lines 32–34)

Anna considers her conscious thoughts as unreliable. Instead, she regards her mental images and dreams as a solid ground for inner truth. They form the reality in which she trusts without hesitation or irony. She gives several vivid examples of how “her decisions have often been made by the help of a vision or a dream” (lines 438–439). For instance, just before seeking help for her problem drinking she saw a dream about a dark haired young man in a black racing car that came to take her with him — a modern version of “the ferry of Kharon” in her interpretation. In the

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car there was no room for her belongings — this made her realize that she had to leave her past behind. Moreover, Anna tells that in her current attempt to quit drinking she has been helped by her therapist’s advice to form herself a mental image of an empowering color which would help maintain her resolution to change. So, the important mental events are acts of intuition and imagery rather than conscious reasoning. The core contradiction: relationality vs. autonomy. The main themes of Anna’s text are her relations to other people and her relation to herself, and the tensions between these two poles. Anna’s social identity, sense of belonging to a well-established social category, is far from solid (see the first quote), and her relations with other people are ambivalent. The relational themes of the text include Anna’s relationships with her father and her previous and present male partner as well as with her circle of friends in the corner pub. She describes the relationship with her previous partner as destructive. Her new partner is depicted as loving and understanding, but also as keen on spending time in pubs rather than with Anna alone. Anna’s relationship to the pub life is increasingly ambivalent. For quite a while she was “fascinated with its open sociality (line 421)” and “felt at home with people like her, those ragged, excluded, good, and passionate people who can laugh and sing, and who struggle bravely for the diversity of their existence (lines 415–417)”. More recently, however, the discussions in the pub have started to feel empty and the solidarity as illusory. Previously she used to be an active participant in the discussions, but nowadays she feels like an outsider at the pub table. The main problem with the community is that it is difficult to participate in its activities without drinking. The problem is aggravated by the fact that Anna’s relation with her partner is tied with her relation to the pub community because going to the pub is one of the main common activities with him (lines 223–224). As to the self-related themes, there seems to be a mixture of confusion and resoluteness. While Anna depicts herself as torn by inner contradictions and even enigmatic forces of her psyche (like the “devil” described above), she also seems to be able to feel solid ground below her feet in her strong personal identity as a person who wants to create art. The need to create is something that gives her joy and resolution: “Anna’s strength came from her desire to draw, desire for a picture, that activity which she started in her thirties.” (Lines 260–261) Every time Anna mentions a dream or image as a guide for decision-making, these encourage her to follow her own autonomous way. The text seems to orbit around two goals or values: being related to others and being true to oneself. In Anna’s text these two goals seem to be mutually exclusive. By remaining in the drinking-based community life Anna feels she would risk her artistic creativity and even her physical health. On the other hand, by



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striving for a self-sufficient sober life she would risk her social self. Maybe also her mental health would be at risk since her psychosis started after a previous lengthy abstinence.

Discussion To sum up, it seems that Anna is ambivalent about describing her life in a storied form. She clearly states as her goal to “find the thread, find the shape of her path”. However, the text she actually writes is not a story with a clear shape or a path, but a series of expeditions into her current situation, her memories and her finely tuned inner life. She is obviously wary and hesitant about putting her life into words and to force it into the form of a conventional ‘beginning, middle and end’ type of narrative. Anna’s text shows the pieces of a puzzle but does not assemble them as a picture. The reader is left to wonder whether all the essential pieces are on the table. Using Brockmeier’s (2001) terminology, Anna seems to have started to collect the “autobiographeme”, or the elements from which the life story could be built, but as yet she has not even started to construct a story out of them. It is as if she refused to say anything like “that is the way my addictions developed and this is the way I could leave them behind”. Why did Anna choose to approach her life in this way? The possible interpretations can be roughly divided into those in which the peculiarity is seen to reside solely on the level of the told narrative (narrative text) and those which see the roots of its nonconformity to be on the level of Anna’s inner narrative. On the level of the told narrative, one possible interpretation of the unconventional features in Anna’s text is that she wanted to write in an artistic way, imitating the style of (post)modernist autobiography. However, as the context and purpose of writing was not literary but research- and therapy-related, we don’t believe that purely literary purposes would have directed her style of writing to this extent. Moreover, she does not refer to literary ambitions or even to reading literature. Thus we find this interpretation rather implausible. Another possibility is that she did not want to settle with easy solutions and conventions in her self-expression but wanted to convey to us the exactly apt expression of her lived experience. On the other hand, the characteristics of Anna’s text can be seen to reflect her striving towards a more authentic inner narrative. The search for self-understanding seems indeed to be the most prominent motive in Anna’s story. It is displayed by the emphasis on the inner experience rather than the external events of her life. However, not just any self-understanding seems to do for Anna: she seems to want to find a solid and authentic understanding which she could rely on. She does not

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make it easy for herself. This can be seen in how she constantly criticizes and questions her own ability to see or convey her real motives. In what follows, we will discuss different views about the psychological meaning of the incoherence and unconventional structure of Anna’s text and how it can be related to her inner narrative. From the position emphasizing the psychological necessity of a well-formed self-narrative, Anna’s story is simply deficient and reflects her disordered state of mind or the incoherence of her inner narrative. Indeed, taking into account that Anna had gone through a bout of psychosis some years ago, it can be that she generally doesn’t have a very stable sense of self. On the basis of this interpretation, it would seem advisable to help her to form a coherent and continuous story of her life and addictions. This view is supported by Anna’s explicit wish to find a story for herself. A second, opposite position can be derived from the thoughts of Galen Strawson (2004), who contends that not all people are inclined to think about their life in narrative terms, and that some people just are episodic in their thinking about their life. Thus they only have a collection of separate memories but not a linear narrative that connects them into a whole. Could this be true of Anna? Such an interpretation is indeed plausible, because Anna’s text shows that her memory operates on the basis of vivid images rather than on verbal storylines. According to “Strawsonian” interpretation, rendering her life in a story form would not help Anna. Rather on the contrary. What would help her more — and as she tells, has already done so — is externalizing her experiences by painting. According to a third, mediating point of view, the incoherence functions as a transitory phase which makes it possible to form a personally convincing story in a situation in which a profound reorientation is necessary. This kind of shuffling of one’s memories may serve as a necessary step in creating a fresh and authentic interpretation of the past and in avoiding premature consolidation of a new story. It could be claimed that even if the text does not tell a story, it can be seen to contain elements of at least three potential or rudimentary storylines, if ‘story’ is defined as a plot structure which connects a set of events in relation to a specific valued endpoint. These stories are the ‘relational story’, the ‘autonomy story’ and the ‘psychodynamic story’. All of them imply their own valued endpoints and their own, contradicting means for attaining them. The relational story sees connection with other people as the primary goal, which in Anna’s case means being immersed in the pub life. The autonomy story, on the other hand, sees artistic self-actualization as the ultimate goal, which Anna can only reach by disengaging herself from the drinking community. The third potential story line, the psychodynamic story, can be seen in Anna’s idea that to get rid of her dependencies she has to face the traumatic events of her past. This is what she is working on particularly in the



Chapter 7.╇ Breaking of self-narrative as a means of reorientation? 117

last part of her initial text, and it is even more evident in her second shorter writing in which she dealt in more detail with her childhood sexual trauma. Which of these potential storylines, if any, eventually will be enacted, remains to be seen. Brockmeier (2001) has noted that the plot of a life story can only be constructed retrospectively, from the point of view of its already visible telos. We would say that sometimes it suffices to have an anticipatory idea of what the telos could be like (e.g. the key to recovery). From the vantage point of the anticipated telos, the preceding events can be selected and connected as a story. But as long as there are rival endpoints, the construction of a story is not possible. From this perspective, the incoherence of the text may partly reflect the ongoing struggle between these different potential stories. Adopting the autonomy story would provide the most probable way out of addiction, whereas the relational story would maintain the status quo. From this perspective the psychodynamic idea that the traumas of the past should be faced before recovery is possible could be seen either as a defensive strategy against the demands of resolution or as a long term treatment plan. NeverÂ�theless, it postpones the decision till unknown future. Whatever the author’s reasons for the choices made in writing her essay, it seems to reflect her ambivalence about changing her use of psychoactive substances, which is highly typical of addictive behaviors (Orford, 2001): the person wants to get rid of the addictive habit and at the same time she wants to continue it. Research on addiction suggests that stable desistance cannot be reached until this motivational dilemma has been resolved (Miller & Rollnick, 2002). At this point we are reluctant to take a definite stance as regards whether a coherent and chronological understanding of one’s life is in general superior to a incoherent and fragmentary one. It may well be that many people can live their life without ever running into deep emotional contradictions that demand explanation and integration. Instead of arguing that a well-formed self-narrative is a psychological or moral necessity, we would like to argue for the pragmatic uses of such a selfnarrative in shattered or dissonant life situations which a person tries to resolve. On the grounds of our previous research and that of others we regard the recovery from severe substance dependence as a process which usually presupposes a change of values and adoption of convincing ideas of how recovery can be attained (Koski-Jännes, Jussila & Hänninen, 1998, pp.â•›159–162; McIntosh & McKeganey, 2000; Jakobson, 2001; Blomqvist, 2002). Leaving the past with addiction behind often involves coming to grips with the guilt and remorse associated with the former life style. These requirements can be met with a solid and coherent story that welds together the discrepant parts of one’s life. This does not mean that the story could not be revised when times change. On the contrary, the merit of the narrative perspective on identity is its openness to change and development along with the unfolding life.

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References Abbot, H. P. (2002). The Cambridge introduction to narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bahtin, M. (1991). Dostojevskin poetiikan ongelmia [Problems of Dostojevski’s poetics] Helsinki: Orient Express. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (M. Holquist (Ed.), C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Barthes, R. (1975). Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. New York, NY: Farrar. Battersby, J. (2006). Narrativity, self, and self-representation. Narrative, 14, 27–44. Brockmeier, J. (2001). From the end to the beginning: Retrospective teleology in autobiography. In J. Brockmeier & D. Carbaugh (Eds.), Narrative and identity: studies in autobiography, self and culture (pp.â•›247–280). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bruner, J. (1987). Life as narrative. Social Research, 45(1) 691–710. Blomqvist, J. (2002). Att sluta med narkotika med och utan behandling. [Quitting drug use without treatment] Stockholm, Sweden: FoU Rapport 2002:â•›2. Chatman, S. (1990). Coming to terms: The rhetoric of narrative in fiction and film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Crossley, M. (2000). Introducing narrative psychology: Self, trauma and the study of self. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Eakin, P.J. (1999). How our lives become stories. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Eakin, P. (2006). Narrative identity and narrative imperialism: A response to Galen Strawson and James Phelan. Narrative 14:2, 180–187. Frank, A. (1995). The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hyvärinen, M. (2008). “Life as narrative”. Partial Answers, 6(2), 261–277. Hänninen, V. (2004). A model of narrative circulation. Narrative Inquiry, 14, 69–85. Hänninen, V., & Koski-Jännes, A. (1999). Narratives of recovery from addictive behaviours. Addiction, 94(12), 1837–1848. Hänninen, V., & Koski-Jännes, A. (2004). Stories of attempts to recover from addiction. In P. Rosenqvist, J. Blomqvist, A. Koski-Jännes, P. Rosenqvist & L. Öjesjö (Eds.), Addiction and life course (pp.â•›231–246). Helsinki: NAD Publication No 44, Nordic Council for Alcohol and Drug Research. Jacobson, N. (2001). Experiencing recovery: A dimensional analysis of recovery narratives. Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal, 24(3), 248–256. Koski-Jännes, A., Jussila, A., & Hänninen, V. (1998). Miten riippuvuus voitetaan [How dependence is defeated]. Helsinki: Otava. Kosonen, P. (2000). Elämät sanoissa [Lives in words]. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto. McIntosh, J., & McKeganey, N. (2000). Addicts’ narratives of recovery from drug use: constructing a non-addict identity. Social Science & Medicine, 50, 1501–1510. Miller, W.R., & Rollnick, S. (2002). Motivational interviewing: Preparing people for change (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Orford, J. (2001). Excessive appetites (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Wiley & Sons. Phelan, J. (2005). Who’s here? Thoughts of narrative identity and narrative imperialism. Narrative, 13, 205–210. Polkinghorne, D. (1988). Narrative knowing and the human sciences. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.



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Sarbin, T. (1986). The narrative as a root metaphor for psychology. In T. Sarbin (Ed.), Narrative psychology: The storied nature of human conduct (pp.â•›3–21). New York, NY: Praeger. Strawson, G. (2004). Against narrativity. Ratio XVII, Dec., 428–452. Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1971). Psychology of Art. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Chapter 8

“There is no fear in my lexicon” vs. “You are not normal if you won’t be scared” A qualitative semiotic analysis of the ‘broken’ discourse of Israeli bus drivers who experienced terror attacks Alison Stern Perez, Yishai Tobin and Shifra Sagy Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, Israel

Bus drivers in Israel have coped with decades of stress, fear, and the constant threat of terror. This paper summarizes a qualitative analysis of the form and content of narratives told by Israeli bus drivers who directly experienced a terror attack. A preliminary discourse and semiotic analysis of a case study is presented here as representative of a ‘broken’ narrative, as reflected in what initially appear as internal contradictions in both form and content. The non-random distribution of personal pronouns is analyzed, and hypotheses are postulated regarding the meaning of the interviewee’s communicative strategies in telling his narrative and coping with his lived experience. In particular, the interviewee makes openly conflicted statements regarding his sense of fear and willingness to admit being scared, while using the first-person and both gendered second-person pronouns in a uniquely patterned manner that also reflects this ambivalence. A careful analysis of these seeming contradictions, inconsistencies, and ‘broken’ narrative patterns leads to the ultimate suggestion that certain messages in individual discourse can reveal the narrator’s feelings and attitudes about the surrounding hegemonic social discourse. In the case of Israeli bus drivers, this discourse facilitates a collective sense of obligation to act and cope resiliently, and discourages ‘less acceptable’ reactions.

Introduction Throughout recent decades, bus drivers in Israel have been exposed to a great deal of stress, primarily in the form of the constant threat of terror attack. This research explores the form and content of the discourse of Israeli bus drivers who directly experienced a terror attack while on duty, through qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews. The central research question investigates the nature and manifestation

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of the communicative strategies revealed in these narratives, as well as what these strategies reflect, represent, and suggest about both the individual experiential and larger social worlds of the interviewees. A single case study is presented here, and a number of exemplar texts are explored through the use of discourse analysis techniques from within a larger semiotic linguistic approach. This particular case was chosen because it exemplifies many of the discourse phenomena that emerged throughout the study and across participants. Each interviewee brought his own unique story and perspective, but this individual’s narratives seemed to reveal many of the phenomena often simultaneously, in what initially appeared as ambiguous and inconsistent discourse. As the issues were explored in more depth, we began to view this case as representative of a ‘broken’ narrative, reflected in a number of apparent internal contradictions in both form and content. In particular, the interviewee’s use of personal pronouns throughout the narrative — while initially seemingly arbitrary and ‘illogical’ — emerged through deeper analysis as not only following a pattern of non-random distribution, but also representative of specific, systematic communicative strategies. This paper discusses these strategies as the participant’s means of coping with the terror attack he experienced, and of making sense of his experiences, on both an individual and societal scale. The research rests on the fundamental assumption that language is not used randomly, and that narrative and communicative strategies can be analyzed to illuminate a number of facets of the narrator’s experience. In the present case, the conjunction of the systematic use of pronouns with certain narrative patterns may suggest a relationship between the narrator’s language use, his lived experience, and his perceptions of the larger hegemonic discourse surrounding him. Essentially, in this paper we present a ‘broken’ narrative and attempt to explore what makes it broken, the nature and manifestation of any patterns of ‘brokenness’, and the narrator’s attempt to cope with and perhaps repair the breaks in his narrative and perception of his experiences. This article will begin by introducing the participants and the interview method, followed by a glimpse into the context within which the research takes place; that is, the security situation in Israel, and where and how bus drivers exist in and cope with this daily reality. There will then be a brief discussion of the Modern Hebrew pronoun system, in order to allow a more comprehensive understanding of the linguistic phenomena explored in the narratives. This analytical framework will then be supplemented by a discussion of the particular qualitative discursive methodologies utilized in this analysis, and then the case study itself will be presented. There will be a short description of the interviewee and his background, followed by presentations of exemplar text sections within categories of the discursive patterns that emerged from the texts. Finally, we will discuss the



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relationship between the individual’s communicative strategies, coping processes, and attitudes about his experience, suggesting the possibility of both a shaping and reflection of the surrounding societal discourse and hegemonic narratives, particularly in relation to resilience and heroism.

The interviewees and the interview methodology Eight Israeli bus drivers who had experienced a terror attack were interviewed. All are male, Jewish, between the ages of 25 and 65, and of various marital statuses. All but one of the participants were recruited through the head psychologist and social worker at Egged Bus Company1 in Jerusalem. Participation in the study was voluntary and without compensation. The interviews took place between August 2005 and March 2007, which was a relatively calm period in Israel vis-à-vis busrelated terror attacks. In-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with each participant by the first author of this paper. The initial interview guide was informed by a number of ‘fact-finding’ meetings with Egged personnel, and included fourteen open-ended questions relating to the general topics under investigation (namely, identity, worldview, systems of meaning-making, cultural norms, and overall belief structures). The interviews began with a request for a brief life story (“Please tell me about yourself and your background”), included a request for a narrative of the terror attack(s) experienced, and involved additional probing depending on the level of depth of the main narrative. Interviews were conducted at the participants’ homes and were recorded using both cassette tape and MP3 recorders. Interviewees were requested to sign a consent form at the beginning of the interview, and then to fill out a short biographical questionnaire. All interviews were conducted, transcribed, and analyzed in Hebrew.

The context: Coping with terror attacks in Israel Terrorism, in one form or another, has been a pervasive component of society in both modern and pre-state Israel for over a century. The past two decades in particular, encompassing the first and second Intifadas (1987–1993 and 2000– 1.╇ This is the national bus carrier in Israel, and by far the most well known and prolific. While there is a very small number of other intracity and intercity carriers, Egged is the only company whose bus lines traverse the entire country. ‘Egged’ is considered to be essentially synonymous with bus travel in Israel.

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2004/5, respectively), have had a significant effect on the Israeli populace (Baum, 2004). The volume and scale of bombings2 have created a daily situation fraught with anxiety, and Israeli citizens’ stress levels have been found to be relatively high (Bleich, Gelkopf, & Solomon, 2003). Ongoing and unpredictable terror attacks, particularly those levelled at civilian populations, cause an all-encompassing sense of threat to individuals and to the society (Zeidner, 2005). Ayalon (2004) writes, “When airplanes, buses, and trains are targeted and when shops and restaurants are exploding, daily mobility can no longer be taken for granted. The threat is contagious — there is a lurking danger that any train or bus can become a death trap” (p.â•›176). Terror in Israel has been referred to as not only a personal challenge but a national and societal trauma, as it is experienced in a shared manner by many facets of the population (Nuttman-Shwartz, Lauer, & Offir, 2002). The demographic makeup and small size of the country also serve to create a sense of personal vulnerability with regard to terror attacks, even in the absence of “direct” involvement (Brody & Baum, 2007). For quite some time, therefore, Israeli civilians have been thrust into a position of having to cope with highly stressful events and their effects and literally build (or at least accept) this into the daily structure of their lives (Baum, 2004; Nuttman-Shwartz et al., 2002). As Baum (2004) has noted, “Despite the repeated deadly attacks on the civilian population, Israelis have gone on with their daily lives and routines with a determined, somewhat fatalistic, business-as-usual approach and no large scale panic” (pp.â•›395–396). Existing research suggests that even under this tremendous stress, the Israeli population as a whole is functioning well and coping fairly resiliently (Sharlin, Moin, & Yahav, 2006; Somer, Ruvio, Soref, & Sever, 2005; Zeidner, 2005). Indeed, the Israeli case provides a unique opportunity for the study of resilience and coping in the face of significant stress, and an examination of the forces within the society that help or hinder the efforts of its populace to be resilient (Sagy, 2002).

The context: Bus drivers in Israel Bus drivers occupy a particularly interesting position in Israeli society and in the context of this study. For one, most have generally served their compulsory threeyear period of military service, in addition to an average of 10–30 days per year on reserve duty. That most of the interviewees have served (in combat units) in 2.╇ The data varies widely, but a general consensus seems to indicate that there were 132 suicide bombings between October 2000 and April 2004, 85 which occurred within Israel “proper” between 2001 and 2003 (Kaplan, Mintz, Mishal, & Samban, 2005; Shalev, Tuval, Frenkiel-Fishman, Hadar, & Eth, 2006; Sharlin, Moin, & Yahav, 2006).



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the army during (multiple) war times is an important variable to be kept in mind, particularly given the “centrality of military matters” in Israel (Lomsky-Feder & Ben-Ari, 1999) and potentially lasting impact of these experiences. Bus drivers in Israel have also existed on the ‘front lines’ of both Intifadas. According to data from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 58 of a total of 165 (35%) suicide and other bombing attacks between 1994 and 2007 were on or directly involved buses, as opposed to 21 (13%) in restaurants and cafés.3 The participants appear acutely aware that buses seem to be associated in the public view with bombings, and that even the nearly complete decline in bus bombings in the past three years has not managed to obliterate this public perception. These two sides of the coin seem to present a dilemma for these bus drivers.4 While their job description officially refers only to safely transporting passengers to their destination, unofficially, bus drivers tend to feel a much greater degree of responsibility with regard to their jobs and their clientele. Because they spend the majority of their workday on their bus, and because many of them drive on the same routes for years and become familiar and even friendly with their ‘regular’ passengers, they come to view their bus as their home or as a personal possession; indeed, as an extension of their identity and their selves (Hyvärinen, personal communication, June 2007). Many also refer to a sense of personal responsibility, stemming from their perception of their bus also as their ‘territory’, which must be protected against all threat. This translates into a high level of alertness with regard to security, as well as personal decisions to add unofficial duties that are decidedly not part of their job description. Indeed, the bus drivers who were interviewed expressed that they often found themselves acting in multiple roles at once: driver, security guard, policeman, and even army commander.

The structure and meanings of the pronoun system in Modern Hebrew In addition to the discourse analysis techniques to be delineated below, the analytical framework of this research is the semiotic or sign-oriented linguistic ap3.╇ From “Suicide and other bombing attacks in Israel since the Declaration of Principles (Sept 1993)” [Electronic version]. Retrieved May 2007 from http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-%20Obstacle%20to%20Peace/Palestinian%20terror%20since%202000/Suicide%20 and%20Other%20Bombing%20Attacks%20in%20Israel%20Since. 4.╇ Because little is written or theorized about this specific population in Israel, it should be noted that much of this discussion comes from statements made by key personnel (both managerial and social service-oriented) within the Egged Bus Company organization, with whom I have conducted repeated ‘fact-finding’ interviews, as well as from the interviewed drivers themselves.

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proach (de Saussure, 1916/1983). The Modern Hebrew pronoun system can be understood in terms of its invariant meanings from within this approach: encoder (first-person), decoder (second-person), and other or outsider (third-person). While the first-person pronominal forms (‘I’ and ‘we’) are gender-neutral, the second- and third-person forms are inflected for both gender (masculine/feminine) and number (singular/plural). The masculine pronouns are the unmarked forms, as they can refer to either male or female objects, and are generally characterized by the base form, while feminine forms require additional suffixes. In addition to nouns and adjectives having gender and number morphology, all verbs are conjugated for person, number, and gender. As Tobin (2001) contends, “structurally speaking, gender (biological and grammatical) is almost always present at all levels of word and utterance formation in Modern Hebrew” (p.â•›192). This linguistic centrality of gender makes it crucial to pay attention to the structure and nature of pronoun use in spontaneous discourse — particularly if it emerges as unusual or unconventional, predominantly consistent or inconsistent, or apparently emotionally motivated in some manner. The first-person singular pronoun (‘ani’ in Hebrew; ‘I’ in English) signifies speaker/writer (generally, ‘encoder’), referring to ‘the one who speaks here and now’, and can be considered the most proximate and personal pronoun, as it is egocentred. It is unmarked for (that is, neutral to) gender, and is the most specific or ‘known’ pronoun, as its use leaves little ambiguity as to the identity or nature of the speaker. This form is used to relate to personalized events, actions, or states, and cannot represent a relation to anything or anyone but the encoder. As Pennebaker (2002) notes, “The use of 1st person singular (I, me, my)…provides insight into people’s social identity and ‘ownership’ of their speaking or writing topic” (p.â•›8). The second-person masculine singular (MS) pronoun (‘atah’ in Hebrew; ‘you’ in English) signifies the audience/listener/reader (generally, ‘decoder’), and is one of the most general and neutral pronouns. It has two functions in Modern Hebrew: 1) the traditional usage to address specific male decoders; and 2) a more generic, general, and impersonal usage corresponding roughly to the non-gendered, non-numbered ‘you’ in English.5 In the latter case, it functions as the unmarked form, customarily used in non-gendered discourse or relation to a non-specific subject (similar to, “When one works…” or “When you wake up…”). However, in Hebrew the MS ‘you’ is also used in discourse that does not necessarily call for the unmarked form. Indeed, feminists have reported on cases of two women using the 5.╇ In English, the second-person ‘you’ is unmarked for both number and gender (i.e., there is no difference between the masculine singular, feminine singular, masculine plural, and feminine plural forms), while in Hebrew, there are four distinct forms for the second-person ‘you’, each marked for both gender and number.



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MS ‘you’ with each other, even in such obviously gendered cases as, “When you (MS) are pregnant…” (Tobin, personal communication). Based on this type of usage, one might therefore hypothesize that the use of the MS ‘you’ serves to create a depersonalized or universalized sense of meaning, as the unmarked pronoun allows or creates a relation to ‘one’ or ‘everyperson’. The second-person feminine singular (FS) pronoun (‘at’ in Hebrew; ‘you’ in English) also signifies the decoder, and also has two functions: 1) to address specific female decoders; and 2) a generic and/or general manner of usage between two females or in all-female groups and specific or generic gendered (female) situations and contexts (i.e., one might hear “When you (FS) are pregnant…” only in this context). Because it is marked for gender and number, this form is customarily utilized only in person- or gender-specific discursive situations, and therefore the choice to use the FS ‘you’ (rather than the standard unmarked MS form) may create a sense of greater proximity and less neutrality toward the female addressee. In this sense, a male who uses the FS ‘you’ in speaking to a female about his own experiences may be showing a particular communicative strategy that may have certain implications with regard to his attitude toward what he is describing and/ or toward the particular female decoder. Only the most feminist-minded men and women in recent generations have begun a revolution of sorts, consciously utilizing the marked feminine plural rather than the unmarked masculine plural pronominal form in mixed groups with only a majority of women (rather than the conventional use, which is called for only in all-female groups) (Tobin, 2001).6 The gendered nature and frequent use of the Hebrew pronominal system requires constant choices with regard to gender and number in relation to both encoder and decoder. These choices are not random, and the meanings of and relationship between the pronouns may function as analytical ‘flags’, thus allowing a deeper analysis of the social discourse surrounding an individual or event. Certain patterns of pronoun choice may also reflect apparent contradictions, inconsistency, or ‘brokenness’ in the narrator’s discourse and/or narrative. Viewed from within a linguistic and discursive analytical perspective, the non-random distribution of pronouns within the texts exemplified here will be employed as both the source and the empirical support for the hypotheses offered.

6.╇ Tobin (personal communication) notes that this extreme ‘politicized’ and ideological use has not spread to the general Hebrew-speaking population and remains unusual and strangesounding to native (non-feminist) speakers.

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Central qualitative analytical questions The analytical approaches used here are largely abductive — that is, the hypotheses emerge from the data and the ‘field’ rather than from a pre-determined theory or perspective — and cluster around the basic idea that when individuals present their narratives to others, they do so for specific and internally ‘logical’ reasons. We tell what we tell, how we tell it, as a result of a complex interplay of personal, interactional, and contextual factors, and an understanding of these factors is critical to a comprehension of the phenomena in this study. This analysis relies heavily on Rosenthal’s (1993) key approach of constantly forming and testing hypotheses with regard to the texts, and guiding these hypotheses through the use of the following questions. First, is the biographer generating a narrative or is he being carried along by a narrative flow in his storytelling? Second, why is the autobiographer using this specific sort of text to present his experience or theme? And, third, in which details are the single experiences or themes presented and why? In essence, the purpose of this method is to continually question and analyse the content, form, manner, length, sequence, and even absences within the narrative being told throughout the interview. Keeping these fundamental analytical ‘building blocks’ in mind, the primary analytical dichotomy within the current analysis is that of ‘content versus form’, and thus the central questions regard what the interviewee says vs. how he says it. The basic analytical questions regarding content are the following: (1) How is the terror attack narrated by the interviewee?; (2) How does the interviewee describe his strategies of coping with daily fear and stress?; and (3) When, how, and why do certain societal issues emerge manifestly in the interviewee’s discourse, and what is the attendant meaning of these issues? The basic analytical questions regarding form are the following: (1) How is the narrative of the terror attack constructed (e.g., what is there vs. what is missing; is the narrative ordered chronologically vs. thematically; what is described in detail vs. what is absent)?; (2) Which grammatical or discursive patterns repeat throughout the interview, and what is the attendant meaning of these patterns?; and (3) How do central themes or issues express themselves ‘under the surface’ (i.e., how are they expressed latently in discourse form vs. as manifest content)? On the micro-level of the present analysis, the following five questions were considered at all stages throughout: (1) Why is this word or phrase used here, and not in other places?; (2) What is the meaning, both in this sentence and in the larger picture, of the usage of this word or phrase here?; (3) How else could this sentence be phrased, and how would the meaning change?; (4) Are there any patterns of usage of certain words or phrases?; and (5) What do these discursive techniques say about this individual, and about his perception of the society in which he lives?



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All of these analytical techniques and questions were used throughout the analysis, although some were relied upon more or less heavily at different junctures.

The case study: Description and analysis ‘Dani’, a native-born Israeli, was 29 years old and single at the time of the interview. He had served in the border patrol during his compulsory army service, and had been working as a bus driver in Jerusalem for six years. He experienced three separate terror attacks during this time: once when a man approached his bus while it was stationary and opened fire with an automatic weapon, wounding a number of passengers; once when he witnessed a bus in front of him explode from a bombing; and once when a single bullet was fired at his bus as he was driving. He also was involved in a traffic accident while he was on duty, which he described as the most traumatic of all of these incidents. He was working as a bus driver at the time of the interview, and proudly reported that he had never taken more than two days off from work. His interview lasted approximately two hours and was conducted in two parts, about a month apart.

Depersonalization and universalization All of the interviewees showed a tendency to depersonalize, generalize, universalize, and/or neutralize their statements at times, and did so by using the unmarked, second-person masculine singular (MS) pronoun ‘you’. Dani showed a particular propensity for making more generic statements, rather than those that could be tied uniquely to himself and his own experiences. For instance, when Dani was asked to compare the terror attacks he experienced with the traffic accident in which he was involved, he responded:

1 “Because it [a traffic accident] is something that you (MS), that is up to you (MS). 2 Here [in a terror attack], it isn’t up to you (MS). You (FS) understand? If you (MS) can 3 prevent it, so of course you (MS), you (MS) will have a little something on [your] 4 conscience. Understand (FS)? As long as it isn’t up to you (MS), so okay, what? What 5 can I do? It is fate. I didn’t kill the people on my bus. It is the terrorist killed them, not

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6 me. Understand (FS)?” (3:1445–1452)7,8

Rather than personalizing his statements (i.e., “If I could have prevented it, so of course I would have had a little something on my conscience”), Dani used the unmarked MS ‘you’, giving a sense of collectivity to his assertions, as if it is something that ‘we all’ would grapple with. Interestingly, he did shift to using ‘I’ in line 5 above, although he could have continued using the generic or generalizing language (i.e., “You (MS) didn’t kill the people on your (MS) bus”). It appears here that there are statements of which Dani is willing (and able) to claim ownership, while there are others of which he is not. Indeed, it may be easier for Dani to personalize statements related to his obvious lack of culpability for the terror attack, while it may be difficult for him to use personalized language regarding his own role in the traffic accident he was unable to prevent. It may thus be more comfortable for him to universalize the experience and bring his audience into it with him, through his language. When Dani discussed the terror attack and his perceptions of fear, he showed an even greater tendency to alternate between statements utilizing first- and second-person pronouns, as seen in this text section:

1 “I was afraid, I was afraid. But when it is/was9 over, you (MS) kind of say ‘My God, 2 what a,’ like, if it had been possible, I would have wanted to go back and do things 3 better, maybe to kill him too. You (FS) understand? I was afraid, and I won’t say that I 4 wasn’t afraid, I was sh-, shaking. There isn’t, I don’t have, what is it? A pers-, a

7.╇ The second-person masculine singular pronoun will be denoted here as ‘you (MS)’ and the second-person feminine singular pronoun will be denoted here as ‘you (FS)’. In addition, nouns, adjectives, verbs, and certain prepositions are inflected for number and gender in Hebrew, and will be indicated here accordingly. 8.╇ All italics are mine, and have been added to the texts to emphasize the noted linguistic phenomena. All other indications in the texts follow conventional transcribing rules: underlined text signifies that the interviewee was speaking in a louder voice relative to the rest of his interview; boldface signifies relatively emphatic speech; (numbers within parentheses) signify the amount of seconds that a particular pause in speech lasted; (notes within parentheses) are extra-linguistic or contextual clues; and [notes within brackets] are explanations for the reader with regard to potentially unclear phrases in the interviewee’s discourse. Use of English words is denoted by CAPITAL LETTERS. 9.╇ It is not possible to ascertain here whether Dani was using the past or present tense form of this verb.





Chapter 8.╇ “There is no fear in my lexicon” vs. “You are not normal if you won’t be scared” 131

5 terrorist is shooting at you (MS) from four meters away, you (MS) won’t be scared? You 6 (MS) are not normal if you (MS) won’t be scared. I screamed ‘Mama!’ and everything.” 7 (3:84–87)

His discourse here seems to expose confusion between the personalized and generalized experiences, as Dani’s phrase, “I was afraid”, is a clear reference to his own lived experience of the attack, after which he referred again to the unmarked, universal subject (“you (MS) kind of say…”). Directly after this, he returned to talking about what he would have liked to have done — a method he utilized repeatedly throughout his interview; namely, retreating to the ‘safety’ of assertions about what he could have done, after making ‘scary’ statements about what he did not do. Dani also qualified his statements about his own fear with a reference to the supposedly universal experience of fear in this type of situation, suggesting that the generic ‘you (MS)’ must be scared in this context (lines 5–6 above). Indeed, Dani demonstrated a great deal of ambivalence with regard to his own fear reactions. Overall, a number of hypotheses could be suggested for the grammatical and discursive methods used in the sections above, which, we contend, serve to create a depersonalized or universalized sense of meaning. One hypothesis regards the use of the masculine form of the ‘you’ pronoun as a generalizing or collectivizing technique. It may be Dani’s way of encouraging, helping, or even requesting his listeners to relate to him and his experiences. A second hypothesis is that Dani’s manner of explaining his attitudes and behaviour may reflect an attempt at normalization and legitimization; that is, to assert that what he did or did not do was normal and acceptable within his society. A final hypothesis suggests that the unmarked pronouns are utilized from within a rejection of ‘I’ statements, as a way to distance the meaning, and perhaps the experience itself, from the speaker. Dani may have been showing a desire to remove himself from his narratives, the situations within the narratives, or even the memories themselves.

Two degrees of separation Perhaps one of the most prominent linguistic tendencies exhibited by the interviewees was their patterned use of the second-person feminine singular (FS) pronoun. As previously mentioned, the FS form of this pronoun is customarily employed when directly addressing a female encoder (such as the interviewer) and/ or when making generalized statements usually reserved for contexts in which two females are talking to each other — and even then, it is widely socially acceptable and conventional to use the unmarked MS ‘you’ instead or interchangeably.

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Thus, it is all the more notable that the majority of the individuals interviewed — all men, most over the age of 40, and none having made a declaration of being a feminist — would make such frequent use of the FS ‘you’ to express many of their personal experiences in terror attacks. Interestingly, Dani did this much less than the other interviewees, but when he did, it was in sentences that were strikingly similar to those made by the others. In fact, across interviews, this form was most often utilized in statements involving the five senses. For instance, as Dani talked about the passengers on his bus who had been wounded, he said, “Because one of them took two bullets in his foot, and so much blood, God help us, you (FS) see the blood, you (FS) know the steps of the bus, trickle drip drip drip, like some kind of, stream, of water, of blood” (3:93–95). Later, Dani described his experience of witnessing a bus bombing, stating, “A second later you (FS) see his roof go up in flames in a boom, something like you (FS) never heard in your (FS) life” (3:233–234). Later in his interview, Dani told about going back to pick up his bag, which had been taken into the bus company’s custody when Dani was taken to the hospital:

1 “You (FS) see the bus, after I went to the [bus company] branch, because my bag was 2 still there, everything, they took my bag. Two weeks later, I, for no particular reason, am 3 getting my things organized, I see tons of glass [shards] inside the bag. Tons of glass. (4) 4 In the end, and you (FS) see the bus, God help us, it is full of holes, I am telling you, 5 God, I, really, I ow-, owe God my life. You (FS) understand? (3) A huge miracle, let’s 6 say that. A big miracle happened here, in my case, that I wasn’t hurt. There are some 7 who you (FS) know, were killed, PLEASE …” (3:115–119)

Here again appears the phrase, “you (FS) see,” twice in the exact same formulations (lines 1 and 4 above). Dani was willing to use an ‘I’ statement to describe seeing glass shards inside his bag (line 3 above), in addition to declaring that he, and no one else, owes God his life (line 5 above). But perhaps it is too painful for Dani to even utter the words describing his experience of seeing his bus after the attack. Indeed, there is a qualitative difference between the sentences, “You (FS) see the bus”, and “I see/saw the bus”. At the time of the interviews, I (the first author of this paper and the interviewer) actually felt that those who used this linguistic technique were attempting to pull me into their story, using any means at their disposal to make their statements more personal for me and thus, easier for me to connect



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with. It is also possible that this technique may signify the speakers’ attempt to educate me (their audience) about the experience, and/or share the experience with me, perhaps for the simple sake of connecting or perhaps as a way of helping me to better understand or identify with the speaker or situation. It is still unclear whether these discursive choices may be the interviewees’ way of educating me in a very personal way about their experience, or possibly an attempt to bring me into the experience with them. Their choice to use the marked second-person FS pronoun, personalized for me, does indeed stand as a stark contrast to the conventional pronoun use in this context. A likely hypothesis, therefore, is that the use of the FS ‘you’ here provides a second level of distancing between the encoder and decoder; in fact, a type of grammatical projection from the former onto the latter. It is also possible that the interviewees’ pronoun choice is in some way related to the activity or personal role they describe in their discourse. Generally speaking, they demonstrated much more difficulty in discussing the more passive experiences, such as looking, seeing, being (e.g., afraid or not afraid), hearing, and feeling, from their own personalized perspective. The prominent presence of the FS ‘you’ pronoun in many of the interviewees’ sensory or emotional statements seems to indicate the likelihood of an unconscious attachment of some special meaning to either the audience or the experience. This hypothesis will now be further explored by contrasting some of these statements with the appearance of the ‘I’ pronoun in the interviewees’ discourse and the attendant circumstances.

Ownership of the active or heroic role Another pattern throughout the interviewees’ discourse was their highly consistent tendency to use ‘I’ statements at points in their narratives at which they were particularly active or perhaps even ‘heroic’. Rarely were either the masculine or feminine forms of the second-person singular pronoun used on these occasions, and because of this degree of consistency we would suggest that there is an underlying message connected to the usage of the first-person singular pronoun, perhaps indicating the existence of a larger social discourse revolving around this message. Dani provided a particularly interesting case for the analysis of the use of the ‘I’ pronoun, as much of both the form and content of his discourse seemed preoccupied with his role in both the terror attacks and the traffic accident in which he was involved. Below is his narrative of the terror attack he experienced most directly, in which he describes in detail his own actions before and while the terrorist was shooting at his bus:

134 Alison Stern Perez, Yishai Tobin and Shifra Sagy



1 “I am driving, line 22, it was winter, February, rain. (1) Approach the bus stop, take on the 2 passengers, take, you (FS) know, [bus] passes, money (in Hebrew), MONEY. 3 Suddenly I see someone come to a standstill in front of the bus. (1) I do to him like ‘Go 4 past.’ (2) Because I want to put on the blinker and leave the bus stop. And then he winks, 5 winks his eye at me, does like this (winks at me), I do to him like ‘What?’, [he] takes out 6 the zipper, coat, takes out a rifle and ‘Brrrrrrrrr’ (sound of automatic weapon firing in 7 succession). And I, am I dreaming (in Hebrew)? I DREAM? What? What? 8 Straight away, like [they] taught me in the army, I bent down underneath the steering 9 wheel, I am small. The bullets passed me over my head, he fired in a burst, in automatic, 10 not single shots, ONE ONE, in a burst. I went down underneath, with the 11 steering wheel, and I started to drive. I wanted to run him over, but he got away. Now I 12 look, I see him pump full of bullets the, the people who were at the bus stop. (2) What did 13 I do, I got out of there, I went to the right towards [name of hospital], there was a hospital 14 nearby, I went off the route, my people were wounded,10 tons of blood on the bus. I said 15 ‘I have to get the bus out, otherwise he is tearing us apart,’ understand (FS)?” (3:66–75)

This entire narrative is told with only ‘I’ statements, and not a single use of secondperson pronouns of either gender (save for direct dialogue with me). Dani placed himself here as the central character, the actor within his narrative, thus creating a sense that he was present and active in this experience. He drives, puts on his blinker, bends and goes down, looks, sees, gets out, and goes off (the route) — all verbs that require one to be alive, conscious, and able to use his wits and strength. In addition to the form, the content of Dani’s narrative also contributes a great deal to the impression here of him as the ‘heroic’ actor of the story. Indeed, amidst all the chaos, he is able to think quickly enough to not only save his own life, but also to spring into action, extricate the bus and its passengers from the scene, and 10.╇ This phrase is particularly difficult to translate, as the construction in Hebrew is highly personalized, protective, and perhaps even military in nature — something that an army commander might say in reference to his unit, or a school teacher about his or her students.



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bring them to safety and to critical medical attention. The image presented here is of Dani as the hero and saviour of those in his charge. There is only a hint of remorse in Dani’s discourse, in his statement about what he had wanted to do (line 11 above), which notably also makes use of the ‘I’ pronoun. A combination of all three of the discourse phenomena discussed in this paper is apparent if we return to the larger narrative context of two of the quotations presented earlier from Dani’s interview, within his narrative of the terror attack that he witnessed:

1 “Again I am telling you (FS), luck. He, went through the traffic light which was turning 2 yellow, went left, like passed through the intersection, and I, God said to me, ‘Stay there. 3 Don’t need to take it [the light]. For what? So two more minutes, what is wrong with 4 that?’ A second later you (FS) see his roof rise up in the air in a boom, like you (FS) 5 never heard in your (FS) life. Immediately I understood that it is a bombing, I made a U6 turn, I escaped from that place. I escaped. You (FS) know what kind of a smell [there 7 was]? God help us. From the roof smoke was coming out. The roof of the back section 8 [of the accordion-style double bus] totally split into two. So you (FS) say luck? I believe 9 in luck, I believe in luck, I be-, no doubt about it. Luck is a separate part of me. 11 You 10 (MS) say that if I had stayed close to him, I also would have gone. Because that bombing 11 demolished his whole back section, that huge bus” (3:231–238).

Here, Dani made an immediate switch between the second-person FS and firstperson pronouns when the action and actor in the sentences shifted from relatively passive to active. This can be seen particularly prominently in lines 4–5, when the FS ‘you’ is used with the actions of seeing and hearing the effects of the bombing, giving a connotation of being acted upon or passively being exposed to these experiences. This contrasts with the subsequent two sentences, in which 11.╇ From the context of this statement, it seems likely that Dani may have said or meant “inseparable” or “integral” rather than “separate” here. Although the transcript reflects what was heard on the tape to the best ability of the transcriber, the original recording may not have been of a good enough quality to permit a correct hearing of this phrase.

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Dani utilized the ‘I’ pronoun in conjunction with understanding that a bombing had taken place, making the bus turn around, and escaping from the scene of the attack — all initiatives performed consciously and actively by Dani himself. We suggest that the interviewee’s use of the first-person singular pronoun may signify a willingness and capability to claim the subject of the statement as his own, which in turn may signify some level of acceptance of the described events and perhaps a belief that his audience would agree with this appraisal. Indeed, the majority of the interviewees appeared more comfortable claiming ownership (discursively) of an experience if it involved them playing an active role, or performing their duties in a manner perceived as heroic. Contrarily, more passive activities, such as sensory events (e.g., seeing, hearing, smelling) and the experiencing of the stressor, seemed to require a distancing from themselves or projection onto someone else in order to be made sense of or be accepted into their narrative at all. It is possible that these linguistic patterns reflect a message sent by the hegemonic discourse of Israeli society; namely, that it is not ‘acceptable’ to be affected by an event. Rather, perhaps one must actively affect the event itself — only then can the narrator/actor be proud of his actions, and be given the social opportunity or right to claim the experience as his own, both experientially and linguistically.

A return to the text to explore dual messages in both form and content The above analysis emerged directly from the interview transcript, as these discursive phenomena simply commanded attention, almost screaming that ‘something interesting’ was happening within and surrounding them. It took a great deal of time, however, to find the ‘missing link’ that would tie these various linguistic signs and discursive forms into a cohesive story explaining the larger picture. It was only after conducting a thorough analysis of the content of the following text section that we were able to understand the central message underlying Dani’s entire narrative, and perhaps those of the other interviewees. Although portions of it have been displayed and analysed above (with regard to the form of the texts), we present here the complete section directly from the transcript, as the interaction and the process of his story-telling (with regard to the content of the texts) is particularly relevant. The section began as Dani described some of his (self-defined “dangerous”) army experiences, after which I asked him how this period was for him, to which he responded: 1 D: Fine, challenging. A challenge. I like the dangers. I like them. You (FS) know. 2 They say that, masochist kind of, masochism, you (FS) know? I am like that. Like



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3 to put myself in danger, I, don’t know. In the attack that I had (2), OK we will get 4 back to the attack, I believe, so, uhh, I will just tell you (FS). If I had had a gun, I 5 would have gotten off [the bus]. And I wanted to get off, I wanted, like, when I got 6 the bus away from the shooting, from the gunfire, from the danger, I wanted to go 7 back to, to that place, because he kept shooting. 8 A: So — 9 D: I understood, and I was not afraid. 10 A: OK. Tell me about the first [terror attack], tell me from the beginning. 11 D: Whi-, from which attack? From the shooting attack, let’s (FS) put it like this. I am 12 driving, line 22, it was winter, February, rain. (1) Approach the bus stop, take on the 13 passengers, take, you (FS) know, [bus] passes, money (in Hebrew), MONEY. 14 Suddenly I see someone come to a standstill in front of the bus. (1) I do 15 to him like ‘Go past.’ (2) Because I want to put on the blinker and leave the bus 16 stop. And then he winks, winks his eye at me, does like this (winks at me), I do 17 to him like ‘What?’, [he] takes out the zipper, coat, takes out a rifle and ‘Brrrrrrrrr’ 18 (sound of automatic weapon firing in succession). And I, am I dreaming (in 19 Hebrew)? I DREAM? What? What? Straight away, like [they] taught 20 me in the army, I bent down underneath the steering wheel, I am small. The bullets 21 passed me over my head, he fired in a burst, in automatic, not single shots, ONE ONE, 22 in a burst. I went down underneath, with the steering wheel, and I 23 started to drive. I wanted to run him over, but he got away. Now I look, I see him 24 pump full of bullets the, the people who were at the bus stop. (2) What did I do, I 25 got out of there, I went to the right towards [name of hospital], there was a hospital 26 nearby, I went off the route, my people were wounded, tons of blood on the bus. I 27 said ‘I have to get the bus out, otherwise he is tearing us apart,’ understand (FS)? 28 And so, actually, I wanted to go back, like, that’s it, I saved the bus, now I want to

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29 go back to that place, like, how do they say? To see what is the condition of the 30 terrorist, to see if they killed him, didn’t kill him, what he is doing, maybe it is 31 possible to bring him under control. You (FS) understand? There is no fear in me, 32 I am not afraid. I didn’t go into shock, no nothing. You can ask [name of the 33 psychologist at the bus company]. They came, something like thirty reporters, 34 (she) says to me ‘Are you able to talk?’, I told her ‘Yes.’ And two days later I 35 went back to work. There is no fear in me, there is no fear in my lexicon, I don’t 36 have it. (2) 37 A: OK. 38 D: I am not afraid, I don’t know why, maybe I am not normal. 39 A: Really, in, during the [actual moment] — 40 D: I was afraid, I was afraid. But when it is/was over, you (MS) kind of say ‘My 41 God, what a,’ like, if it had been possible, I would have wanted to go back and do 42 things better, maybe to kill him too. You (FS) understand? 43 A: Um-hmm. 44 D: I was afraid, and I won’t say that I wasn’t afraid, I was sh-, shaking. There is no, 45 I don’t have, what is it? A pers-, a terrorist is shooting at you (MS) from four 46 meters away, you (MS) won’t be scared? You (MS) are not normal if you (MS) 47 won’t be scared. I screamed ‘Mama!’ and everything. But, (2) that’s it, how do 48 they say? God tests us. (3:57–88)

Dani began by referring to his enjoyment of the dangers and challenges of his army role, and his narrative was peppered with four separate declarations that he is and/ or was not afraid and that he has no fear, neither in himself nor in his “lexicon” (lines 9, 31–32, 35–36, and 38). At first, these assertions were emphatic, appearing to reflect a sense of pride in what Dani seems to view as a notable accomplishment. In lines 32–33, for instance, he elaborated that he experienced no traumatic effects as a result of the attack, and even assured me that I will receive a corroborating report if I check his statements with another source. In line 38, however, we see his ‘façade’ break slightly, as he questioned why he has/had no fear, and expressed uncertainty with regard to his normality. I scarcely said three words in response before he interjected, suddenly admitting readily that he was indeed afraid at the time (line 40).



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Immediately after this, however, Dani distanced himself discursively from what may have seemed a powerful and ‘scary’ statement to make, and then continued to alternate between statements about what he would have wanted to do (lines 41–42), and his actual feelings of fear and even the physiological manifestation of this reaction at the time (line 44). Interestingly, in lines 44–45, Dani appeared to make an attempt to repeat his contention that “there is no fear in me…I don’t have it” (lines 35–36), but was unable or unwilling to complete this statement. He followed this by once again retreating to the unmarked, universal and generic discursive technique (lines 45–47), finally imparting what we suggest is his summation statement: “You are not normal if you won’t be scared” (lines 46–47). There is clearly an emotionally charged and highly ambivalent ‘play’ with words and meanings in Dani’s discourse, particularly surrounding the issues of fear and normality. While at one juncture, he stated categorically that fear does not exist in his lexicon, only seconds later, he asserted not only that he was afraid, but that he “won’t say that [he] wasn’t afraid”. Meanwhile, he questioned whether he is normal because of his lack of fear, then admitted that he is afraid, and finally agreed that the universal ‘you’ is indeed not normal if [he] is not afraid. He appears to directly contradict statements he made mere sentences beforehand; and yet, there may indeed be an internal logic to Dani’s discourse. Perhaps what may appear to be contradictions are actually the signs of Dani attempting to make sense of his ambivalence and his own realizations that some of his statements may seem to be paradoxical. Indeed, there may be a process at work within the discourse — a gradual shift from unwillingness/inability to willingness/ability to admit to his fear reactions, and an attempt to accept his behaviour, particularly through the communicative strategies that may encourage collectivization and universalization. Indeed, returning to the initial section of the above text, we see a stark split between Dani’s earlier assertions and his summation statement. Before I had even mentioned the topic of terror attacks, and even coupled with an admission of his understanding that we will “get back” to this issue, he was unable to contain himself and thus presented the opening statement of his narrative of the attack: “If I had had a gun, I would have gotten off [the bus]” (read: to take care of the situation; lines 4–5). We suggest that this sentence is essentially the title of Dani’s narrative of this event, and his placement of it at this juncture may be his way of clarifying that this is, in his eyes, the most important facet of his story. Indeed, in this single unbroken section of text, Dani expressed in five different places and ways his feelings about what he wanted to do, wished he had done, and would have wanted to do if the circumstances had been different (lines 4–7, 23, 28–29, 30–31, and 41–42); notably, Dani’s ‘title sentence’ is followed by the most elaborated expression of this. It seems crucial for him to make his point unequivocally and early on in — or even as a prelude to — the narrative.

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It is actually Dani who seems unable to accept or make peace with his actions, and perceived lack thereof, during this event. This is particularly visible in lines 28–29, when his use of “that’s it” sends a stark message as to what he and/or his society expected of him in this context, and his sense that he did not live up to these expectations (i.e., ‘save the bus — done; kill the terrorist — not done’). In fact, all the interviewees made statements of this nature, revealing expressions of doubt, regret, guilt, and responsibility. Much of their discourse was peppered with the interjections, “I should have…”; “I would have…”; “I wanted to…”; or “I wish I had…”, as if they were apologizing for not being ‘heroic’ enough, or ‘man’ enough, or ‘Israeli’ enough. The drivers seem to feel a need to prove themselves as powerful, honourable, and ‘acceptable’ members of their society. We suggest that these feelings spill over into their work, as their discourse showed an almost overactive sense of obligation to protect and/or save their clientele, even under impossible circumstances.

Discussion This research has illuminated a number of findings with regard to the manners in which these bus drivers narrated their experiences, in particular, and in which the larger social discourse can influence the individual discourse of its members, in general. We have proposed here that the discursive choices — reflected in the form perhaps even more succinctly than in the manifest content — made by Dani in his narratives serve to express his feelings about himself, his bus and work, his society, and his sense of responsibility in relation to the terror events he experienced. Of course, one could suggest that the linguistic and discursive techniques highlighted in this paper are just common, ‘normal’, or simply ‘how people talk’, particularly in the context of narratives of stressful life events. This may or may not be the case; nonetheless, we contend that these discursive choices are not random and certainly not meaningless. Embedded within the moments and positions in which certain linguistic signs are used, there is a meaning, a message, a systematic nature, and a significance to both this usage and the surrounding context. With few exceptions, the discursive patterns that emerged throughout these interviews are the following: 1. The second-person masculine singular decoder (‘you’ (MS)) is frequently the subject of the sentence when: a. the experience described is distanced emotionally from the speaker, or the speaker is attempting to distance the experience from himself; and/or



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b. the speaker is describing an experience in which he was passive and/or being acted upon (particularly by the perpetrator of the terror attack). 2. The second-person feminine singular decoder (‘you’ (FS)) is frequently the subject of the sentence when: a. the speaker is describing something involving difficult/stressful sensory experiences (particularly relating to the effects or after-effects of the terror attack); and/or b. the speaker is describing something that he feels is particularly important for the (female) interviewer to know, understand, and/or experience. 3. The singular encoder (‘I’) is frequently the subject of the sentence when the speaker is describing an experience in which he was performing in an active and/or ‘heroic’ manner. In addition, if we go one step further and connect the linguistic patterns to the stated personal feelings and attitudes of the interviewees about their experiences and surrounding society, it may be possible to offer an explanation as to why the choices made and strategies utilized in the discourses occurred. We would therefore offer the following interpretive hypotheses: 1. The second-person masculine singular decoder (‘you’ (MS)) is frequently the subject of the sentence when the speaker is making an attempt to universalize, collectivize, and/or normalize the experience he is describing. 2. The second-person feminine singular decoder (‘you’ (FS)) is frequently the subject of the sentence when the speaker is making an attempt to connect personally with the (female) interviewer, in order to bring her into the experience (i.e., to learn about it, to understand and/or experience it with him, or to project it onto her and away from himself). 3. The gender-neutral singular encoder (‘I’) is frequently the subject of the sentence when the speaker feels comfortable with or even proud of some aspect of the experience described (particularly with regard to his behaviour), and/or is confident that the surrounding society would find his descriptions and actions ‘acceptable’. So what does all this mean? Why does this pattern emerge so consistently across multiple individuals, interviews, and contexts? What messages do these linguistic signs send, and what meanings are the interviewees attempting to impart through their discursive choices? According to a manuscript currently in process of publication by Gabriela Spector-Mersel, a type of narrative discourse entitled the narrative identity card offers the “representative version” of the given narrator’s self — an externalized, ideal identity created out of an attempt to self-represent according to social norms

142 Alison Stern Perez, Yishai Tobin and Shifra Sagy

of acceptability and belongingness. This type of narrative is characterized by a high degree of “cultural sensitivity”, reflecting close attention paid to the teller’s perception of what is allowed and what is frowned upon within his society and its hegemonic discourse. ‘Acceptable’ topics and themes, and manners of discussing them, are key ingredients of the narrative identity card, while ‘unacceptable’ issues are notable in their absence and surrounding silence. Spector-Mersel suggests that it is this type of narrative that presents the “key cultural plot or storyline”, and a deep analysis of these narratives can expose the greatest amount of information about the culture surrounding the interviewee. In this sense, Dani’s ‘broken’ narratives — filled with ambivalence and seeming contradictions — can be seen as a reflection of his feelings and attitudes about the hegemonic cultural discourse (particularly in relation to coping, heroism, and resilience) that surrounds him, and the conflict between these attitudes and his own individual feelings and resulting discourse. Viewed through this lens, Dani’s patterns of pronoun use fit with the hypotheses suggested here. He was barely willing to speak of the emotional effects of the terror attack, and spent most of his interview attempting to deny their existence. His use of the FS ‘you’ is relatively low, as he had no need or opportunity to attempt to bring me into his emotional or sensory experiences — as they simply do not exist (or so he wanted his audience to believe). Dani made a number of ‘I’ statements with regard to the actions he did perform, and indeed, although he also mentioned not being able to prevent the attack, he did think and act quickly during it, possibly preventing much greater injury to his passengers by evacuating the bus immediately to a nearby hospital. And yet, he repeatedly stated that he wished he could have done more, and would have done more if circumstances had permitted. Predictably, therefore, it is the unmarked MS ‘you’ that receives the most frequent usage in Dani’s discourse, which can be seen as a reflection of Dani’s efforts to ‘fit in’ with his society, to universalize his actions and the experience itself, and to present the argument that he is no better or worse than ‘the next guy’, who is “not normal if he [isn’t] afraid”. His ambivalence, however, lies in his desire to indeed be better than ‘the next guy’ — he wishes he had behaved more heroically, and he wishes he hadn’t been afraid. Indeed, the consistent message of his interview appears to be a presentation of his perception of ‘the ideal Israeli man’, and his attempts to prove that he fits the description. When I asked Dani how he defines the ‘Israeli man’, he responded:

1 “Israeli man? It is a person who copes. A person who experienced things, and needs 2 to give, needs to cope with them, things that are not nice, things, (1) difficult things,





Chapter 8.╇ “There is no fear in my lexicon” vs. “You are not normal if you won’t be scared” 143

3 let’s (FS) say army, and that, uhh, people don’t know. A man who needs to cope 4 with dangers and needs to give them solutions, let’s (FS) say it like that. Always 5 need to be vigilant/ready” (3:1315–1317).

He then expanded on these comments, discussing his country and its societal expectations:

1 “…One needs to be masculine in, in this country, in my opinion. Because it (FS) is a 2 country, it (MS) is a country, how will I explain this to you (FS)? (4) It (MS) is a 3 country that is like, inside in, don’t get offended (FS), I, men, courage, people that 4 are not afraid, people that are built, that their heart is strong, let’s (FS) say it like 5 that. Because if not, then it is difficult to live in this (FS) country, with everything 6 that happens” (3:1324–1329).

When I then asked him how Israeli society relates to someone who does not live up to these standards, after a brief pause he replied, “The society, pities him in my opinion” (3:1333). Herein lies the crux of the dilemma for Dani. He tries to admit that he wasn’t afraid, but must ultimately admit that he was, and then attempts to justify his own fear by protesting that everyone would react in the same way. But his deeply-held belief is the exact opposite: that a real Israeli man copes no matter what; deals with dangers by finding solutions and not by falling apart; is masculine, courageous, and unafraid. A real Israeli man’s heart is strong, and he is built to withstand all the difficulties involved with living in Israel. Anything less deserves pity, and is not worthy of any sense of pride or personal ownership. Indeed, we would hypothesize that if Dani had gone back to the scene of the terror attack and managed to kill the shooter, he would have felt more justified claiming ownership (as would be demonstrated in greater usage of the first-person singular pronoun) of more, if not all, of his experiences during and after the attack. Even if he had been emotionally affected by it, he might have been more willing to admit this because he would have already established himself as worthy of social praise.

144 Alison Stern Perez, Yishai Tobin and Shifra Sagy

Conclusion The present research highlights the intersection at which the discursive data from the texts shown above meet the larger societal discourse that informs, influences, and interacts with them. Indeed, we have attempted to demonstrate and explore the triangular interplay between the individual, the event he experienced, and his surrounding society, and how all three factors can affect and be affected by resilience within this context. Indeed, it must be asked: Does Israeli society support the individual in a crisis, or is it the other way around? Can societal expectations and demands encourage, or even force, the individual’s particular response to stress, and if so, how? The hegemonic social discourse surrounding these bus drivers is one that applauds heroism and (at best) disapproves of (and at worst, silences) anything less. Does Israeli society permit its members to be fearful, or upset, or anything other than warriors and heroes? Perhaps this is why these interviewees were so concerned with not having done ‘enough’ — that is, whether they acted heroically enough to be ‘allowed’ to take pride in their actions. What emerges, therefore, is an attestation to more than simply personal or individual resilience; rather, there appears to be a type of societal or collective resilience as well. For better or worse, these individuals feel compelled by their community and society to be strong, and the results of this pressure emerge through the ‘broken’ discourse of the interviewees, in the form of ambivalence and ‘word play’. They are able to claim experiences as their own only when they are or were acting ‘heroically’, and seem compelled to distance themselves from or project onto others statements about passive experiences such as fear and negative effects of stress. Indeed, it could be hypothesized that resilience in this societal context is uniquely collective; as if the passive experience of being ‘traumatized’ or ‘wounded’ cannot be taken on alone in this society, and must be connected in some way to another person, or to the collective. The constant attempts made by the interviewees to make their experiences sound universal, commonplace, and generic — essentially, the experiences of ‘everyperson’ — indeed seem to suggest a need to connect to their collective in some way. It could be possible that living through a terror attack such as a bombing is much more of a solitary experience than many other types of violent events or stressors (such as war or traffic accidents). Indeed, many of the individuals who were interviewed expressed a type of solitude and an isolation within their experiences, often manifested in statements such as, “You cannot imagine what it is”, “It is impossible to describe”, and “I cannot even begin to tell you…”. It may be this very isolation that leads these individuals to attempt to share and universalize their experiences, utilizing any methods available to them. Indeed, it is this constant interplay between the individual, the event, and the surrounding societal



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discourse that may be the essential ingredient in a particular type of resilience at work in this context, which allows these individuals — and this society — to cope well with a tremendous amount of fear, stress, and pain.

Acknowledgments I (the primary author, ASP) would like to thank my advisors, Professor Dan Bar-On (z”l), Professor Shifra Sagy, and Professor Yishai Tobin, for their dedicated, thoughtful, and tireless efforts to guide me through the doctoral research process. I would also like to express my gratitude to the bus drivers who agreed to be interviewed for this project, and to Yael Dover and Yael Ayalon, the psychologist and social worker (respectively) at Egged Bus Company in Jerusalem, for their professional support and cooperation in the participant recruitment process. Finally, I would like to thank the Kreitman Fellowship Foundation at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, since my acceptance as a Kreitman scholarship fellow is partly responsible for allowing this article to come to fruition.

References Ayalon, O. (2004). Children’s responses to terrorist attacks. In D. Knafo (Ed.), Living with terror, working with trauma: A clinician’s handbook (pp.â•›171–200). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Baum, N. (2004). Social work students cope with terror. Clinical Social Work Journal, 32(4), 395–413. Bleich, A., Gelkopf, M., & Solomon, Z. (2003). Exposure to terrorism, stress-related mental health symptoms, and coping behaviors among a nationally representative sample in Israel. JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, 290(5), 612–620. Brody, D., & Baum, N.L. (2007). Israeli kindergarten teachers cope with terror and war: Two implicit models of resilience. Curriculum Inquiry, 37(1), 9–31. de Saussure, F. (1916/1983). Course in general linguistics (C. Bally, & A. Sechehaye with A. Riedlinger (Eds.), annotated and trans R. Harris. London: Duckworth. Kaplan, E. H., Mintz, A., Mishal, S., & Samban, C. (2005). What happened to suicide bombings in Israel? Insights from a terror stock model. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 28(3), 225–235. Lomsky-Feder, E., & Ben-Ari, E. (1999). The military and militarism in Israeli society. Albany, NY: State University of New York (SUNY) Press. Nuttman-Shwartz, O., Lauer, E. K., & Offir, S. (2002). Group therapy with terror-injured persons in Israel: Societal impediments to successful working through. Group, 26(1), 49–59. Pennebaker, J.W. (2002). What our words can say about us: Toward a broader language psychology. Psychological Science Agenda, 15, 8–9. Rosenthal, G. (1993). Reconstruction of life stories: Principles of selection in generating stories for narrative biographical interviews. In R. Josselson & A. Lieblich (Eds.), The narrative study of lives, Vol. 1 (pp.â•›59–91). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

146 Alison Stern Perez, Yishai Tobin and Shifra Sagy Sagy, S. (2002). Moderating factors explaining stress reactions: Comparing chronic-withoutacute-stress and chronic-with-acute-stress situations. Journal of Psychology, 136(4), 407– 419. Shalev, A.Y., Tuval, R., Frenkiel-Fishman, S., Hadar, H., & Eth, S. (2006). Psychological responses to continuous terror: A study of two communities in Israel. American Journal of Psychiatry, 163(4), 667–673. Sharlin, S.A., Moin, V., & Yahav, R. (2006). When disaster becomes commonplace: Reaction of children and adolescents to prolonged terrorist attacks in Israel. Social Work in Health Care, 43(2/3), 95–114. Somer, E., Ruvio, A., Soref, E., & Sever, I. (2005). Terrorism, distress and coping: High versus low impact regions and direct versus indirect civilian exposure. Anxiety, Stress & Coping, 18(3), 165–182. Spector-Mersel, G. (manuscript). Manganonei brirah b’taanah shel zehut sipurit: Model l’nituach narrativim (Choice mechanisms in the claiming of narrative identity: A model for narrative analysis). Tobin, Y. (2001). Gender switch in modern Hebrew. In M. Hellinger & H. Bubmann (Eds.), Gender across languages: The linguistic representation of women and men, Volume I (Published as Vol. 9 of the series Impact: Studies in Language and Society) (pp.â•›176–198). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Zeidner, M. (2005). Contextual and personal predictors of adaptive outcomes under terror attack: The case of Israeli adolescents. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 34(5), 459–470.

Chapter 9

Beyond narrative The shape of traumatic testimony Molly Andrews

University of East London, UK

This chapter will explore the limits and possibilities of narratives in which individuals turn to language to communicate the inexpressibility of experiences they have endured. The central dilemma for many survivors of trauma is that they must tell their stories, and yet their stories cannot be told. Traumatic experiences often defy understanding. Testimony of those who have survived can be marked by what is not there: coherence, structure, meaning, comprehensibility. The actual emplotment of trauma testimony into conventional narrative configurations — contained in time- transforms them into something which they are not: experiences which are endowed with a particular wholeness, which occurred in the past, and which have now ended. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relationship between language and silence in traumatic testimony.

Abraham Lewin’s diary, posthumously published as Cups of Tears, documents daily life in the Warsaw Ghetto. In these pages, he reflects on both the impossibility and the necessity of expressing his thoughts and feelings. For instance, he describes the day his wife, along with many others, was taken away to Treblinka: ‘Eclipse of the sun, universal blackness. My Luba was taken away.’ He is a committed diarist who, nonetheless, doubts what is to be gained by capturing in words the horror which surrounds him. But perhaps because the disaster is so great there is nothing to be gained by expressing in words everything that we feel. Only if we were capable of tearing out by the force of our pent-up anguish the greatest of all mountains, a Mount Everest, and with all our hatred and strength hurling it down on the heads of the German murderers of our young and old — this would be the only fitting reaction on our part. Words are beyond us now. Our hearts are empty and made of stone.  (Cited in Wieviorka, 1994, pp.â•›24–25).

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Commenting on this passage, Annette Wieviorka writes: ‘The victims are certainly beyond words, and yet, dispossessed of everything, words are all they have left. Words which will be the sole trace of an existence conceived not as that of an individual but as that of a people.’ (Wierviorka, 1994, p.â•›25). This article concerns itself generally with trauma testimony and the narrative challenges it poses, as individuals like Lewin turn to language to communicate the inexpressibility of experiences they have endured. However, it is important to note that each trauma — while sharing some characteristics with other trauma events — is unique, both in terms of the ways in which individuals experience them, but also, critically, as historical events. In using examples from the Holocaust, South Africa, the Naxalbari movement in Bengal, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in this paper, I wish to highlight certain features of traumatic testimonies, while at the same time respecting the important differences between these ‘limit events.’ Geoffrey Hartman speaks of the injunction felt by many survivors of trauma, sometimes following decades of silence: ‘Thou shalt tell.’ (1996, p.â•›13). But tell what, and to whom? Who, who was not there, will understand that ultimately the experiences defy understanding? Despite their deep and lingering anguish, many survivors of trauma do feel compelled to tell their stories, not because they believe that in so doing they will experience relief, but rather because not to do so is to betray those who cannot do so. Their words testify to the very existence of a people. In Elie Wiesel’s words: ‘If someone else could have written my stories, I would not have written them. I have written them in order to testify. My role is the role of the witness. Not to tell, or to tell another story, is… to commit perjury.’ (quoted in Felman, 1994, p.â•›90). The central dilemma for many survivors of trauma is that they must tell their stories, and yet their stories cannot be told. The experiences which they have endured defy understanding; the very act of rendering them into narrative form lends them a coherence which they do not have. Isak Dinesen is quoted as saying that any burden is bearable if it can be put into a story; but perhaps the psychological reality is more complicated this. For some survivors of trauma, transforming an event which is wholly absent of meaning into a story form might be to lose ‘the force of its affront to understanding’ (Caruth, cited in Edkins, 2003, p.â•›41). In this article, I will argue that oftentimes survivors of trauma articulate their experiences in ways in which we who are ‘outside’ are unable to accept, and so we begin a project to redeem the stories which we are told. This reshaping of blank spaces is carried out in a number of ways, which I will crudely outline here. The journey of redemption begins even before the transmission of the story, when we tell ourselves that the process of telling will itself be a healing one — a journey from suffering to recovery. We encourage a traditional emplotment — what happened where, and when, to whom, and what followed after this — and even when this is not offered, we reorganise what we have heard to fit such a mould. We regard those



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who tell us their stories as somehow special, often over-identifying with them (and thus appropriating their subject position as our own), while at the same time presenting them as heroes. We are prone to over-interpret both what we are told and what we are not told. And we refuse to accept that we can neither understand nor represent that which has been told to us; that in many ways the experiences themselves are not capable of being understood nor represented.

Healing: Personal pain and social suffering I have written elsewhere (Andrews, 2007) about the ‘myth of healing’ which researchers often use to soothe our worries about the potentially detrimental effects of the work which we undertake, particularly with vulnerable and/or wounded others. Building upon the cornerstone of western psychology, we argue that it is not only good for scholarly purposes that those who have endured suffering should talk about it. Yes, it is important to document their experiences — for historical and/or scholarly purposes — but it is also good, we persuade ourselves, for them to talk to others (which may or may not include us). This overly simplistic model has come under criticism from a number of different angles, two of which I will address here: (1) this misconstrues the boundaries of the scholarly project; (2) this conflates individual pain and the suffering of the community. South African oral historian Sean Field has argued that ‘oral historians should not cast themselves as “healers” … Oral history will neither heal nor cure but offers subtle support to interviewees’ efforts to recompose their sense of self and regenerate agency” (Field, 2006, p.â•›31). There has been much discussion of the potential healing effects of giving testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (see, for instance, the account of Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, one of the commissioners of the TRC, in Van de Merwe & Gobodo-Madikizela, 2007); however, many of the witnesses who did come before the commission did not have this experience, and some even underwent a retraumatisation. However, there is no evidence to suggest that the majority of people agreed to give testimony in order to unburden themselves. While this may have been a motivation for some, there were other concrete and practical reasons to testify, including the perceived possibility of reparations for loss, acquiring new information about the fate of absent loved ones, and contributing to the larger project of rebuilding the broken nation. Even those who were retraumatised by giving testimony did not necessarily regret their decision to participate, as their contribution may have achieved other ends, at the same time that it caused them anguish. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not established as a mechanism for providing individual therapy, nor could it perform that function in any

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systematic way. While some of the rhetoric surrounding the commission implied that personal suffering was likely to decrease as a result of providing testimony, indeed this was not part of its mandate. Rather, the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, which established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, refers to the desired goal of the ‘restoration of human and civil dignity’ (cited in Field, 2006, p.â•›32). Critically, the restoration of civil dignity and the promise of personal healing are different, and possibly at times conflicting, pursuits. Politically, the TRC was established as a forum for reconciling the factions of a radically divided country. This was its function. The healing, if there was to be any, was for the country, not for the individual. But this distinction was not always clear. Thus, while the TRC banner which was in full view for much of the time stated: ‘The TRC: Healing the Nation’ Desmond Tutu voiced a slightly different message at the first victim hearing: We pray that all those people who have been injured in either body or spirit may receive healing through the work of this commission… We are charged to unearth the truth about our dark past. To lay the ghosts of that past, so that they will not return to haunt us and that we will hereby contribute to the healing of a traumatized and wounded people. For all of us in South Africa are a wounded people. (cited in Field, 2006, p.â•›32).

The country needs to be healed, and it requires the participation of its people in order to ‘unearth the truth’ in order to ‘lay the ghosts of the past.’ In Tutu’s statement, there is an assumed compatibility between the dual goals of realising individual and communal healing. However, in her work on the Naxalbari movement in Bengal, Srila Roy has argued that personal pain, when articulated in public testimony, is transformed into ‘social suffering’; the individual becomes emblematic of individuals of a kind, and the particularities of their story — the aspects which make it their story — are lost. In the transformation of personal pain into social suffering, the witness is transposed from one that embodies personal trauma to a metaphor of collective violence and suffering……personal pain can be silenced in the transformation into collective suffering. …the very structure of testimony, as a genre, conditions the public articulation of pain in ways that seriously compromise a representation of the individual subject in pain. … the act of testimony gives voice to the silence of pain in the public domain, it forecloses the possibility of listening to and of acknowledging personal pain…. Testimony is, in the final instance, a speech act that draws its meaning from a collective, plural ‘us’ rather than the ‘I’ who is in pain. (Roy, 2006, p.â•›10).

Roy’s argument, and one which seems to be upheld by many in South Africa, is that testifying in public about private pain might ultimately lead to a silencing of



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the individual sufferer, even at the same time that it might serve to further other, desirable ends, such as establishing a common ground of truth for the rebuilding of shattered communities. Jean Améry is one of several well-known writers who survived the Holocaust, only to take his own life years later.1 Before his death, he recorded feeling little comfort from the years which separated him from Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, where he had been an inmate: ‘No remembering has become a mere memory… Nothing has healed… Where is it decreed that enlightenment must be free of emotion?’ (cited in Hartman, 1996, p.â•›137). Time does not heal all wounds; indeed, on the contrary, as Lawrence Langer warns ‘we must learn to suspect the effect as well as the intent of bracing pieties like “redeeming” and “salvation” when they are used to shape our understanding of the ordeal of former victims of Nazi oppression’ (Langer, 1991, p.â•›2). While time and narrative are always intricately bound to one another — and if, what and how trauma is narrated will be influenced in part by the distance of time from the event — time alone neither creates nor erases the narrative impulse of trauma survivors.

Life and narrative Jerome Bruner argues that narrative is the only means we have for describing ‘lived time’. “[A]rt imitates life… life imitates art. Narrative imitates life, life imitates narrative” (1987, pp.â•›12–13). Narratives structure our experience, and they are the means by which we organize our memories. It has become commonplace to say that we are the stories we tell, indeed the stories we live. Our stories are our identity, and without them, we lose our compass. There is considerable debate amongst narrative scholars regarding to what extent narrative is an inherent quality of human experience. Is life, as Roland Barthes famously contends, just ‘scrambled messages’ (communications brouillées) (cited in Carr, 1986, p.â•›14)? Or rather, does life itself, in the words of Paul Ricoeur ‘demand narrative’ (1991, p.â•›29)? Ricoeur argues that there is a ‘pre-narrative quality 1.╇ Included in this group are such renowned figures as the Romanian-French poet Paul Celan, the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski, and the Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi (though whether or not Levi’s death was accidental is still debated). When Levi heard of Améry’s suicide in 1978, he commented that the latter’s last book on the death camps should be seen as “as the bitterest of suicide notes” (Gambetta, 1999,). When Levi’s close friend, Ferdinando Camon, heard the news of Levi’s own death (in 1987), he commented “This suicide must be backdated to 1945. It did not happen then because Primo wanted (and had to) write. Now, having completed his work (The Drowned and the Saved was the end of the cycle) he could kill himself. And he did” (Gambetta, 1999).

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of human experience’, and it is because of this that we can speak of life as ‘a story in its nascent form…an activity and a passion in search of a narrative’ (Ricoeur, 1991, p.â•›29; italics in the original). But even while narratives might in some sense be inherent to the structure of life — in that life is ‘in search of narrative’ — they are not and cannot be synonymous with life. And hence the questions persist: By structuring our experiences into traditional narrative form, do we lend to them a coherence and unity which raw life does not contain? Are narratives ultimately products of our own creativity, our human way of lending order to a world which is characterized by chaos and disorder? Ricoeur’s response to these pressing issues can be summarized in his characterization of narrative as a ‘synthesis of the heterogenous’ (1984, p.â•›64), whereby concordance and discordance — which lie at the heart of narrative and its twin sister time — exist in a dynamic tension with each other. The emplotment of events and incidents into a narrative “↜‘grasps together’ and integrates into one whole and complete story multiple and scattered events” (Ricoeur, 1984, p.â•›x). Thus Ricoeur describes the ‘discordant concordance of narrative and the concordant discordance of time’ (Ricoeur, 1991, p.â•›32). When we tell our stories, there is a certain pressure to deliver them within an Aristotelian conventional narrative configuration — one in which concordance looms large, where there is a sense of the connection between events, where the conclusion is ‘congruent with the episodes brought together by the story’ (Ricoeur, 1984, p.â•›67). According to Brockmeier (2008) these stories are ‘narratives told according to the conventions of linearity, continuity, closure, and omniscience… [and] are often taken as the quasi-natural condition of narrative’ (Brockmeier, 2008, p.â•›28). Typically, these are stories with beginnings, middles, and endings. As historian William Cronon writes: What distinguishes stories from other forms of discourses is that they describe an action that begins, continues over a well-defined period of time, and finally draws to a definite close, with consequences that become meaningful because of their placement within the narrative. Completed action gives a story its unity, and allows us to evaluate and judge an act by its results. (1992, p.â•›1367).

It is precisely this conventional configuration, this ‘natural condition of narrative’ which eludes so many survivors of trauma when they attempt to give an account of that which they have endured. There is a pressure to provide a certain kind of narrative, the story of their lived experience, and this emplotment ‘transforms a succession of events into one meaningful whole” (1984, p.â•›67). But this transformation is a product of human creation. As Ricoeur describes it: ‘I see in the plots we invent the privileged means by which we re-configure our confused, unformed, and at the limit mute temporal experience’ (1984, p.â•›xi). The very reconfiguration of events into a plot ‘imposes “the sense of an ending” on the indefinite succession



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of incidents’ (1984, p.â•›67). Kermode argues that ‘In “making sense” of the world we… feel a need to experience that concordance of beginning, middle and end which is the essence of our explanatory fictions…’ (Kermode, 1968, pp.â•›35–36). But such fictions ‘degenerate’ into ‘myths’ whenever we actually believe them or ascribe their narrative properties to the real ‘whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive’ (p.â•›39). How we construct the stories of our lives not only assists us in making sense of our lives, but is itself a reflection of our framework for making sense of the world and our place within it. But what happens when no sense can be made? Beginnings of narratives demarcate the point from which all subsequent action must follow. But if beginnings are important, endings are even more so. In the words of Aristotle, ‘the end is everywhere the chief thing’ (cited in Cronon, 1992, p.â•›1367). The ending of a story is its most crucial component, because it is only here that we can appreciate where all the preceding events have been leading. As Paul Ricoeur comments, the story’s conclusion is ‘the pole of attraction of the entire development’ (cited in McQuillan, 2000, p.â•›259), and elsewhere, ‘the point of view from which the story can be perceived as forming a whole’ (1984, p.â•›67). Only when we can emplot our experiences (which Ricoeur describes as ‘an act of the productive imagination’ (1984, p.â•›76), can we decipher meaning in the events of our lives. But in order to narrate our experiences, ‘we force our stories on a world that doesn’t fit them’ (Cronon, 1992, p.â•›1367). As Jackson observes: The idea that any human life moves serially and progressively from a determinate beginning, via a middle passage, towards an ethically or aesthetically satisfying conclusion, is as artificial as the idea of a river running straightforwardly to the sea. Lives and rivers periodically flood and run dry; rapids alternate with calm stretches, shallows with depths; and there are places where eddies, counter-currents, undertows, cross-currents, backwaters and dark reaches make navigation unpredictable (Jackson, 2002, p.â•›22).

Life is characterized by an infinite unfolding of time. There is no beginning, middle or end, just a state of forever continuing. We organize our life and our past into structured events precisely because that contains them for us, renders them more manageable. We cannot keep a ‘forever continuing’ entity in our heads; it surpasses even the great potential of our imagination, and is something which we can only dip into once in a while, when we afford ourselves the opportunity to contemplate the structure of life. But on a daily basis, we do not do this; we cannot do this, the task is simply too enormous. And so experience is broken down into constituent parts. From this partitioning, we gain the ability to make sense of what we are living. But we lose something as well. Although our life can be recounted

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as a story, there are aspects of our human experience which cannot be contained within the boundaries of a conventional narrative structure. This is particularly so in trauma testimony. Ricoeur devotes a significant amount of attention to considering the narrative potential of ‘untold stories’. He comments: We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated. This remark takes on its full force when we refer to the necessity to save the history of the defeated and the lost. The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative. (Ricoeur, 1984, p.â•›75)

And yet to narrate suffering can prove impossible for some. Chris Colvin has argued that ‘Stories framed as stories of “trauma” are always already implicated in some way in a specific perspective on psychological suffering and recovery’ (Colvin, 2003, p.â•›155). The very set-up of the TRC in which witnesses gave their testimony imposed on their narrative a premature closure (an ‘ending’), which, however hoped for, was not for them a reality. Colvin provides the example of Mbuyiselo Coquorha, who endured torture and multiple forms of deprivation under apartheid. A crucial component of Coquorha’s testimony was his insistence that the effects of this treatment were ongoing, into the present time. ‘This is what they have done to me, and I still cannot eat. I am still sick. What will happen to me? I ask you, what will become of me?’ he asks the commissioners. As Colvin comments: … the historical moment is not, for him, a new one in any tangible way. He still suffers physically and psychologically from his torture. He still lives in poverty and fears for his life. He still has not been able to recover from a past (and a present) that keeps him too thin, too medicated, too hungry, and too vulnerable. Storytelling here is not redemptive exercise (Colvin, 2003, pp.â•›163–164).

Some of those who gave testimony before the TRC participated in other, nonofficial, community-based storytelling ventures. Here, the focus was not on the therapeutic effects of telling trauma. Rather ‘crafting the history of the struggle means writing a history about a struggle that is not over. Time has passed but the suffering and the struggling continues’ (Colvin, 2003, p.â•›165). The benefit which is derived from such communal storytelling is one of bonding. As people listen to the stories of others, they can recognise some elements of their own experience. They know that if and when they come to tell their story, others will, in turn, recognise themselves. This mirroring between self and other functions as connective tissue between traumatized individuals and their community.

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Narratives and traumatic testimony Traumatic testimony is marked by what is not there: coherence, structure, meaning, comprehensibility. Edkins has articulated the bind of the trauma survivor for whom ‘it is both impossible to speak, and impossible not to speak’ (p.â•›41). Their stories can only be told in narrative form, and as argued earlier in this paper, that very form lends the testimony a framework of meaning which, critically, it lacks. Edkins and others have argued that the very conception of time — which lies at the heart of narrative construction — is different in the articulation of trauma. Edkins distinguishes between ‘trauma time’ and ‘linear time’ — the latter variously referred to as narrative time2 — which, she says has ‘beginnings, middles, and ends.’ Linear time is central to the workings of the nation state, and even though many of us assume that it is ‘real’, it is a notion that exists because we all work, in and through our everyday practices, to bring it into being… the production and reproduction of linear time take place by people assuming that such a form of times does exist, and specifically that it exists as an empty, homogenous medium in which events take place. (Edkins, 2003, pp.â•›xiv–xv).

But not only does trauma time not conform to this construction, but when it is forced to do so, something crucial is lost — or, stated differently, something fundamentally extrinsic is added. One of the most important implications of this rescripting of traumatic memory into linear time is that memory is depoliticised (Edkins, 2003, p.â•›52). The actual emplotment of trauma narratives transforms them into something which they are not: experiences which are contained in time, indeed which happened in the past and are now finished (as indicated by their ‘endings’). Edkins cites the work of Allan Young, who has worked on post-traumatic stress disorder: ‘The traumatic experience/memory is in a sense timeless. It is not transformed into a story, place in time, with a beginning, a middle and an end (which is characteristic for narrative memory). If it can be told at all, it is still a re-experience’ (cited in Edkins, 2003, p.â•›40). Trauma narratives exist in the forever present; in order to capture the heart of experience, individuals must risk another journey back to moment of rupture. Hartman describes this as taking a ‘descent to the dead.’ In trauma testimony, witnesses often explicitly speak ‘for the dead or in their name. This has its dangers: to go down… may be easy, but to come up again… that is the hard task’ (Hartman, 1996, p.â•›139). 2.╇ Edkins use of the term ‘narrative time’ is very different from Ricoeur’s theory on the relation between time and narrative, to which the latter dedicated three volumes. The important point here, however, is that trauma time is characterised by being imprisoned in a forever present.

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Dominick LaCapra speaks of ‘double inscription of time’ which characterises trauma testimony: one is both back there and here at the same time, and one is able to distinguish between (not dichotomize) the two. In other words, one remembers — perhaps to some extent still compulsively reliving or being possessed by — what happened then without losing a sense of existing and acting now. (LaCapra, 2001, p.â•›90).

It is perhaps this temporal schizophrenia — both being locked in the past and yet knowing that that time is not this time — which makes trauma testimony so difficult to articulate, and why the imposition of a traditional narrative structure compromises the attempt to speak the unspeakable. The temptation to reshape trauma testimony into a conventional narrative configuration means that we instil in them a wholeness which they do not contain. Hayden White has written about the ‘desire for narrative foreclosure’. We urgently want and need our narratives to make sense, to be characterised by a logical sequencing, and towards this end, we instil in them a wholeness which is not theirs. We want, White writes, real events to ‘display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary’ (White, 1987, p.â•›24). Evidence for this argument can be found in the transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Boc and Mpolweni-Zantsi (2006) have written thoughtfully about the process by which the words of those who gave testimony before the TRC became transformed into the transcripts that now appear on the TRC website. First, a brief word on the role of interpreters in the TRC proceedings. Prior to 1994, there were two official languages in South Africa, English and Afrikaans. However, in the country’s new constitution, eleven languages were officially recognised. Contained within the mandate of the TRC was the stipulation that when at all possible, witnesses should be able to speak in their native tongue. Although there had never been a professional class of interpreters prior to 1994 — there was perceived to be no need for such skills as all were assumed to speak either English or Afrikaans — in 1994 all of that changed rather dramatically. Not only were interpreters needed, but immediately, and for very intensive work. In the end, twenty-three people were trained for ten working days, and it was this group of men and women who performed the simultaneous translation for 57,008 hours of non-English language testimony into English. Some of the most memorable images which were flashed around the world of the proceedings of the TRC were those of interpreters crying as they performed their duties.3 It was they who had the impossible job of translating that which 3.╇ For a discussion on the instantaneous accessibility of images of trauma across the globe, see Susan Sontag’s book, Regarding the pain of others. She opens with the statement that ‘for a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people



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could not be communicated. In Edkins’ words ‘What we can say no longer makes sense, what we want to say, we can’t. There are no words for it. That is the dilemma survivors face’ (p.â•›8). Testifiers struggle to put their experiences into words, and interpreters struggle with putting these often ruptured and chaotic expressions into another language. As Huston (1999) writes ‘There are some things which cannot be translated’ (cited in Apfelbaum, 2001, p.â•›27). The result was that often the original testimony was cleaned up, and in some cases information was added. A close comparison of the recordings of the hearings with the official transcripts of these hearings shows that sometimes the original testimony differs significantly from its subsequent representation. An example is where Mrs. Mhlawuli describes the burial of her husband, whose hand had been chopped off. He was buried without this, and in her testimony — translated from the Xhosa into English — she says “We buried him without his right wrist — right arm or whatever — hand actually. We don’t know what they did with the hand.” This appeared in the official transcripts as “They chopped off his right hand, just below the wrist. I don’t know what they did with that hand.” (cited in Boc & Mpolweni-Zantsi, 2006, pp.â•›107–108). While the testimony has been ‘cleaned up’, it has erased some of the most vital information that was contained in the original. Not only does the actual testimony reflect more accurately the emotional rupture experienced by the narrator, but critically, the revised version omits the information that Mrs. Mhlawuli’s husband was buried without his hand. This information is culturally significant, as for a Xhosa person to be buried without all of their body parts means they cannot rest in peace (Boc & Mpolweni-Zantsi, 2006, p.â•›108). There are other examples where the ‘incoherence’ of an original statement is cleaned up, thereby no longer communicating the utter rupture experienced by the speaker. In Mrs. Calata’s testimony (cited in Boc & Mpolweni-Zantsi, 2006, p.â•›105), for instance, in which she recounts a story where her children see a picture in the newspaper of their father’s friend’s burned out car, the English translation of the Xhosa reads: “If Mathew’s car is burnt what happened to them [her husband and his friend]? Hey! No! I became anxious and the situation changed immediately.” The official published version of the transcript, however, omits her exclamation of ‘Hey! No!” At this point in the hearings, Mrs. Calata becomes so distressed would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war’ (Sontag, 2003, p.â•›14). Her book is an exploration into why this has not happened. While pictures and sounds of war might pour into our living rooms daily, the reality does not pierce the skin. Her book concludes with the haunting comment: ‘↜“We”… don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine’ (Sontag, 2003, pp.â•›125–126).

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that Archbishop Tutu decides to adjourn the meeting. However, the deep level of anguish, as represented by her self-interruptions and exclamations, are not in evidence in the official transcript. Yet, these very utterances are an important component of the testimony, as they contribute to our understanding of how the horrific events being described impacted on the person who is left behind, struggling to create a narrative.

Language and the ‘confusion of tongues’ Paul Ricoeur describes narrative as a ‘semantic innovation’ which opens us to ‘the kingdom of the “as if ”↜’ (Ricoeur, 1984, p.â•›64). While narrative might indeed enhance our ability to imagine other possibilities, to envision the ‘as if ’, it may be deficient as a tool for capturing the experience of lived human trauma. Elie Wiesel describes his feelings of trying to write about the Holocaust: ‘words seem too inconspicuous, worn out, inadequate, anaemic, I wanted them burning. Where can one find a novel language, a primal language?’ (cited in Apfelbaum, 2001, p.â•›26). Lawrence Langer makes a similar point: ‘The universe of dying that was Auschwitz yearns for a language purified from the taint of normality’ (Langer, 1995, p.â•›93). But how are trauma survivors to find such a language? Of course the task is impossible. If one is to speak, if one is to offer witness of the things one has known and seen, then one must resort to language, all the while accepting that there cannot but be a chasm between ‘that world’ and ‘this.’ Langer (1991) terms this ‘a confusion of tongues’, which marks ‘the clash between the assumptions and vocabulary of the present world of the survivor and interviewer and the wordbreaking realities of the concentration camp survivors’ (Hartman, 1996, p.â•›140). Language is inextricably linked to social structure and power; what words mean, how they are used, the blank spaces which exist between and beyond words, all of these issues emerge as key considerations in the current discussion. As Edkins writes: ‘… the language we speak is part of the social order, and when the order falls apart around our ears, so does the language’ (Edkins, 2003, p.â•›8). And yet — and this is important — it is not sufficient to state, as many have, that the horrors of the Holocaust (or other ‘limit events’) are simply too terrible for words, and therefore must be left unsaid, and thus unheard. For ultimately, even if language is insufficient for the task, it is, if not all we have, then at least one of the most effective tools we have for communicating that which must not be forgotten. Too often we have heard the phrase that those who survive trauma are left speechless; they do not wish to talk about what they have endured, and this remains forever within them as a black hole of suffering. While this may be true for some (and one must avoid retreating into generalisations about ‘all survivors of trauma’), for



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many others this is simply not the case. Many survivors of trauma emerge from these experiences wanting to talk about what they very often describe as ‘unsayable’ or ‘unimaginable’. Despite the content of what they say, what is crucial is that they do say it — that is, if there is someone in place to hear it. As Edkins comments, the terms ‘unsayable’ and ‘unimaginable’ have often served as an excuse for neither imaging it nor speaking about it’ (Edkins, 2003, p.â•›2). This is not a sufficient moral response. The claim that those who survived the concentration camps were unwilling or unable to talk about their suffering must be evaluated in light of the fact that immediately following the war there was a flurry of testimony which was published by those who had been to hell and were crawling their way back. However, people did not want to read them. As Wieviorka comments: Publishers are not philanthropists; they want their books to sell. A successful book often leads to the publication of other books on the same theme. It is the absence of this market of buyers and readers — indicating the indifference of public opinion once the initial shock had passed — which partly explains why the stream of testimonies came to an end. (Wieviorka, 1994, pp.â•›26–27)

We in the safe outside world told ourselves that the victims of the camps could not speak. But many of those who survived tried to speak; when they found they were not listened to, they stopped speaking. One of the most thoughtful treatments of the paradox of language in the context of trauma testimony has been that of Giorgio Agamben. Following Foucault, he asks ‘What happens in the living individual when he occupies the “vacant place” of the subject… How can a subject give an account of its own ruin?’ (1999, p.â•›142). And yet give an account, the survivor must, all the while recognising that anything that will be said, indeed that can be said, will be an empty container for that which has happened. The significance of such testimony lies not in what is said, but simply that something is said. The fact that the testimony exists, this is what is critical. He writes ‘The subject of enunciation… maintains itself not in a content of meaning but in an event of language’ (Agamben, 1999, p.â•›142). Testimony, he tells us, is that which lies … between the inside and the outside of langue, between the sayable and the unsayable in every language — that is, between a potentiality of speech and its existence, between a possibility and an impossibility of speech. (Agamben, 1999, p.â•›145).

The distinction Agamben makes between the content of meaning and the event of language is a crucial one. The content of meaning of much trauma testimony is, in fact, that there is a void; those who give witness to trauma, and we who are their audience, are, in Maurice Blanchott’s words, ‘guardians of an absent meaning’ (cited in Hartman, 1994, p.â•›5). But the event of language, the fact of the testimony

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itself, is what is vital, not so much because of the historical information that such testimony conveys (though this is important too) but more because of the depths of darkness that it begins to make visible to those who were not there, ‘the psychological and emotional milieu of the struggle for survival, not only then but also now’ (Hartman, 1996, p.â•›142). Agamben describes the paradox confronting those who survive, those who can and must give witness: to bear witness is to place oneself in one’s own language in the position of those who have lost it, to establish oneself in a living language as if it were dead, or in a dead language as if it were living — in any case, outside both the archive and the corpus of what has already been said. (Agamben, 1999, p.â•›161).

Limit events pose a challenge to narrative, because they lie beyond language, and possibly beyond representation. Just as these events demand a new language, so too they demand a new method of representation; and yet, we have not proven ourselves equal to the task, despite the fact that more than half a century has passed since the end of Second World War. What might this new representation look like? And might new forms of narrative be a useful tool in this most challenging pursuit? These are questions which scholars of trauma testimony have been grappling with, and to which there are no definitive answers. In the words of Saul Friedlander, notwithstanding a fifty years’ accumulation of factual knowledge, ‘We have faced surplus meaning or blankness, with little interpretive or representational advance’ (cited in Hartman, 1996, p.â•›10). The challenge for future scholars remains.

Language and ‘the threshold of silence’ Before one can ask how to represent the Holocaust (and other limit events) one must first confront the question of whether it is possible to do so — at all. Some of the greatest minds of the late 20th century dedicated themselves to this most difficult question — but ultimately, they did so through words. George Steiner’s work on language and silence provides a thoughtful example of this. He acutely describes the dilemma that confronts the writer in a world forever scared by genocide: To a writer who feels that the condition of language is in question, that the world may be losing something of its humane genius, two essential courses are available: he may seek to render his own idiom representative of general crisis, to convey through it the precariousness and vulnerability of the communicative act; or he may choose the suicidal rhetoric of silence. (Steiner, 1967, p.â•›69).



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Many writers resorted to language, all the while struggling with its paucity, its ultimate inability to carry the weight of the historical moment. The playwright Arthur Adamov, exponent of the Theatre of the Absurd, wrote, just before the outbreak of the Second World War: ‘Le mots, ces gardiens du sens ne sont pas immortels, invulnerable… Commes les hommes, les mots souffrent… Certain peuvent suivivre, d’autres sont incurables.’ [‘Words, guardians of meaning, are not immortal, invulnerable. Like men, words suffer. Some can survive, others are incurable.’] And then, with the war, he elaborated on this: ‘Worn, threadbare, filed down, words have become the carcass of words, phantom words; everyone drearily chews and regurgitates the sound of them between their jaws’ (cited in Steiner, 1967, p.â•›71). Jens Brockmeier challenges the view that language is the ‘form and medium that represents or transforms experiences into clear and intelligible statements or propositions which are communicable and can be reflected upon’ (Brockmeier, 2002, p.â•›92). Rather, he argues, ‘language is itself a reality, a reality that at times can be murky, messy, and even ineffable…. [language] outlines — and thus embraces — both the sayable and the unsayble’ (Brockmeier, 2002, pp.â•›92–93). It is not the choice between language or silence, but rather the relationship between the two that has provoked many writers on this subject. Parain comments that ‘language is the threshold of silence’, while Lefebvre describes language as ‘at once inside language, and on its near and far sides’ (cited in Steiner, 1967, p.â•›72). Silence always and only exists in relation to that which surrounds it. It is the blank spaces between words, and as such it helps to frame not only the meaning of what is said but that which can be said, a refuge for both the unsaid and the unsayable. As historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes: Not all silences are equal and they cannot be addressed in the same manner; any historical narrative [is] a bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly. (cited in Passerini, 2003, p.â•›249).

Having considered the importance of silence, and its force as a way of marking meaning, let us now return to Agamben’s argument, discussed earlier, in which he emphasises that what matters is not what is said, but rather that something is said. If this is the case, Agamben asks, then ‘To what does such a language bear witness?’ His response is powerful: What cannot be stated, what cannot be archived is the language in which the author succeeds in bearing witness to his incapacity to speak… Just as in the starry sky that we see at night, the stars shine surrounded by a total darkness that, according to cosmologists, is nothing other than the testimony of a time in which the stars did not shine, so the speech of the witness bears witness to a time in which human beings did not yet speak; and so the testimony of human

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beings attests to a time in which they were not yet human. (Agamben, 1999, pp.â•›161–162).

Traumatic testimony bears witness to a total darkness. Although it often is incomprehensible and incoherent, its significance is that it functions to mark the void. Dominick LaCapra (1996, 1998), amongst others, has written about the crisis of representation posed by the Shoah, a crisis which pertains to the problem of historical understanding. How can such limit events be represented at all? Hartman argues that ‘there are no limits to representation, only limits to conceptualization, to the intelligibility of the Shoah’ (Hartman, 1996, p.â•›28). The limits are not what can be represented, so much as what can be thought. Simply ‘we do not believe that what we are made to feel and see is part of reality’ (p.â•›28), and with this, then, there follows a most indicting corollary: ‘… the problem of limits … is not so much the finiteness of intellect as the finiteness of human empathy that comes into view’ (Hartman, 1996, p.â•›129). Hartman describes a representational rupture which ‘involves story as well as history: the story of hell, of its representations. Before Auschwitz we were children in our imagination of evil; after Auschwitz we are no longer children’. Citing Des Pres, he describes ‘a new shape of knowing which invades the mind’, concluding that ‘we have changed as knowers’ (Hartman 1996, p.â•›130). Erika Apfelbaum speaks of the ‘profound dilemma’ which confronts those who are presented with stories of trauma. We respond with a ‘stubborn deafness’ for to do otherwise is to put ourselves, and the moral universe in which we operate, at risk. Apfelbaum elaborates on ‘the threatening implications of listening’: It requires a willingness to follow the teller into a world of radical otherness and to accept the frightening implications it carries for our personal lives and society as a whole. The only way to truly hear is to acknowledge the unbridgeable gap between the two worlds, and to assimilate the impact of this unbridgeable difference. Understanding is irrelevant (the reality always exceeds what the narrative is able to represent and convey). What is important is the willingness to become part of the transmission. (Apfelbaum, 2001, p.â•›31).

Brockmeier’s work with twenty-six written personal narratives provided by eyewitnesses of the attacks on the World Trade Center — collected as part of “The 9/11 National Memory Survey on the Terroist Attacks” — deals with the problem of how people talk about elusive experiences. These accounts, Brockmeier summarizes, speak to ‘the experience of the limits… not only… of language but also the limits of experience itself ’ (Brockmeier, 2008, p.â•›29). Echoing the work of Hartman, LaCapra, and others who have written on the crisis of representation (in relation to the Holocaust), Brockmeier’s work on the Twin Towers testimony provides evidence for the claim that at the core of traumatic experience is ‘its failure to be represented in any common forms or modes or representation’ (Brockmeier,

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2008, p.â•›29). Brockmeier then describes work with ‘antirealist, experimental, and formally innovative types of narrative’ which he characterizes as ‘non-Aristotelian forms of broken narrative [which] do not claim to represent the original trauma’ (Brockmeier, 2008, p.â•›29). While these non-traditional narrative forms might hold more promise for ‘communicating with others about events that demand witness but defy narrative expression’ (Apfelbaum, 2001, p.â•›20) Brockmeier concludes by describing traumatic experience as …a break not just with a particular form of representation but with the very possibility of representation at all… The traumatic gap between language and experience does not just reflect a rupture with the way the world is depicted but with the existential basics of human meaning making. (Brockmeier, 2008, pp.â•›33–34).

The search for heroic meanings This poses a key challenge for those who listen to traumatic testimony. Because we believe in the power of stories, and because we are creatures who are forever engaged in creating and deciphering meaning in our world, we cannot accept what we are told time and time again: There is no meaning in these stories. There are no heroes. There are no lessons. All of this suffering did not resolve itself in a better world. And yet if we cannot accept this — and there is much evidence that we do not — then we have not even learned the very first lesson about listening to trauma. For ourselves, we want these painful narratives to signify something, and we recreate those who offer their testimony in another image, one which effectively makes further telling more difficult. Those who emerge from the ruins cannot be who we want them to be, who we need them to be. We persist in our efforts nonetheless, as too much is at stake. Lawrence Langer tells the story of Magda F., who survived the Holocaust though her husband, parents, brother, three sisters and all their children did not. Another brother and sister had emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, where she joined them at the end of the war. They wanted to hear from her what had happened, and yet she found herself painfully unable to communicate anything which they could understand. ‘nobody, but nobody fully understands us. You can’t. No [matter] how much sympathy you give me when I’m talking here.’ She says that she hopes they will never be able to understand ‘because to understand, you have to go through with it, and I hope nobody in the world comes to this again, [so] that they should understand us. … nobody, nobody, nobody…’ (cited in Langer, 1991, p.â•›xiv). Here her testimony breaks off. Magda’s efforts to communicate what she has seen are persistent, even while she believes that these attempts will always be thwarted by the limitations to imagine that of which we have no experience.

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Geoffrey Hartman writes poignantly about our inability to listen to the void … we who were not there always look for something the survivors cannot offer us. … it is our search for meaning which is disclosed, as if we had to be comforted for what they suffered …. If we learn anything here it is about life when the search for meaning had to be suspended: we are made to focus on what it was like to exist under conditions in which moral choice was systematically disabled by the persecutors and heroism was rarely possible. (Hartman, 1994, pp.â•›133–134).

As the founder of the Fortunuff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, Hartman knows of what he speaks. Having overseen the collection of over 4000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors, Hartman warns against the ‘search for heroic meanings’ in which interviewers over-identify with the witness. This inclination is, he says, ‘far from innocent’ as it effectively eradicates the message of the narratives, at the same time that it strips witnesses of their agency. Rather than experiencing any kind of empowerment from giving testimony, witnesses are instead confined by we their listeners to perpetual victimhood. Removing the weight of the heroic genre, space is created for a different kind of narrative, one which documents the pain of speaking the unspeakable. …the strength required to face a past like that radiates visibly off the screen and becomes a vital fact…breaking the silence is, for those who endured so dehumanizing an assault, an affirmative step, in part because of their very willingness to use ordinary words whose adequacy and inadequacy must both be respected. (Hartman 1996, pp.â•›142–143, 145).

Concluding comments In this article, I have explored some difficulties associated with telling and listening to traumatic testimony. My own entry into this discussion is as one who is interested in political narratives, how the very stories which individuals tell about their own lives function as a point for viewing the wider social context. Personal narratives have the potential to act as a bridge between private and public worlds. In the case of trauma testimony, this is perhaps the most one can hope for. There may be no promise that telling leads to healing, but very act of speech — no matter how garbled or seemingly nonsensical — can begin the process of reconnecting one to the world of the living. Hannah Arendt has written that A life without speech and without action… is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men. With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our

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original physical appearance…. [The impulse to do this] springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born and to which we respond by beginning something new on our own initiative. (Arendt 1958, pp.â•›176–177)

Traumatic testimonies might not provide listeners with a beginning, middle, and end, but they have the potential to assist individuals to “move beyond the self into what Buber calls the essential-we relationship, so opening oneself up to the stories of others and thereby seeing that one is not alone in one’s pain” (Jackson, 2006, p.â•›59). And here lies the potential gift of narrative: the knowledge that we are not alone. As Lacan reminds us ‘What I seek in speech is the response of the Other… There is no speech without a reply, even if it is only met with silence’ (Lacan, 1995, p.â•›40, 86).

References Agamben, G. (1999). Remnants of Auschwitz: The witness and the archive. New York, NY: Zone Books. Andrews, M. (2007). Shaping history: Narratives of political change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Apfelbaum, E. (2001). The dread: An essay on communication across cultural boundaries. International Journal of Critical Psychology, 4, 19–35. Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press Boc, Z., & Mpolweni-Zantsi, N. (2006). Translation and the media: Translation and interpretation. In C. Villa-Vicencio & F. DuToit (Eds.), Truth and reconciliation in South Africa: Ten years on (pp.â•›103–109). Claremont, SA: New Africa Books. Brockmeier, J. (2002). Ineffable experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9(9–10), 79–95. Brockmeier, J. (2008). Language, experience, and the ‘traumatic gap’. In L. C. Hydén & J. Brockmeier (Eds.), Health, illness and culture: Broken narratives (pp.â•›16–35). London: Routledge. Bruner, J. (1987). Life as narrative. Social Research, 54(1), 12–32. Carr, David (1986). Time, narrative, and history. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Colvin, C. (2003). “Brothers and sisters, do not be afraid of me”: Trauma, history and the therapeutic imagination in the new South Africa.” In K. Hodgkin & S. Radstone (Eds.), Contested pasts: The politics of memory. London: Routledge. Cronon, W. (1992). A place for stories: Nature, history, and narrative. The Journal of American History, 78(4), 1347–1376. Edkins, J. (2003). Trauma and the memory of politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Felman, S. (1994). Film as witness: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. In G. Hartman (Ed.), Holocaust remembrance: The shapes of memory (pp.â•›90–103). Oxford: Blackwell. Field, S. (2006). Beyond ‘healing’: Trauma, oral history and regeneration. Oral History, 34(1), 31–42. Gambetta, D. (1999). Primo Levi’s last moments: A new look at the Italian author’s tragic death twelve years ago. Boston Review of Books. Retrieved 4 June 2009 from http://bostonreview. net/BR24.3/gambetta.html Hartman, G. (Ed.). (1994). Holocaust remembrance: The shapes of memory. Oxford: Blackwell.

166 Molly Andrews Hartman, G. (1996). The longest shadow: In the aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hodgkin, K., & Radstone, S. (Eds.). (2003). Contested pasts: The Politics of memory London: Routledge. Jackson, M. (2002). The politics of storytelling: Violence, transgression and intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Kermode, F. (1968). The sense of an ending. Oxford: Oxford University Press. LaCapra, D. (1996). Representing the Holocaust: History, theory, trauma. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. LaCapra, D. (1998). History and memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. LaCapra, D. (2001). Writing history, writing trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lacan, J. (1995). The function and field of speech and language in Psychoanalysis. In Ecrits: a Seleciton (A. Sheridan, Trans.) (pp.â•›30–113). London: Routledge. Langer, L. (1991). Holocaust testimony: The ruins of memory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Langer, L. (1995). Admitting the Holocaust: Collected essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McQuillan, M. (Ed.). (2000). The narrative reader. London: Routledge. Passerini, L. (2003). Memories between silence and oblivion. In K. Hodgkin & S. Radstone (Eds.), Contested pasts: The politics of memory. London: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. (1991). Life in quest of narrative. In D. Wood (Ed.), On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and interpretation, (pp.â•›20–33). London: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative Vol 1 (K. McLaughlin and D. Pellemer, Trans.) Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Roy, S. (2007). Of testimony: The pain of speaking and the speaking of pain. Unpublished paper, Warwick, England. Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the pain of others. New York, NY: Picador. Steiner, G. (1967). Language and silence: Essays 1958–1966. New York, NY: Atheneum. Van de Merwe, C., & Gobodo-Madikizela, P. (2007). Narrating our healing: Perspectives on working through trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. White, H. (1987). The content of the form: Narrative discourse and historical representation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University. Wieviorka, A. (1994). On testimony. In G. Hartman (Ed.), Holocaust remembrance: The shapes of memory (pp.â•›23–32). Oxford: Blackwell.

Chapter 10

Afterword ‘Even Amidst’: Rethinking narrative coherence Mark Freeman

The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts

The Manifest and the Latent I fear that I am about to intrude on the party — or, to put the matter in more explicitly narrative terms, I fear that I am about to disrupt some central aspects of the storyline that has evolved throughout the pages of this book, rendering it just a bit less of-a-piece. Please understand: I concur with much of what has been said here, particularly regarding the possible ‘bias’ toward narrative coherence and linearity, the importance of recognizing the interactive and performative dimension of narration, and, more generally, the value of remaining hermeneutically suspicious about those teleological tales that flatten difference and heterogeneity, whether wittingly or unwittingly, in the name of normalization. Let it be said from the outset, therefore, that this volume does indeed provide a most valuable counterweight to the coherence paradigm — as traditionally conceived. But there is a curious fact that needs to be emphasized here. And that is that nearly every chapter in this book seeks to show that, behind the manifest in-coherence or ‘a-coherence’ of the narratives in question a latent coherence lurks. Moreover — and here I enter even more contested territory — most of these chapters suggest that there is in fact some relationship between narrative coherence and well-being. Two qualifications are in order. The first is that narrative coherence is surely not equally necessary for all people. In fact, it may not be necessary at all. There are no doubt people whose lives and consequent ‘stories’ (should they even be called that) are dispersed, heterogeneous, even fragmented. This simple fact should be enough to convince even the most stalwart torch-bearers of coherence that it is not a strict requirement of a human life. Moreover, it may very well be the case that these more dispersed, dis-unified beings are just fine about it, perhaps even rejecting the very coherence others seem to want to foist upon them. Now, it might be argued here that this ‘anti-coherence’ — or even anti-narrativism — bespeaks a coherence of its own, that it is the inverted image of, and is thus parasitic

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upon, the very coherence it rejects and replaces. But no matter; such lives and the stories that might be told about them are still ‘open works’, testifying to the fact that those tidier beginning-middle-end narratives that are so much the lore of the coherence crowd are not for everyone. As a corollary to these qualifications, it should also be noted that some people become imprisoned by too-coherent narratives, assimilating everything that comes their way to the ‘same old’ storyline, and that what they seem to need most of all is a good dose of difference, one that might allow them to live and breathe a bit more freely. In a related vein, we must not forget that in the case of traumatic ‘limit events’ of the sort that Molly Andrews addresses in the last chapter, it may be that there is simply no coherence to be had, that the experiences in question far exceed that sort of intelligible sense that is often sought in narrative. Indeed, it could be the case that such experiences not only bring us beyond coherence but, following Andrews, beyond narrative altogether. It all depends on what we might mean by coherence and narrative. Taking this line of thinking one step farther, it could also be the case that these experiences, in their excess, their surplus, their ostensible beyond-tellability, reveal something fundamental about the ‘gap’ between experience and narrative more generally. For all of its apparent virtues, particularly to the likes of us ‘narrativists’, narrative seems to have its share of vices too. In fact, if Crispin Sartwell’s polemical End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History (2000) has it right, it is the vice-like grip of narrative itself that must be cast into question. What is it, Sartwell asks early on in the book, that escapes linguistic, and more specifically narrative, articulation? ‘[A]t a rough estimate,’ he answers, ‘almost everything’ (p.â•›5). How curious it is, therefore, that there should have emerged an industry, such as our own, so strenuously devoted to the narrative cause. ‘Narrative,’ Sartwell writes, ‘has become a sort of philosophical panacea, performing all sorts of tasks that philosophers and other intellectuals seem to think need performing’. These range from explaining ‘the human experience of time’ to addressing ‘the personal existential project of constructing a coherent life out of the chaos of experience’ (p.â•›9). The problem at hand, however, is not just that narrative has overextended its reach; that would simply require trimming it back a bit. The more significant problem, for Sartwell at any rate, is that narrative seems to have a built-in tendency to flatten and homogenize the very experience it seeks to tell about. And at the very heart of the problem is coherence itself. ‘This is not to say that narrative doesn’t have liberatory possibilities, and it is not to say that you or I could or should live without it.’ But its liberatory possibilities notwithstanding, ‘every [such] counter-narrative brings with it a new capacity for oppression, and … this capacity is proportional to the coherence and meaningfulness of the narrative. So the more narrativized the narrative, the more thoroughly organized and chock-full of significance it is, the more problematic’ (p.â•›10).



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Narrative’s ‘problematic’ nature is perhaps most visible in the context of cataclysmic traumas such as those Andrews explores: the Holocaust, 9/11, and other such unspeakable horrors. It is also visible in experiences ranging from ecstatic mystical trances to the ‘selflessness’ of dementia (see Freeman, 2008). As Sartwell puts the matter, ‘Narrative comes apart at the extremes… [I]t comes apart in ecstasy, in writhing pain, at death. But it has already also come apart everywhere, all the time, wherever people are breathing, or walking around, or watching TV, and not getting anywhere narratively speaking.’ What to do? ‘Pull yourself away from significance for a moment and let yourself feel the sweet, all-enveloping insignificance all around. And take comfort in your own insignificance; take comfort in the triviality of your culture; take comfort in the triviality of your life-project and your failure in realizing it’ (p.â•›65). Try, in other words, to move beyond the vicelike clutches of narrative, particularly those forms of it that seek to render coherent the irrevocable otherness and ineffability that is part and parcel of being itself. We thus return to an idea posed earlier, which I now put in the form of a question: Is it time to move not only beyond narrative coherence but beyond narrative itself? I return to the aforementioned answer as well: It all depends on what we mean by coherence and narrative. What do we mean? Just as I began writing this chapter, I sent a note to Matti Hyvärinen that said the following: ‘I am finally working on my chapter for the book, and I should have it to you within a week or two. I apologize for the delay.’ (It’s important to keep certain academic traditions alive.) In any case, and more substantively, I went on to note that ‘I do have a concern about it. Although you moved from the idea of broken narratives to that of coherence, a number of the chapters continue to use language more appropriate to the former idea than the latter. Is there a way of rectifying this? On one level, it’s a minor problem. But conceptually, the notion of “brokenness” is quite different than of coherence/incoherence, and it seems important to address in some way. What are your thoughts on this?’ This is what he wrote (in a wonderfully Matti-esque way): Your question seems to be on the tricky side. Due to the long editorial process we were not able to re-shape the articles after the change of the title. We discussed the option of a longer subtitle, including the earlier themes of broken, fragmented and unfinished narratives, but writers voted for a simple and straightforward title. It seems to me, thus, that anything that can be done should be included in your comments. My take on the issue is rather more historical than strictly philosophical: even though “coherence” and “brokenness”, for example, may be seen to locate on entirely different levels, in praxis the problem has repeatedly been to equate coherence, linearity, and clear story-level moral ending. I agree that in many a case the reading model still is to find the ultimate coherence — but again it is ethically

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and scholarly a better option than [to] start with claims about [narratives] lacking coherence. Thus, to my mind the antonym of “coherence” may change from “incoherence” to complexity, incompleteness, brokenness, depending on the context. If and when you can shed some clarity — and theoretical coherence — on this conundrum, we would be pleased!

A tall order, this one. Let us begin at the beginning by asking, once again: What do we mean by narrative coherence? And is it in fact something to move beyond?

A New Paradigm? In their introduction to the volume, Hyvärinen and his co-authors wish ‘to suggest and nurture a kind of paradigmatic change within narrative studies’. Operating under the (questionable, in my view) presumption that the earlier phase of ‘the narrative turn’ tended to posit ‘a vital and many-layered relationship between narrative and coherence’, they wish to recast the relationship at hand. Whether the coherence at hand was linguistic, temporal, sequential, or what have you, it ‘was assumed as a norm for good and healthy life stories’. It was also “something that scholars ventured to investigate and to find, for instance, in life-story interviews’ (p.â•›1). These scholars might even bemoan gathering an incoherent narrative — unless, of course, they could find some interesting pathology (a silver lining, as it were) amidst the narrative debris. What, then, is coherence? The coherence paradigm generally implies that i) good and competent narratives always proceed in a linear, chronological way, from a beginning and middle to an end, which also constitutes a thematic closure; ii) the function of narrative and storytelling is primarily to create coherence in regard to experience, which is understood as being rather formless (which may be understood as a merit or disadvantage of narrative); iii) persons live better and in a more ethical way if they have a coherent life-story and coherent narrative identity (or, in contrast, narrative is understood as being detrimental because it creates such coherence). (p.â•›1–2)

The present volume, Hyvärinen and his colleagues go on to assert, challenges this paradigm theoretically, methodologically, and ethically via both theoretical argumentation and by exploring specific cases that cannot be assimilated to the paradigm, those in which the stories told are ‘fragmented, disorganized or where the narrative text is superseded by the performance of the story’ (p.â•›2). The preceding chapters have done well to remind us of what lies beyond narrative coherence as the coherence paradigm conceives it. They have also done well to render more subtly the notion of narrative identity, which, not unlike narrative itself, had been ‘thematized from the perspective of unity and coherence it was able to afford, not in terms of complexities, contradictions and undecided elements it



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might include’ (p.â•›8). As Hyvärinen et al. go on to note in this context, it had been maintained by Hayden White and others that narrative provided a kind of aesthetic counterweight to ‘life itself ’, in its messy, formless, ongoingness. The result, however, was ‘a binary opposition between the multitude of life and the full, fixed and eternal form of narrative’ (p.â•›5) that kept the coherence paradigm front and centre. Bearing this in mind, there would seem to emerge a dual task: to recognize the narrativity that is part and parcel of experience and, in so doing, to loosen the hold of the coherence paradigm. Narratives need not flatten out difference — at least not to the extent that had been posited; they are not to be understood merely as ordering machines, seeking (an illusory) unity, harmony, and closure amidst the chaotic openness of reality. Insofar as ‘coherence’ is equated with unity, harmony, and closure, therefore, it is indeed something to be moved beyond, and the present volume should be instrumental in hastening the process. But it could also be that the idea of coherence itself needs to be rethought, in a way that at once explodes the unity-harmony-closure equation while still retaining the sense-making ‘binding’ function that narrative is designed to serve. By ‘binding’, I have in mind the desire of survivors of trauma, among others, to speak — even while recognizing that their experience exceeds what words can say and that, consequently, whatever ‘account’ they might provide will fall short of the mark of containing it, expressing it adequately. Only by speaking, indeed only by narrating, will they be able to prevent the utter dispersion of experience, its evaporation into nothingness. By all indications, moreover, they will need and seek to find some measure of coherence — broadly conceived — in and through the act of narrating. That is to say, they will need to find a language commensurate with, if not ‘adequate’ to, their traumas and their lives. It will not, and cannot, be a language rooted in unity, harmony, and closure. But nor can it be a language wholly devoid of the sense-making, binding function to which I have referred. To move entirely beyond coherence is to move beyond narrative itself, and this, I believe, we cannot do. Nor do the contributors to this volume. The challenge, therefore, is to think anew both coherence and narrative and in such a way as to render them more appropriate to the complexities of experience. As shall become clear, doing so will take us to the very edge of both.

Beyond ‘Weird’ Jens Brockmeier and Maria Medved’s chapter on ‘Weird stories’ is a fitting point of entry for the central ideas I want to convey. According to Brockmeier and Medved, ‘the standard — Aristotelian — view on what represents narrative coherence in autobiographical narrative is misleading because it offers too narrow a picture of coherence and incoherence’ alike. Appearances notwithstanding, ‘not all weird

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autobiographical stories are necessarily incoherent, and not all incoherent stories mirror a weird self ’ (p.â•›21). The ‘main difficulty’ of the Aristotelian approach, they go on to suggest, has to do with ‘its tendency to decontextualize stories’, from both ‘the intersubjective context in which all stories are told (which includes the dialogic relationship between teller and told), the larger autobiographical context that is behind all self-narratives (which includes one’s life history), and the socio-cultural context (which includes the social environments in which narrators share their lives with others)’ (p.â•›22). Exclude this trio of contexts from the fragmentary tales told by those with brain-based memory impairments and the like, and what they have to say may sound incoherent indeed. These people ‘struggled to formulate narrative accounts’, either because their linguistic and cognitive resources were seriously limited’ or ‘because they simply had no or very few autobiographical memories … on which their stories could draw’. What came as a surprise to Brockmeier and Medved was that these individuals ‘did not complain about changes in their sense of self and their identities in time’ (p.â•›22). This comes as a surprise to me as well, largely owing to my own experience with my 86-year-old mother, who has suffered from dementia for some five years. On the one hand, she, like those Brockmeier and Medved have studied, tells stories that sometimes appear ‘disconnected, fragmented, and implausible’ (p.â•›22). Unlike them, however, she does complain, about who and what she has become. Lately, she has taken to waking up from afternoon naps only to find that she has no idea where she is, how she got there, or how long she’s been there. She looks around to find somebody, anybody, who can answer these questions. But of course these people are unknown too. So their words don’t stick. No; she needs to speak to me; I’m still in the picture, on the edge of consciousness. And when the phone rings sometime in the late afternoon and I see who is calling, I know how the conversation will unfold. ‘Mark? I’m just trying to find out what’s going on.’ There’s confusion in her voice, and perhaps panic; and there may be some rage too. Nothing makes any sense. She’s reaching for a narrative through-line, an anchor, a story that makes sense. But she can’t find one. It’s at that point that I may try to explain to her, for the umpteenth time, that she’s home (in an assisted living residence), that she’s been there for some five years due to her memory problems — which, of course, she forgets she has, thus inaugurating yet another cycle of dialogue about her ‘whereabouts’. As for her response to this dialogue, it is almost always exactly the same: ‘Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god.’ And then she might utter a Yiddish phrase that she used to hear from her own aging mother years ago, which translates roughly as, ‘Oh, what becomes of a person.’ It is at these junctures that she has an acute and very painful sense of her own loss and infirmity. She can complain about being ‘dumb,’ ‘stupid,’ a ‘moron.’ ‘I have to be put in a nursery with infants, to be watched,’ she said recently. ‘Brainless. I don’t have a brain anymore.’



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On one level, my mother’s situation seems quite different from what Brockmeier and Medved report. Instead of the ‘unbroken continuity between their lives and selves before and after the neurotrauma of their tellers,’ coupled with ‘a strong sense of sameness’ (p.â•›22), she displays a rather more broken continuity — a continuity in discontinuity, as it were — coupled with a disturbed sense of sameness: the ‘I’ who reflects looks upon the ‘me’ that has emerged only to find its radical difference and otherness. But of course it is precisely at this point that Brockmeier and Medved’s account and my own come together once again. For even amidst the chaos and debris of her life, ‘she’ nevertheless remains, a witness to the devastation (see Freeman, 2009). Were we to rely on those ‘rounded and autonomous Aristotelian stories told by an isolated individual’ (p.â•›24), we might readily be lured by ‘deficit diagnoses’, seeing in the more fragmentary stories told little more than testimony to the incoherence of narrative and identity alike. But the fact is, ‘the coherence of stories … can change relative to the rhetorical dynamic of the conversation in which the interplay among the possibly different strategies, intentions, and narrative competencies of the participants plays a central role’ (p.â•›25). It can also change as a function of ‘world knowledge’, for instance knowledge about the life of the storyteller. So it is that when cast against the backdrop of her life history, a ‘weird’ story, of the sort told by one of Brockmeier and Medved’s informants, ‘begins to make more sense’ (p.â•›26). More to the point still, ‘obsessive, bizarre, and weird’ though her stories might have been, ‘they were not incoherent stories, at least not when understood as … attempts to struggle against the utter breakdown that fully realizing and accepting her desperate situation would have entailed’ (p.â•›26). I am not sure Brockmeier and Medved would want to frame it this way, but ultimately they seem to be issuing a plea on behalf of narrative coherence — albeit of a different sort than Aristotelian. It is one that is less ‘rounded’ and ‘autonomous’, to be sure, and it is founded not so much upon the tidy flow of meaning from beginning to middle to end as it is upon a search for continuity and wholeness amidst the assaults that have come one’s way. Lars-Christer Hydén’s reflections on identity, self, and narrative extend these ideas by asking explicitly ‘whether the inability to tell stories about the past and to establish a plot implies a loss of identity, replaced by a void never to be filled again’ (p.â•›34). Rather than dealing with storytelling in ‘representational’ terms, Hydén wants to call attention to how it is ‘used as a tool to establish and negotiate identity in specific situations’ (p.â•›37). By doing so, he also wants to call attention to the ‘narrative expansion of identities,’ the way in which ‘the teller is able to put forward something new about him/herself, something that he/she wants to highlight at a certain moment in the ongoing interaction. In this way,’ Hydén maintains, ‘the teller is able to negotiate his or her identity with the audience by presenting

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contrasts and alternatives, by stressing continuity or discontinuity’. Indeed, there is a distinct sense in which, through such negotiation, ‘the teller to some extent becomes someone else, or becomes at least a bit different compared to before the telling of the story’ (p.â•›40). Whether in fact the teller ‘becomes someone else’ is an open question. Framing the issue this way implies that ‘the’ self that had existed previously has become wholly other. But insofar as the identity of the self is itself framed in more plural terms — as what William James (1981) refers to as a ‘loosely construed thing’, an identity ‘on the whole’, wrought out of multiplicity — one has simply become oneself, yet again. Having offered this qualification, let me hasten to acknowledge that Hydén does well in his chapter to underscore the fluid, interactive, performative dimension of narrative and identity alike. What he has also underscored is the idea that ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity’ are not to be understood as immutable properties of identity but are rather constructed and reconstructed anew in interaction. Whether the former is stressed or the latter thus depends on the nature and purpose of the interaction itself, especially how one wishes to ‘position’ oneself therein (e.g., Bamberg, 1997). ‘In this way the organization of the storytelling event can be used as a tool for presenting identity’, and ‘concerns how the telling of autobiographical stories can be used to change the audience’s perception and definition of the teller — and probably also the teller’s perception of him- or herself ’ (p.â•›44). How, then, does the issue of coherence enter this picture of narrative identity? In emphasizing the expansion of identities, Hydén seems to want to keep a version of coherence in the picture. ‘I am this too’, one essentially says through his or her performance. One can, of course, imagine instances in which coherence is undermined. During a dinner with the boss, I begin to act in a way that is ‘out of character’, and when I reflect on it later on I see just how crude my performance was. Or I get drunk and begin to do things that are quite unexpected, even offensive, given my usual ways of being in the world. ‘He’s not himself ’, an observer might say, hoping to calm the situation down. Even in these more extreme cases, it should be emphasized, there will likely be some attempt to tell a (more or less) coherent story after the fact. ‘It was pathetic how I acted with my boss’, I might eventually say. ‘I wish I didn’t have such a profound need to be affirmed by people’. Or: ‘What a jerk I become after a few too many — the wild rogue, with his devil-may-care attitude. I ought to look at that part of me a little more closely’. There is no questioning the fact that ‘one important aspect of identities is that they are performed through the storytelling event’ and that such storytelling ‘is a way of ritually changing the relationship and the social status of the participants’ (p.â•›46) — even if only temporarily. ‘In this sense the storytelling has a performative force,’ such that ‘by telling the story a certain identity is put in place’ (pp.â•›46). This implies that ‘it is important when studying identity in social scientific situations to not only study stories, but



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also the way stories are told, received and negotiated’ (p.â•›47). Doing so will surely call attention to the complexity, mutability, and multiplicity of narrative identity. It will also serve to undermine the notion of narrative coherence as strict selfsameness. But unless we do in fact ‘become someone else’ altogether — in which case the term ‘identity’ would no longer be applicable — there is bound to remain some measure of continuity and coherence amidst the flux. In people with intact brains, and memories, and enduring social relationships, how could the situation be otherwise? Tarja Aaltonen offers some similar ideas in her consideration of ‘mind-reading’. Acknowledging the interpretive problem often posed by aphasic speakers, the speech therapist, nonetheless, ‘treats the speech acts of the aphasic man as if they were coherent, … as if his speech had a point, … as if it was meaningful’ (p.â•›55). The communicative efforts of the aphasic’s partners in dialogue are key in this context. Indeed, ‘Research on strategies people use when communicating with aphasic individuals have shown rather unanimously that communicative partners attempt to support the smooth flow of conversation and try to resolve the problems created by aphasia’ (p.â•›57). It is difficult to imagine doing otherwise: operating on the assumption — or at least the hope — that there is meaning immanent in the utterances being made, people generally do what they can, with aphasics among others, to make sense of things. Skill will be required. ‘In her interpretation the speech therapist is filling in the gaps by combining the information she gleans from both what the aphasic speaker says and the prosodic and nonverbal communication’. Moreover, ‘she also draws from her knowledge of rehabilitation practices in Finland,’ such that ‘hypotheses’ about what is being said rapidly emerge (p.â•›60). As Aaltonen goes on to suggest, the therapist is thus ‘reading both the individual mind as well as the social mind and the meaning of the utterances is linked to both minds’ (p.â•›60). Here too, taken out of context, the aphasic’s utterances may appear quite nonsensical. But placed in context, and supported by the skills and knowledge of the therapist, the manifestly nonsensical becomes decidedly more meaningful. Indeed, writes Aaltonen, through the ‘co-construction’ of meaning, ‘the aphasic man’s utterances and non-verbal messages are interpreted and made a coherent part of the storyworld’ (p.â•›62). It is this storyworld, she continues, that ‘provides the presuppositions that enable the reader or the listener to construct a coherent understanding of the narrative that is told’. So it is that ‘We were able to recognize that he was telling us a story even without knowing from time to time what that story meant’ (p.â•›63). From this perspective, therefore, coherence very much remains the rule. The challenge is precisely to locate it amidst debris of what is said.

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Multiplicities and Coherences There are some apparent exceptions to the rule. As Maria Tamboukou suggests in her chapter through her presentation of Gwen John, the very ‘events’ that transpire in John’s life bear within them an instability, an unfixedness. Rather than being bounded occurrences, happening ‘in’ time, the letters she writes ‘embody traces of virtual forces, narratives of intensities and passions, messages for the yet-to-come; they do not represent “realities” — they are pure events emitting signs and releasing forces, … vectors of deterritorialization’ (p.â•›74). Along these lines, ‘subjects are dispersed, sometimes even emerging in the text as pre-individual singularities rather than coherent characters’ (p.â•›75). There is no singular ‘Gwen John’ discernible through her letters; there are ‘traces of a divergent series of states, difficult to be enveloped in the sequential unity and structure of classic narratology: they become broken narratives of nomadic distributions, while her paintings release forces of her narratability’. John thus ‘lives out of order and her letters and paintings carry traces of disjointed space/time blocks’ (p.â•›77). Indeed, Tamboukou asserts, ‘There are many and different Johns and her character has both an actual and a virtual dimension’. At the same time, ‘Her letters hold differences together, not as oppositions but as multiplicities: despair — and — hope, woman — and — artist, inside — and — outside, solitude — and — communication’. One might ask: Is John an unusual person? Yes and no. Yes: she is unusual in the degree to which she is dispersed, heterogeneous, ever-reconstituted. Presumably, this is one of the reasons Tamboukou has elected to tell her story. But in other, perhaps more fundamental ways, it would seem that she is simply ‘one of us’, the events that comprise our own lives being, in the end, no more fixable than those comprising hers. Perhaps this too is a reason why Tamboukou wishes to tell her story. In John herself, we can find an emblem of the open event, ‘in the sense that she is complicated, keeping all the selves that compose her in a continuous state of intensity’ (p.â•›78). Strictly speaking, ‘she’ doesn’t exist — not, at any rate, as some ‘thing’ that lives in a circumscribable time/space block. And nor do we. We are perpetual openings, becomings, nomadically on the move. Are we heading anywhere? Nowhere in particular, it would seem. And yet John, and we, are ignited and indeed moved by desires, which draw us this way rather than that. So it is that ‘John has written extensively in her letters about her love of the Parisian quarters, the city gardens and the grand boulevards, … the countryside and the sea’ and ‘about her walks in the woods and her boat rides on the Seine’ (p.â•›80). Even if she is heading nowhere in particular — no single teleologically-driven place — there is a certain selectivity at work, a space of desire that is at once open and delimited. We, as readers, are thus able to gather some sense of who she is, even in her dispersion and heterogeneity. To tell her story, Tamboukou



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cannot possibly resort to the beginning-middle-end framework of narrative enshrined in the aforementioned coherence paradigm. This tripartite structure, one might argue, itself relies on a conception of the event that is being cast into question here, one that remains tethered to Chronos rather than set free by Aion. And yet we read the story at hand, with interest, imagining and wondering, not only who she is but who we are. The question is sensible, if ultimately unanswerable. ‘Identity created in narrative,’ Linda Sandino adds, ‘is always in process and imcomplete’ (p.â•›88). In the case of the artist especially, ‘the emplotment of the character … is made up of “fits and starts” rather than describing a coherent, stable selfhood’ (p.â•›91). This is so for fairly clear reasons: Insofar as one devotes oneself to creation, and insofar as the objects one creates are themselves transformative of their creators, one is engaged in a process of constant re-creation. As Heidegger (1971) puts the matter, ‘The artist is the origin of the work,’ while at the same time ‘The work is the origin of the artist.’ (p.â•›45) What’s more, even though a given work may be completed, brought to an end, this end is but a pausing before the next beginning. There is thus an irrevocable incompleteness to the process of creation, an unfinalizability. No work will ever, no work can ever, say it all. Indeed, in line with what Tamboukou tells us, the work of art is not to be considered a discrete event of saying, able to be encapsulated in discursive terms, but an open space of meaning, disclosure, unconcealment. ‘The work,’ Heidegger states succinctly, ‘holds open the open of the world’ (ibid). Are artists unusual? The answer, once again, would seem to be yes and no. Yes, to the degree that they devote their lives to the creation of objects that hold open the open of the world and, folding back upon those who create them, hold open their very stories and identities. Not only may there emerge an unusual trajectory of fits and starts, as Sandino mentions, but, in some instances, outright breaks, givings-up and beginnings-anew. Once again, however, it isn’t only artists who are ‘open works’ but the entire lot of us, ever in the process of bringing into the world new ‘objects’ — children, meals, cars, book chapters — that return our way, transforming, yet again, the stories we might tell about the movement of our lives. There will be both change and, to a greater or lesser extent, continuity and coherence — manifested perhaps most visibly in the form of our own distinctive style of being and our own particular oeuvre of creations, whatever they may be. There can of course be radical changes in style in artists and non-artists alike — so much so that an outsider, utterly unaware of the context within which such changes have taken place — may become convinced that those in question have indeed become different people altogether. But most artists, and most non-artists too, would be extremely reluctant to claim this, not least because even amidst their, our, fits and starts or even radical breaks, there are threads of continuity. Whether the break in question is an artistic turnabout or a divorce or a mid-life crisis, there will more

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than likely be some sense to the move, some way of linking up before and after — in retrospect if not at the time. There can, of course, be psychotic breaks too, in which the very connections between ‘I’ and ‘me’ have been severed. But that is, truly, another story altogether. Let us explore more closely this language of ‘breaking’ through Hänninen and Koski-Jännes’ chapter. Against the backdrop of those ‘well-formed narratives’ found in most research on ‘ordinary people’ when asked to tell the story of their lives, Hänninen and Koski-Jännes want to focus on a ‘non-canonical’ narrative. ‘A researcher who has set out to find well-formed narratives from the data is tempted to relegate a non-chronological text to the margins in presenting her results’. But it need not be this way. For ‘she can, depending on her level of commitment to the canons of narrative psychology, either see it as indicating some kind of abnormality or as a reminder that it can, after all, be quite normal not to write, indeed not even to grasp one’s life, according to traditional narrative conventions’ (p.â•›104). It may be that such non-canonical telling is intentional; ‘a person with a fully coherent inner narrative may write about her life in an experimenting fashion’. Likewise, it may be that more canonical telling masks a rather hazier inner narrative. As Hänninen and Koski-Jännes rightly acknowledge in this context, ‘There is no oneto-one relation between the narrative text [and] the author’s inner life’ (p.â•›105). More important for present purposes is the fact that a manifestly ‘deviant’ text may well serve important psychological functions for the teller, its surface incoherence and contradictoriness sometimes signifying deep inner work. The story of Anna is just this kind of story. ‘She moves between varying positions in relation to her life and to the text: between the hierarchical positions of a protagonist, a narrator and an author, between the immediacy of narration and distanced reflection, and between multiple same-level perspectives’ (p.â•›107). Her text is ‘also at times populated by different same-level voices addressing, condemning and even haunting each other’ (p.â•›108). There is what Hänninen and Koski-Jännes term a ‘distrust of language’ as well, in the sense of a resistance to too-codified meanings and an attempt to find those words that will authentically convey what most needs to be said. Finally, and most prominently, is the text’s ‘lack of chronology; it does not proceed neatly from past to present…. On the contrary, its event structure is totally broken,’ such that ‘the major part of her story dwells in the “timeless” internal universe of crisscrossing thoughts and memories’. Was Anna a self-conscious postmodernist, mixing it up for the social scientists? Or was her text ‘rather an intuitive choice that reflects her relationship to her current life problems?’ (p.â•›110). Although there may be elements of the former contributing to the text, Hänninen and Koski-Jännes lean more to the latter in their understanding of Anna and her world. Something is being done in and through her fashioning of this deviant text. Perhaps some of the ‘devastating events’ that have come her way ‘are



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made bearable’ by the ‘distancing’ displayed therein. Perhaps the fact that there are ‘no strong connections of cause and effect’ signifies that she is more in the mode of exploration and speculation than causation. There is no canonical story to be told at this point in time. Anna remains very much ‘in process’, and to stop the process in the name of a well-formed story would be defensive and destructive of her inner reality. Nevertheless, certain themes emerge, most notably ‘her relations to other people and her relation to herself, and the tensions between these two poles’ (p.â•›114). Even amidst the story’s deviance, therefore, there arise some plotlines, candidates for making sense of what is being said. Indeed, Hänninen and Koski-Jännes speak of a ‘core contradiction’, between ‘relationality’ and ‘autonomy’, their supposition being that, in some way, Anna is trying to work through the contradiction at hand. ‘Ambivalent’ though she is ‘about describing her life in storied form,’ she still seeks to ‘↜“find the thread, find the shape of her path”↜’. In Hänninen and Koski-Jännes’ view, ‘Anna’s text shows the pieces of a puzzle but does not assemble them as a picture’ (p.â•›115). Her story is like a dream in this respect, a somewhat fragmented constellation of images and plots-in-formation, pointing at times in the direction of a meaning but moving along multiple associative pathways. Recognizing once more the possibility that Anna’s text reflects her desire ‘to write in an artistic way,’ Hänninen and Koski-Jännes go on to raise the more likely possibility that ‘the characteristics of Anna’s text … reflect her striving towards a more authentic inner narrative’. Operating on the assumption that ‘The search for self-understanding seems indeed to be the most prominent motive in Anna’s story,’ it ‘is not just any self-understanding’ that will do: ‘she seems to want to find a solid and authentic understanding which she could rely on’ (p.â•›116) — elusive though it may be at the present moment. It is curious that Hänninen and KoskiJännes go on to discuss ‘the psychological meaning of the incoherence and unconventional structure of Anna’s text and how it can be related to her inner narrative’. I suppose one can consider her text ‘unconventional’. But I am not at all sure why it would be considered ‘incoherent’. Taken out of context and background knowledge, shorn of interpretation, sure: some of it might seem downright senseless, akin, perhaps, to the utterings of the brain-injured or demented. But this would be precisely to mistake the manifest text for the latent thoughts that inform it; and as the authors’ own interpretive unpacking of Anna’s story has shown, it is imperative to avoid this sort of conflation. Is it true that ‘some people are just episodic in their thinking about their life?’ And, ‘Could this be true of Anna?’ Well, I hesitate to say it again, but yes and no: Yes, in the sense that ‘her memory operates on the basis of vivid images rather than on verbal storylines’ (p.â•›116). But no, in the sense that, whatever her mode of telling may be — whether through words or paint, chronologically or non-chronologically, causally or non-causally — it seems to represent an attempt to move beyond the episodic, toward some semblance of

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narrative coherence. Along these lines, the kind of ‘shuffling of one’s memories’ one finds in Anna’s text ‘may serve as a necessary step in creating a fresh and authentic interpretation of the past and in avoiding premature consolidation of a new story’ (p.â•›116). Well said. Moving ‘beyond narrative coherence’, therefore, may very well be a ‘transitory phase’ in Anna’s case, paving the way, ultimately, to one that is deeper, more real — true and authentic narrative coherence, one might say, rather than false and inauthentic. In their concluding comments, Hänninen and Koski-Jännes avow their reluctance ‘to take a definite stance as regards whether a coherent and chronological understanding of one’s life is in general superior to an incoherent and fragmentary one’ (p.â•›117). As far as I can tell, there is no reason whatsoever to assume that a ‘chronological understanding’ of one’s life is superior to a non-chronological one. I also see no reason for one’s narrative to be ‘well-formed’ in the Aristotelian sense. In fact, I would tend to regard most well-formed narratives with a measure of suspicion, and for one very basic reason. Most of our lives are quite messy, and to the extent that we are inclined to tell about them — some people are, some aren’t — the resultant stories ought to be messy in turn. Anna is to be commended for seeing this. Perhaps one day there will emerge ‘a solid and coherent story that welds together the discrepant parts of [her] life’ (p.â•›117). Or, perhaps not. What would be unlikely is for Anna to remain in a purely episodic mode, one in which she is fully resigned to a fragmentary, saccadic, senseless inner story. Somehow or other, she will need to find that particular mode of narrative coherence that suits her life and being, that allows her to carry on with some sense of connection to what matters most, in all of its messy multiplicity.

To Speak the Unspeakable Alison Perez, Yishai Tobin, and Shifra Sagy’s chapter on the broken discourse of Israeli bus drivers also serves to show the latent coherence within the manifest text. ‘In particular, the interviewee’s use of personal pronouns throughout the narrative — while initially seemingly arbitrary and “illogical” — emerged through deeper analysis as not only following a pattern of non-random distribution, but also representative of specific, systematic communicative strategies’ (p.â•›121). Notice that, here as elsewhere, I have referred to manifest and latent properties of the text itself. Important to emphasize in this context is that the latent properties eventually to be disclosed only emerge in and through interpretation: only then, after the fact, can we speak of what might exist beyond the seemingly incoherent, the arbitrary and the illogical. As such, one might ask: Is the coherence revealed to be ‘located’ in the text, the interpretation, or both? My own inclination is to say



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‘both’; for while interpretation is in fact needed to move from manifest to latent, what is disclosed through the process nonetheless refers back to the text itself. In the present case, the interviewee’s use of personal pronouns might have escaped the naked eye. Eventually, however, we come to see patterns in the text itself that can plausibly be said to have been there ‘all along’, awaiting savvy interpreters to find them. So it is that Perez et al. maintain their analysis ‘emerged directly from the interview transcript, as these discursive phenomena simply commanded attention, almost screaming that “something interesting” was happening within and surrounding them’. Admittedly, ‘It took a great deal of time … to find the “missing link” that would tie these various linguistic signs and discursive forms into a cohesive story explaining the larger picture’. In fact, ‘It was only after conducting a thorough analysis … that we were able to understand the central message’ (p.â•›136). Only after: Putting aside those instances of narrative coherence that wear their coherence outright, Aristotelian-style, what we find in many of the chapters in this volume is that narrative coherence is sometimes deferred, ‘put on hold’, until some interpretive work has been carried out. Then, after the fact, we come to see a greater measure of coherence than meets the eye. Whether we frame the matter spatially, via terms like manifest and latent, or temporally, by speaking of deferral, the story is much the same. Strictly speaking, coherence — and meaning more generally — is neither ‘found’ nor ‘made’. Rather, there is a distinct sense in which it is found and made at one and the same time — or, as I have put it elsewhere, meaning is found through being made (Freeman, 2002, p.â•›24). I am speaking here of poiesis. On one level, I have suggested, the term highlights the constructive, imaginative dimension entailed in the process of meaning-making. But this very process of meaning-making has as its ultimate aim disclosing what is there, in the world — including the world of the text. Let us return to Perez et al.’s chapter with these ideas in mind. Dani, their interviewee, ‘appears to directly contradict statements he made mere sentences beforehand; and yet,’ they suggest once more, ‘there may indeed be an internal logic to Dani’s discourse. Perhaps what may appear to be contradictions are actually the signs of Dani attempting to make sense of his ambivalence and his own realizations that some of his statements may seem to be paradoxical’ (p.â•›139). Dani’s specific situation aside, the authors’ position on the coherence of the narratives derived from their work is clear enough: ‘Embedded within the moments and positions in which certain linguistic signs are used, there is a meaning, a message, a systematic nature, and a significance to both this usage and the surrounding context’ (p.â•›140). I must confess to being just a bit uncertain about this claim. Do all of their narratives have a message and a systematic nature? Can all of them be ‘decoded’ in the way Dani’s has been? One might also ask, more generally: To what extent do we, as interpreters, seek coherence in the narratives we explore? And how often do we

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‘find’ it in narratives that may actually not warrant it? ‘Seek and ye shall find’. But might it not be the case that some narratives are as incoherent as they appear to be? A still more vexing question might be raised at this point as well: How do we know, how can we know, which narratives bear within them a latent coherence and which do not? Is the question even a meaningful one? Here, we come full circle and can turn once more to Molly Andrews’ chapter on traumatic testimony. On the face of it, her chapter would appear to be different in kind than virtually all the others. For, by all indications she is committed, for ethical reasons, to honour and preserve the manifest form in which survivors’ words are uttered. ‘The central dilemma for many survivors of trauma,’ she writes, ‘is that they must tell their stories, and yet their stories cannot be told. The experiences which they have endured defy understanding; the very act of rendering them into narrative form lends them a coherence which they do not have’ (p.â•›4). As Andrews points out, this situation may in fact be an extreme version of the more general relationship between experience and narrative. ‘By structuring our experiences into traditional narrative form, do we lend them a coherence and unity which raw life does not contain?’ (p.â•›152). We have already established that there is an element of poiesis, meaning-making, entailed in the interpretive process itself and that coherence, in turn, is derived — issues? is discovered? is articulated? — after the fact. It is true: the transformation of experience into narrative form ‘is a product of human creation’ (p.â•›152). It is also true that we sometimes ‘force’ narratives onto experience in a way that dilutes and detracts from the autonomous power of such experience. Here, we enter some perilous territory: Life is characterized by an infinite unfolding of time. There is no beginning, middle or end, just a state of forever continuing. We organize our life and our past into structured events precisely because that contains them for us, renders them more manageable. We cannot keep a “forever continuing” entity in our heads; it surpasses even the great potential of our imagination, and is something which we can only dip into once in a while, when we afford ourselves the opportunity to contemplate the structure of life. But on a daily basis, we do not do this; we cannot do this, the task is simply too enormous. And so experience is broken down into constituent parts. From this partitioning, we gain the ability to make sense of what we are living. But we lose something as well. Although our life can be recounted as story, there are aspects of our human experience which cannot be contained within the boundaries of a conventional narrative structure. This is particularly so in trauma testimony. (p.â•›153–154)

Andrews is surely right to note that there are aspects of experience that cannot be contained within a conventional narrative structure. That this is ‘particularly so’ in the case of trauma testimony stands to reason as well: according to some, there is no language, narrative or otherwise, that can adequately convey the enormity



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of traumatic experience. But Andrews seems to be going a significant step farther here, claiming in essence that narrative cannot help but falsify ‘raw life’. The problem, therefore, is not coherence per se but narrative itself. ‘Traumatic testimony,’ Andrews continues, ‘is marked by what is not there: coherence, structure, meaning, comprehensibility’ (p.â•›155). It is also marked by a different dimension of time — ‘trauma time’ — than the linear time that is said to characterize the temporality of narrative, with its beginnings, middles, and ends. But narrative time, I would argue, is not to be equated with linear time (see Freeman, 1998; Ricoeur, 1981). And while there surely is a distinction to be made between ‘raw life’ and the stories we might tell about it at some subsequent point in time, it is not at all clear that the former is as devoid of narrative — or, more appropriately, narrativity — as Andrews implies or that narrative is quite as ‘imposing’. Yes: ‘the imposition of a traditional narrative structure compromises the attempt to speak the unspeakable’ (p.â•›156). But all this means, in my view, is that it is precisely this ‘traditional narrative structure’ that needs to be gotten beyond, not narrative itself. But what about coherence? Drawing on the work of Hayden White (1987), Andrews writes, ‘We urgently want and need our narratives to make sense, to be characterised by a logical sequencing, and towards this end, we instil in them a wholeness which is not theirs’ (p.â•›156). There is no questioning the tendency. Along with White, Kermode (1979) notes that we all seek narrative ‘fulfillment, … the center that will allow the senses to rest, at any rate for one interpreter, at any rate for one moment’ (p.â•›73). Paul Smith (1988) goes a step farther, speaking of our ‘claustrophilic’ inclinations, our desire for narrative closure. Insofar as narrative coherence connotes such claustrophilic inclinations, then it too must be gotten beyond, particularly in the context of cases such as those Andrews is examining. To demand this form of coherence from those who have experienced unspeakable atrocities is to do violence to them. On some level, again, experience always exceeds narrative. In extreme situations, this fact becomes that much more clear. Also clear is the fact that there are more, and less, appropriate demands for narrative coherence. When investigating a petty crime, it may be important fashion as coherent a story as possible, such that in the end one can proclaim: case closed. But when dealing with experiences tied to large-scale political traumas, such as those related in the transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it is imperative to not elide ‘messy’ discourse for the sake of the tellable story. As noted earlier, Andrews is speaking here of ‘limit events’, and these ‘pose a challenge to narrative, because they lie beyond language, and possibly beyond representation’. At the same time, of course, there still remains the desire to speak on the part of many victims of trauma, and there still remains the need to tell their stories in a way that is somehow commensurate with, if not entirely adequate to or representative of, their experience. ‘Just as these events demand a new language, so

184 Mark Freeman

too they demand a new method of representation’. Andrews therefore asks: ‘What might this new representation look like? And might new forms of narrative be a useful tool in this most challenging pursuit?’ (p.â•›184). It is here, at this juncture, that we can see most clearly the import of this very volume. The challenge at hand is neither to move beyond narrative nor beyond coherence. Rather, it is to find forms of narrative and modes of coherence that move beyond — well beyond — the classical model in order to do justice to reality, in all of its potential unruliness and beauty, violence and horror. In some narratives, there is simply no room for consolation or redemption — indeed no room even for the sort of ‘followability’ that is generally associated with stories. And certainly, ‘There may be no promise that telling leads to healing’. At the same time, ‘the very act of speech — no matter how garbled or seemingly nonsensical — can begin the process of reconnecting one to the world of the living’ (p.â•›164). Do such acts of speech or writing deserve to be called narrative acts? ‘Traumatic testimonies might not provide listeners with a beginning, middle, and end’ (p.â•›165). I therefore ask: Is it possible to think the idea of narrative — and narrative coherence — apart from these classical categories? Some would say no; do away with this temporal triad and one does away with narrative itself. But it is precisely here, in thinking both narrative and narrative coherence anew, that the challenge at hand begins to emerge in full force. As Andrews has pointed out, the classical categories — endings in particular — frequently seem downright impertinent in traumatic testimony, for there may be no ending, no conclusion, and surely no lesson. But these classical categories, I have suggested, may not work much better in the context of more ordinary lives, like most of our own. As Paul Ricoeur points out in Oneself as Another (1992), there is nothing in real life that serves as a narrative beginning; memory is lost in the hazes of early childhood; my birth and, with greater reason, the act through which I was conceived belong more to the history of others — in this case, to my parents — than to me. As for my death, it will finally be recounted only in the stories of those who survive me. I am always moving toward my death, and this prevents me from ever grasping it as a narrative end. (p.â•›160)

So much for the classical categories: at the most, it seems, all we can speak about, with any cogency and clarity, are ‘middles’! Hayden White and others are partially right when they note that ‘real life’ is different from the stories we subsequently tell about it, particularly those stories that entail false coherence, with the rough edges of experience smoothed out, even erased. But they err, I believe, in separating real life and narrative in the way they have. ‘Without leaving the sphere of everyday experience,’ Ricoeur (1991) adds, ‘are we not inclined to see in a given chain of episodes in our own life something



Chapter 10.╇ Afterword 185

like stories that have not yet been told, stories that demand to be told, stories that offer points of anchorage for the narrative?’ Following Ricoeur, we are ‘entangled’ in stories; narrating is a ‘secondary process’ that is ‘grafted’ onto this entanglement. ‘Recounting, following, understanding stories is then simply the continuation of these unspoken stories’ (p.â•›30). As for narrative coherence, there is no question but that it entails some measure of what Ricoeur refers to as a ‘synthesis of heterogeneous elements’, a seeingtogether of the disparate and different. There need not be unity, in the sense of a single, circumscribed narrative arc. Nor, I would argue, need there be chronology or linearity; many of the most mundane stories we tell about experience move beyond chronology and linearity. What, then, does there need to be in order for us to use the magical word ‘narrative’? There needs to be an aspect of ‘after-thefactness’, a looking-backward, that somehow binds together, however loosely, the ‘heterogeneous elements’ about which Ricoeur speaks. In no way does this mean that narratives deal with the past alone; they can deal with the present and future as well. Nor, emphatically, does it mean that the seeing-together and binding-together process must culminate in coherent stories in the classical style. In point of fact, such stories are of minimal applicability to real life — or at least those aspects of real life that matter. ‘I went to the store, bought some wine, and came home’. The end: case closed, once again. When it comes to the messy stuff of life, on the other hand, the classical categories break down. How messy is it? Messy enough that the classical categories will not suffice but not so messy that we need to relinquish entirely the idea of narrative coherence. Something similar may be said of another fraught term, namely ‘identity’. And here, the story is much the same. I refer once again to Paul Ricoeur (1991): Our life, when then embraced in a single glance, appears to us as the field of a constructive activity, borrowed from narrative understanding, by which we attempt to discover and not simply to impose from outside the narrative identity which constitutes us. I am stressing the expression ‘narrative identity’ for what we call subjectivity is neither an incoherent series of events nor an immutable substantiality, impervious to evolution. This is precisely the sort of identity which narrative composition alone can create through its dynamism. (p.â•›32)

Neither incoherent nor immutable, neither senseless nor static, ‘we’ persist, never quite the same and, with rare exceptions, never entirely different. Even amidst profound difference, there is a measure of identity. And, as we have seen here, even amidst manifest arbitrariness, illogic, senselessness, and incoherence, there is a measure of coherence — or at least, in the case of the victims of limit events, a process of ‘reconnecting one to the world of the living’. In a way, this process of reconnecting may itself be seen as a mode of coherence, binding together what remains of the human community even amidst its devastation.

186 Mark Freeman

References Bamberg, M. (1997). Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7, 335–342. Freeman, M. (1998). Mythical time, historical time, and the narrative fabric of the self. Narrative Inquiry, 8, 27–50. Freeman, M. (2002). The burden of truth: Psychoanalytic poiesis and narrative understanding. In W. Patterson (Ed.), Strategic narrative: New perspectives on the power of personal and cultural stories (pp.â•›9–27). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Freeman, M. (2008). Beyond narrative: Dementia’s tragic promise. In L.-C. Hydén & J. Brockmeier (Eds.), Health, illness, and culture: Broken narratives (pp.â•›169–184). London: Routledge. Freeman, M. (2009). The stubborn myth of identity: Dementia, memory, and the narrative unconscious. Journal of Family Life, 1. Retrieved March 19, 2009, from http://www.journaloffamilylife.org/mythofidentity Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language, thought. New York, NY: Harper Colophon. James, W. (1981). The principles of psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Originally 1890) Kermode, F. (1979). The genesis of secrecy: On the interpretation of narrative.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1981). Narrative time. In W.J.T. Mitchell (Ed.), On narrative (pp.â•›165–186). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1991). Life in quest of narrative. In D. Wood (Ed.), On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and interpretation (pp.â•›20–33). London: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. (1992). Oneself as Another. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sartwell, C. (2000). End of story: Toward an annihilation of language and history. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Smith, P. (1988). Discerning the subject. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. White, H. (1987). The content of the form: Narrative discourse and historical representation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

List of contributors

Tarja Aaltonen is an Assistant Professor in Social Psychology at the University of Tampere, Department of Social Research. Her research interests include such themes as inter-subjectivity, talk-in-interaction, narrative studies and experiences of chronic conditions like aphasia and allergies. Molly Andrews is Reader in Sociology at the University of East London, London, England, and Co-director of the Centre for Narrative Research (www.uelac.uk/ cnr/index.htm). Her research interests include the psychological basis of political commitment, psychological challenges posed by societies in times of acute political change, the psychology of patriotism, the politics of remembering, gender and aging, and counter-narratives. Her most recent book is Shaping history: Narratives of Political Change (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Jens Brockmeier is a Senior Scientist in the Department of Psychology of the Free University of Berlin, Germany, and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Psychology of the University of Manitoba, Canada. His research is concerned with the cultural fabric of mind and language, with a focus on narrative as psychological, linguistic, and cultural form — issues he has explored both as empirical phenomena and as philosophical questions. Mark Freeman, Ph.D, is Professor of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, where he also serves as Dean of the Class of 2011. He is the author of Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (Routledge, 1993); Finding the Muse: A Sociopsychological Inquiry into the Conditions of Artistic Creativity (Cambridge, 1994); Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward (Oxford, forthcoming); and numerous articles on memory, the self, and autobiographical narrative. Among other projects, he is currently working on a book entitled The Priority of the Other: Attention, Devotion, Transcendence, in which he seeks complement his longstanding interest in the self with an in-depth exploration of the category, and place, of the Other in psychological life. Lars-Christer Hydén received his PhD in Psychology from Stockholm University. His current position is as full professor at the Department of Medicine and Health, Linköping University, Sweden. He is also visiting professor at the University College of Bodö, Norway. His research primarily concerns the use of narrative

188 List of contributors

in psychological and social contexts, especially in the area of health and illness. He has published extensively in international journals and edited a number of books about narrative research. Matti Hyvärinen is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the Department of Social Research, University of Tampere, Finland. He is the convener of the Finnish Network of Narrative Studies, and has been active in organizing several Tampere Conferences in Narrative. He is the leader of the research team Politics and the Arts at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change, University of Jyväskylä. He is the co-editor of volume Terror and the Arts, Palgrave 2008, the special issue “Narrative Knowing, Living, Telling”, Partial Answers, June 2008, and the electronic volume The Travelling Concept of Narrative, at http:// www.helsinki.fi/collegium/e-series/volumes/index.htm. Vilma Hänninen is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Kuopio. She attained her doctoral degree in 1999 at the University of Tampere. Her research interests focus on narrative approach to coping with life changes, mental health and recovery from addiction. Anja Koski-Jännes is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Tampere. She attained her doctoral degree in 1993 at the University of Helsinki. She has done both quantitative and qualitative research in the area of addictive behaviours. Her current research interests range from conceptual issues to narratives of recovery and various interventions in problem behaviours. Maria I. Medved is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Manitoba, Canada, and a licensed practicing psychologist. Her research is concerned with the way people deal with threats to their sense of self in disease or after injury. She is especially interested in the narratives people tell themselves and others in order to cope with illness and disability, and one main topic in this regard has been neurotrauma narratives. Alison Stern Perez is currently in the combined MA/PhD program in Social Psychology at Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, Israel, where she is a Kreitman Doctoral fellow. Her doctoral thesis, under the advisorship of Professors Shifra Sagy, Yishai Tobin, and Dan Bar-On, focuses on coping and psychological resilience in Israeli bus drivers who experienced a terror attack. She is investigating the nature of coping with ongoing fear and threat of terror on a daily basis, and the ways in which Israeli society may both contribute to and hinder resilience in these individuals. Marja Saarenheimo, PhD, is a psychologist and works as a senior researcher in the Central Union for the Welfare of the Aged in Finland. Her research interests include geropsychology, mental health, psychotherapy and autobiographical



List of contributors 189

memory. Moreover, she has given courses on narrative and discursive methods in psychology and social sciences co-operating with several universities in Finland. Shifra Sagy is a Professor of Psychology, head of the Conflict Management and Conflict Resolution graduate program, and chair of the Center for Enhancement in Education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Her major research interests are stress, coping and adjustment to stressors, both normative and nonnormative. She is actively involved in peace education in the Palestinian-Israeli context. Linda Sandino gained an MA in Design History at the Royal College of Art/Victoria & Albert Museum, and is currently embarked on a PhD at the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London on identity in life history narratives of applied artists. Her current post is Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum, developing an oral history archive in collaboration with Camberwell College of Arts. Her work also includes a substantial number of recordings for National Life Stories at The British Library National Sound Archive with architects, craftspeople, designers, and painters. She is editor of the Special Issue of the Journal of Design History ‘Oral Histories and Design’ (2006). Other publications have focused on the history and theory of contemporary applied arts. Maria Tamboukou is Reader in Sociology and Co-director of the Centre of Narrative Research, University of East London, UK. Her research interests and publications are in the sociology of gender and education, gender and space, the exploration of foucauldian and deleuzian analytics and the use of auto/biographies in research. She is the author of Women, Education, the Self: a Foucauldian Perspective (Palgrave, 2003) and co-editor with Stephen J. Ball of Dangerous encounters: genealogy and ethnography (Peter Lang, 2003) and with Molly Andrews and Corinne Squire of Doing Narrative Research (London, Sage, 2008). Her current research focuses on fin-de-siècle women artists’ letters and paintings, exploring power/desire connections in the interface of visual and textual narratives. Yishai Tobin is a professor in the Department of Foreign Literatures & Linguistics and the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He is the author and editor of 15 books and over 185 articles in the fields of developmental and clinical phonetics and phonology, discourse and text analysis, and semiotics. He is the editor of the series Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics at John Benjamins Publishing Company and serves on the editorial boards of several international linguistics journals. His research reflects a cognitive and functional approach to language as a system of signs used by human beings to communicate.

Index

9/11   148, 162, 169 A Aaltonen, Tarja   11, 12, 175, 187 absent meaning   159 Actual Minds   4 Adamov, Arthur   161 addiction   103, 105, 107, 113, 115–17, 188 addressee   38, 70, 82, 107, 127 addresser   70, 83 Agamben, Giorgio   159–60 Alzheimer’s disease   9, 23, 29, 34, 36, 40, 42 Améry, Jean   151 amnesia   25 Andrews, Molly   11–13, 168–69, 182–84, 187, 189 annals   5 anticipated telos   117 Apfelbaum, Erika   162 aphasia   11, 34, 40, 49–50, 54, 57–58, 63, 175, 187 archive   68, 71, 84, 160, 164, 189 Arendt, Hannah   72, 164 Aristotle   2–3, 5, 8, 19, 153 art(s)   11, 67–69, 72–74, 77, 82, 84, 87, 89–95, 97–99, 101, 112, 114, 151, 177, 189 artist   11–12, 67–70, 73–74, 76–81, 83–84, 87–101, 103, 106, 109, 176–77, 189 artistic creativity   114 assemblage   75–76, 79, 82, 84 author   4, 9, 12, 18–19, 23, 87, 93–94, 103–8, 112, 117, 123, 132, 145, 161, 178–79, 181, 187, 189 autobiographical   17–19, 21–25, 27–29, 33–42, 44, 46–47,

52, 73, 97, 103–7, 171–72, 174, 187–88 autobiography   88, 103–104, 107–8, 110, 115 Autoportrait a la lettre   68 avant-garde   9, 97 Ayalon, Ofra   124 Ayalon, Yael   145 B Bakhtin, Mikhail   61 Bamberg, Michael   47 Bar-On, Dan   145, 188 Barthes, Roland   151 Baum, Nehami   124 becoming   69–70, 74–76, 78–79, 83–84, 87–89, 91, 98, 176 becoming imperceptible   78 beginning   1–3, 5, 7, 9, 19, 35, 69, 107, 112–13, 115, 137, 152–53, 155, 165, 168, 170, 173, 177, 182–84 Bernstein, Michael André   10 Blanchott, Maurice   159 Boc   156 bohemian   69, 77, 83 bombing(s)   124–5, 129, 132, 135–36, 144 Boulogne Forest, the   81–82 brain   9, 11, 17–18, 20–22, 25–29, 33, 36, 40, 50, 53, 172, 175, 179 brain injury   11, 17, 20, 22, 27, 33, 36, 40 brain trauma   9, 40 Brockmeier, Jens   2, 11, 104, 115, 117, 152, 161–63, 171–73, 187 Bruner, Jerome   4, 8, 9, 17, 33, 100–1, 113, 151 Buber, Martin   165

Bunin, Ivan   110, 112 Burke, Kenneth   19 bus driver   11–12, 121–25, 129, 140, 144–45, 180, 188 C Cain, Carole   45–46 Capps, Lisa   9 Caspari, Isabelle   20 Cavarero, Adriana   72 Cavell, Marcia   62 ceramic art   92–94 character   4, 6, 34–37, 41, 44, 50–51, 55–58, 60, 75–76, 78, 89–91, 95–96, 99–101, 110, 134, 174, 176–77 chronological order   103, 105, 112 chronology   6, 10, 103, 110, 112, 178, 185 lack of chronology   110, 112, 178 chronotopes   77 Clarissa   83 closure (see also foreclosure)   1, 7, 81, 106, 152, 154, 156, 170–71, 183 cognition   29 coherence   1–2, 4–13, 17–21, 23–26, 28–29, 33, 36, 46, 91, 95, 99, 101, 103–4, 147–48, 152, 155–56, 167–71, 173–77, 180–85 coherence paradigm   1–2, 11, 167, 170–71, 177 coherence thesis   1, 9 Colvin, Chris   154 communicative disability   2 completeness   8, 92–93, 98, 101 complexity   4, 7, 20, 82, 170–71, 175 composition scheme   111

192 Index

configuration (see also reconfiguration)   76, 91–92, 94, 96, 99–100, 147, 152, 156 conventional configuration (see also beginning, narrative)   152 consciousness   18, 29, 34–35, 53, 55–56, 76, 113, 172 consciousness novel   9 contemplation   10, 74, 78 content vs. form   128 continuity   19, 22, 27, 40, 74, 152, 173–75, 177 conversation analysis   2, 49, 51, 63 conversational   9, 24–25, 51 cope   8, 51, 121–22, 124, 142–43, 145, 188 Coper, Hans   93–94 coping   121–24, 128, 142, 188–89 Coquorha, Mbuyiselo   154 correspondence   68, 73, 81, 83–84 Count of Monte Cristo, The   4 Craib, Ian   7 Cronon, William   152 Cups of Tears   147 curriculum vitae   7 D Damasio, Antonio   18, 53 Davidson, Donald   60 defensive strategy   117 Deleuze, Gilles   68–71, 73, 75–76, 78, 80, 82–84 dementia (see also Alzheimer’s disease)   9, 11, 20, 22, 27, 29, 33, 40, 42, 169, 172 Dennett, Daniel   18 Denzin, Norman K.   94 dependence   72, 105, 107–9, 117 Derrida, Jacques   71 deterritorialization   69, 74–76, 78, 176 developmental   6, 18, 20, 53, 189 developmental disability   20 dialogue   36, 55, 97, 106, 108, 134, 172, 175

diegesis (see also mimesis)   2 Dinesen, Isak   148 discourse   7, 9, 22–24, 34, 50–53, 55, 110–11, 121–23, 125–28, 130–31, 133, 135–36, 139–42, 144–45, 152, 180–81, 183, 189 discourse analysis   122, 125 discursive mind   29 disorder   8, 25, 104 disposition scheme   111 distributed cognition   29 Doležel, Lubomir   50, 53 Douglas, Jacinta   20 Dover, Yael   145 drama (see also tragedy)   2 E Eakin, Paul   33, 104 Edkins, Jenny   155, 157–59 Elmer, Fanny   78 empathy   42, 96, 162 emplotment   87, 89–92, 96, 101, 147–48, 152, 155, 177 emplotment of trauma narratives   155 traditional emplotment   148 end (see also beginning, middle)1–3,   5, 9, 19, 35, 44, 95, 107, 112–13, 115, 149, 151, 153, 155–56, 159, 165, 170, 173, 177, 182–85 End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History   168 epiphany   93–95, 101 ethics   67 evaluation   3, 10–11, 41–44, 60, 93 event   6, 8–9, 18, 23, 26, 33–39, 41–46, 53, 56, 58, 67, 70–80, 82–84, 90, 95, 101, 105–7, 109–17, 124, 126–27, 136, 139–40, 144, 148, 151–53, 155–56, 158–60, 162–63, 168, 174, 176–78, 182–83, 185 expectation   9, 11, 34, 36, 61, 140, 143–44 experience   2, 5–7, 11–13, 19, 22, 24, 29, 33, 37, 39, 41,

45, 49, 50, 56–58, 61, 63, 70, 73–74, 76–80, 88, 91, 99, 103–4, 109–10, 115–16, 121–23, 125, 127–36, 140–44, 147–49, 151–55, 157–59, 161–63, 168–72, 182–85, 187 experientiality   9, 58 F Fabula   110–11 family   9, 11–12, 23, 26–27, 34–35, 45–46, 50–51, 83 Fictional minds   49 Field, Sean   149 Figure 5,   8, 12, 36–37, 39, 68, 72, 74, 77, 82–83, 88, 91, 93–94, 151 film   9, 71 Fludernik, Monika   9, 58 folk psychology   8–9, 100 folklore   1 For the Love of God   90 force   36, 46, 56, 67, 69, 71–78, 80, 82–84, 114, 124, 144, 147–48, 154, 161, 174, 176, 184 visual forces   67, 72, 83–84 foreclosure (see also closure)   5, 88, 156 form and content   20, 121–22, 133–34, 136 Foucault, Michel   159 Fragile X syndrome   23, 25, 51 fragmentation   4 Freeman, Mark   7, 13, 88–89, 187 Friedlander, Saul   160 G gap(s)   24, 29, 52, 55, 60, 63, 67, 69, 78, 81–82, 110, 175 gaze   77–78 Gazzaniga, Michael   18 gender   92, 126–27, 130, 134, 141, 187, 189 gendered   7, 11, 74, 80, 121, 126–27 genocide   12, 160 genre   5, 19, 61, 91, 104, 150, 164

Index 193



“Gentle Breath, The”   110 Georgakopoulou, Alexandra   51 Gibson, Andrew   71, 75 Goffman, Erving   40, 46 Goldstein, Kurt   29 Goodwin, Charles   50–51 grammatical subject   82 Greenberg, Daniel   18 Greimas, Algirdas   113 Guattari, Felix   69–70, 76 H haecceity   76 “Hang Up”   98–99 Harré, Rom   29 Hartman, Geoffrey   148, 155, 162, 164 health (see also well-being)   19, 35–36, 74, 114–15, 188 Heidegger, Martin   177 Heritage, John   60 Herman, David   9, 53, 62 heroic meaning   163–64 Hesse, Eva   95–99 Hirst, Damien   90 historiography   2, 4–5 history   1, 4–5, 7, 22–23, 25–26, 87–95, 97, 99, 101, 149, 154, 162, 172–73, 184, 189 Holocaust   12, 148, 151, 158, 160, 162–64, 169 crisis of representation   162 European Holocaust   12 Holocaust testimonies   164 Huston   157 hybridity   7 Hydén, Lars-Christer   11–12, 22–23, 173–74, 187 Hymes, Dell   3 Hyvärinen, Matti   92, 169–71, 188 Hänninen, Vilma   10, 12, 178–80, 188 I identity (see also narrative identity)   4, 6, 12, 17–23, 27–28, 33–37, 39–42, 44–47, 76–77, 80, 84, 87–92, 95, 97, 99–101, 103–4, 114, 117, 123,

125–26, 141, 151, 172–75, 177, 185, 189 construction   17–21 idem   12, 41, 87, 89–91, 95, 97, 99–101 ipse   12, 41, 87, 89–91, 97, 99–101 illness   11, 17, 27, 3336, 40, 106, 111, 188 image   18, 67, 71–73, 75, 77, 84, 94–95, 97, 106, 109, 113–14, 116, 135, 156, 163, 167, 179 in-depth interview   121 incoherence   11, 20–23, 25, 27–28, 103, 105, 116–17, 157, 169–71, 173, 178–79, 185 incompleteness   87, 95, 97, 99, 101, 170, 177 individual   6–7, 10–11, 17–24, 26–27, 29, 33, 46, 53–55, 57, 60, 75, 78, 88, 96, 100, 121–24, 127–28, 132, 140–42, 144–45, 147–51, 154–55, 159, 164–65, 172–73, 175–76, 188 individualism   4 injury   11, 17, 20, 22, 27, 33, 36, 40, 142, 188 inner speech   104 interaction   9, 24–27, 29, 36, 39–40, 42–44, 46–47, 49–50, 54, 56, 61–63, 88, 97, 100, 136, 173–74, 187 intermezzo   70,78 internal dialogue   106 interview   1, 11–12, 27, 33, 35, 37–40, 46, 87–88, 92–93, 95, 101, 121–23, 125, 128–32, 135–36, 140–42, 170, 181 Israel   121–25, 143, 188–89 Israel, Kali   83 J Jackson, Michael   153 James, Henry   9 James, William   174 jealousy   79 John, Augustus   69

John, Gwen   11–12, 67–84, 176 Joyce, James   4, 9 K Kerby, Paul   33 Kermode, Frank   153, 183 Kohler Riessman, Catherine   10 Koski-Jännes, Anja   10, 12, 178–80, 188 Kundera, Milan   78 L Labov, William   3, 41 Lacan, Jacques   165 LaCapra, Dominick   156, 162 lacunae   81–82 landscape of action   113 landscape of consciousness   113 Langellier, Kristin M.   9, 52 Langer, Lawrence   151, 158, 163 language   3–4, 12, 25, 34, 50–51, 53–54, 60–61, 80–81, 83–84, 98–101, 109–10, 122, 130, 147–48, 156–63, 169, 171, 178, 182–83, 187, 189 language and silence   147, 160–61 language and social order   158 langue (and parole)   3, 159 larval subject   78 Lefebvre   161 letter(s)   12, 67–84, 176, 189 Lewin, Abraham   147–48 life accounts   104 life experience   58 life history   22–23, 25–26, 87–93, 97, 99, 101, 172–73, 189 life story   1–2, 6–7, 9, 12, 19–20, 26, 33, 35, 45, 52, 87–88, 91–92, 95, 100–1, 106, 115, 117, 123, 170 Linde, Charlotte   6 linear time   84, 155, 183 linearity   8, 10, 12, 67, 152, 167, 169, 185 lines of flight   69–70, 75, 77–78 linguistics   1–3, 189 listening   2, 35, 45, 72, 150, 162–64

194 Index

lived experience   33, 78, 80, 115, 121–22, 131, 152 Living Narrative   9 Luria, Alexander   22, 29 M machine   76, 84, 171 MacIntyre, Alasdair   4, 6 Main, Mary   19 Man Without Qualities, The   34 manifest and latent   13, 167, 179–81 masculinity   11 McAdams, Dan P.   6, 9, 19 meaning   4, 10–11, 19, 23, 33, 51–52, 55, 59, 60–63, 67, 71–72, 88, 91–92, 94, 97–100, 108–10, 116, 121, 123, 125–28, 131, 133, 139–41, 147–48, 150, 153, 155, 159–61, 163–64, 173, 175, 177–79, 181–83 Medved, Maria   2, 11, 51, 171–73, 188 memory   20, 22, 27–28, 42, 72, 94, 108, 110, 112–13, 115–16, 131, 151, 155, 162, 172, 175, 178–80, 184, 187, 189 impairment   20, 22, 172 metaphysical   82 methodology   10, 122–23 middle (see also beginning and end)   1–2, 5, 9, 78, 115, 152–53, 155, 165, 168, 170, 173, 177, 182–84 mimesis (see also diegesis)   10, 91 mimesis, three-fold (see also prefiguration, configuration, refiguration)   91 mind-reading   12, 49–56, 59–63, 175 Mink, Louis   5 minoritarian   74, 77 model   3–4, 9, 11–13, 18, 20, 34, 52, 58, 77, 81, 83–84, 91, 149, 169, 184 modernist autobiography   108, 115 monads   84

monochromatic   77 Morphology of the Folktale   3 Morson, Gary Saul   10 Mpolweni-Zantsi, Nosisi   156 multiplicity   5, 7, 75, 78, 82–83, 174–76, 180 Musil, Robert   4, 34 myth of healing   149 N narratability   67, 72–73, 77, 84, 176 narration   2, 9, 11–13, 17, 22, 25, 33, 51, 56, 62, 72, 83, 103, 106–7, 167, 178 narrative (see also story)   1–13, 17–29, 33–36, 39–42, 44, 46–47, 49–53, 55–56, 58, 62–63, 67–68, 71, 74–75, 77–84, 87–101, 103–6, 110–13, 115–17, 121–23, 127–28, 131, 133–36, 138–42, 147–48, 151–56, 158, 160–65, 167–85, 187–89 autobiographical narrative   17–19, 21, 23, 28–29, 33–34, 36, 42, 104, 171, 187 bad faith narrative   7 broken narrative   2, 36, 49–50, 62–63, 67, 77–78, 81–84, 121–22, 142, 163, 169, 176 conventional narrative   2, 103, 146, 152, 154, 156, 182 epistolary narrative   10, 67, 81 hypothetical narrative   10 inner narrative   104–5, 115–16, 178–79 life narrative   7, 10, 89, 92, 101, 104 narratable self   72 oral narrative   1, 3, 9, 12 personal narrative   88, 162, 164 told narrative   104, 115 narrative and silence   100, 142, 147–48, 161, 164–65 narrative coherence   1–2, 4,

7–8, 10–11, 13, 17, 19–21, 24, 28–29, 91, 104, 167, 169–71, 173, 175, 180–81, 183–85 narrative construction   8, 18, 155 narrative context   135 narrative form   2–3, 5, 20, 82, 148, 152, 155, 163, 182 narrative grammar   3 narrative identity   2, 4, 7, 10, 17–18, 20–21, 28, 34, 87–89, 92, 95, 99–101, 141–42, 170, 174–75, 185 narrative performance   2, 10–13, 27, 29, 34, 44, 47, 52, 170, 174 narrative psychology   6–7, 18, 103–4, 178 narrative structure   103–5, 154, 156, 182–83 narrative studies   1–2, 7, 51–52, 170, 187 narrative time   155, 183 narrativist theory of history   1 narrativity   3, 5, 7, 9, 58, 96, 171, 183 narratology   1–2, 8–9, 49, 51, 53, 58, 75, 77, 176 narrator   1, 11, 17, 22–26, 38–39, 41, 55–57, 60, 90, 92, 94, 99–100, 103, 107–8, 112–13, 121–22, 127, 136, 141, 157, 172, 178 natural narratology   9, 58 Naxalbari Movement (Bengal)   148, 150 neo-Aristotelianism   4 neuropsychology   18 “new woman”   76–77 normative   1, 3–4, 10 novel   4–5, 9, 34, 50–53, 57, 63, 71, 78, 82–83, 92, 113, 158 O Ochs, Elinor   9 Oneself as Another   90, 184 oral history   87, 93, 95, 149, 189 order   8, 10, 33–35, 74–75, 80, 111–12, 152 Örulv, Linda   22–23

Index 195

P painting   67, 71–73, 75–80, 84, 110, 113, 176, 189 Palmer, Alan   49, 53, 57, 60, 63 paradigm (see also coherence paradigm)   1–2, 6, 11–12, 167, 170–71, 177 paradox   8–9, 79–80, 83, 159–60 Parain   161 Paris   67–69, 73–74, 77, 79 Parkinson, S. R.   20 patriarchy   76 Pennebaker, James W.   126 Perez, Alison   11–12, 180–81, 188 performative   11–12, 34, 36, 46, 72, 167, 174 personhood   99 Peterson, Eric E.   9, 52 philosophy   1–2, 73, 75–76 place   7, 37, 46, 69, 79, 92, 100, 112, 128, 135, 137–39, 153, 155, 159, 174, 176, 187 plot   19–20, 23–24, 33–34, 36, 88–89, 91, 96, 104, 106–7, 110, 112, 116–17, 142, 152, 173 polyphony   79 Ponsford, J. L.   20 portrait   11, 68–69, 72–74, 77–78 post-modernist   104 post-traumatic stress disorder   155 postcard   12, 73–74 prefiguration   91–92 Pres, Des   162 private/public   82, 164 pronoun   11–12, 82, 89, 121–22, 125–27, 129–31, 133–36, 142–43, 180–81 Propp, Vladimir   3 protagonist   11, 37, 41, 103, 106–8, 178 Proust, Marcel   68, 82 psychology   1–2, 6–9, 17–18, 51, 100, 103–4, 149, 178, 187–89 public testimony   150 pure thinking   77–78

Q qualitative interview   123 R Radstone, Sara   93, 95–99 reading strategy   10 realism (19th century)   9 reconfiguration   94, 152 recovery   12, 19, 62, 103, 105–6, 109, 117, 148, 154, 188 referentiality   33, 46, 96, 100 refiguration   91–92, 94–96 reflection   17, 24, 39–40, 72, 95–96, 99, 101, 105–7, 112–13, 123, 142, 153, 173, 178 representation   5, 11, 34–35, 52, 73, 88, 104, 150, 157, 160, 162–63, 183–84 resilience   123–24, 142, 144–45, 188 reterritorialization   69 rhetoric   3, 150, 160 Richardson, Samuel   83 Ricoeur, Paul   8, 10, 41, 87, 89–91, 94, 96–97, 100–1, 151–55, 158, 184–85 Rie, Lucie   93 Rilke, Rainer Maria   74, 83 Rodin, Augustus   12, 68–70, 72–75, 77, 79, 81–83 Rosenthal, Gabriele   128 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques   104 Roy, Srila   150 Rubin, David   18 S Sabat, Steven   29 Sacks, Oliver   18, 36 Sagy, Shifra   145, 180, 188–89 Salaman, Michel   67 Sandino, Linda   10, 12, 177, 189 Sartwell, Crispin   168–69 Schechtman, Marya   6 scripts   8–9, 63, 88 self   6–7, 12, 17–23, 25, 27–29, 33, 35, 39–41, 72–73, 75–76, 80, 83, 87–93, 95, 98, 100–1, 115–16, 141, 149, 154, 165, 172–74, 187–88

drafting the self   80 relational self   29 sense of self   17, 19–22, 27, 72, 116, 149, 172, 188 self-narrative   7, 10, 19–22, 103–4, 116–17, 172 self-representation   104 self-understanding   96, 99, 104, 107, 115, 179 semiotic analysis   121 semiotic registers   73, 75, 78, 80 sequentiality   8, 20 side-shadowing   10 sign-oriented linguistics   125 signs   20, 46, 58, 68, 71, 73–74, 76, 78–80, 82, 84, 90, 136, 139–41, 176, 181, 189 Slade School of Fine Arts, the   67 Smith, Paul   183 Snow, Pamela   20 social action   47 social discourse   121, 127, 133, 140, 144 social identity   114, 126 social psychology   2, 51, 187–88 social sciences   1, 17, 189 social self   29, 115 sociology   2, 187, 189 solitude   68, 71, 77–78, 84, 144, 176 South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee   12 space/time   70, 77–78, 176 Spector-Mersel, Gabriela   141–42 split-brain   18 St Augustine   8 Stair, Julian   93–95 Steiner, George   160 Stern Perez, Alison   11–12, 188 story   1–10, 12, 17–26, 33–47, 49–54, 58–59, 63, 72–73, 79, 83, 87–89, 91–97, 99–101, 103–8, 110–13, 115–17, 122–23, 132, 134, 136, 139, 147–55, 157, 162–65, 167–68, 170–85, 189 autobiographical story   19, 21, 23, 25, 33, 35–41, 44, 46–47, 172, 174

196 Index

resolved story   106 told story   58 unresolved story   106 untold story   154 Story Logic   9 storytelling   2, 9, 11–12, 20, 33–35, 37, 40–42, 44–47, 49–50, 63, 128, 136, 154, 170, 173–74 Storytelling in Daily Life   9 storyworld   37, 39, 50–57, 61–63, 175 Strawson, Galen   6, 104, 116 stress   121, 124, 128, 144–45, 155, 189 stroke   20, 22, 25–26, 54, 58 structuralist narratology   2 subject   4–7, 11, 25, 37–39, 50, 67, 69, 72–73, 75–78, 81–84, 88–89, 91–93, 96, 99, 101, 103, 126, 131, 136, 140–41, 149–50, 159, 161, 176 subjectivity   7, 67, 76, 185 surplus meaning   160 survivors of trauma   147–48, 152, 158–59, 171, 182 Suzhet   110 T Tamboukou, Maria   10, 12, 176–77, 189 Tapiès, Antonio   97–99 tellability   9, 168 tellability (and the unsayable)   159, 161 temporality   8, 91, 183 linear time and trauma time   155, 183

temporal schizophrenia   156 terror   121, 124, 140, 188 terror attack(s)   121–24, 128–30, 132–33, 135, 137, 139, 141–44, 188 terrorism   123 terrorist attack(s)   11–12, 148 testimony   87, 147–50, 154–65, 173, 182–84 testimony and suffering   150, 154, 159, 163 traumatic testimony   147–48, 155, 162–65, 182–84 textual   7, 11, 21, 36, 68, 106, 189 time   20, 37–39, 41, 67, 70–78, 84, 90, 92–95, 103, 107, 112, 114, 125, 147, 151–56, 161–62, 168, 176, 182–83 Aion   71, 74–75, 177 Chronos   71, 75, 177 Tobin, Yishai   126–27, 145, 180, 188–89 tragedy   2–3 transitory phase   116, 180 translation   3, 11, 55, 156–57 trauma   1, 9, 11–12, 35–36, 40–41, 113, 117, 124, 147–48, 150–52, 154–56, 158–60, 162–64, 169, 171, 182–83 trauma studies   9 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph   161 Truth and Reconciliation Committee, The (TRC)   11–12, 149–50, 154, 156 Tutu, Desmond   150, 158 Tyrwhitt, Ursula   68, 73–74, 81

U uncanniness   8 understandability   9 unfolding   34, 71–72, 84, 103, 105, 117, 153, 182 unity   4, 6, 77, 82, 152, 170–71, 176, 182, 185 V virtual   70, 73–74, 78, 84, 176 visceral experiences   77 visual   67–68, 72, 83–84, 87, 91, 97, 99, 189 voice   28, 38, 40, 50, 55, 58–59, 62, 79, 87–88, 108–9, 130, 150, 172, 178 Vygotsky, Lev S.   104, 110, 112 W Waletsky, Joshua   3 Warsaw Ghetto   147 well-being (see also health)   13, 19, 167 White, Hayden   4–5, 156, 171, 183–84 Wiesel, Elie   148, 158 Wieviorka, Annette   148, 159 Williams, Gareth   34–35 witness   11, 13, 37, 76, 148–50, 154–56, 158–64, 173 Woolf, Virginia   4, 9, 78 Y Young, Allan   155 Z zero-degree narrativity   9

In the series Studies in Narrative the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 11 Hyvärinen, Matti, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo and Maria Tamboukou (eds.): Beyond Narrative Coherence. 2010. vi, 196 pp. 10 Kurkowska-Budzan, Marta and Krzysztof Zamorski (eds.): Oral History. The challenges of dialogue. 2009. xviii, 224 pp. 9 Bamberg, Michael, Anna De Fina and Deborah Schiffrin (eds.): Selves and Identities in Narrative and Discourse. 2007. x, 355 pp. 8 Georgakopoulou, Alexandra: Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. 2007. xii, 186 pp. 7 Shkedi, Asher: Multiple Case Narrative. A qualitative approach to studying multiple populations. 2005. xvi, 210 pp. 6 Thornborrow, Joanna and Jennifer Coates (eds.): The Sociolinguistics of Narrative. 2005. vi, 300 pp. 5 Quasthoff, Uta M. and Tabea Becker (eds.): Narrative Interaction. 2005. vi, 306 pp. 4 Bamberg, Michael and Molly Andrews (eds.): Considering Counter-Narratives. Narrating, resisting, making sense. 2004. x, 381 pp. 3 De Fina, Anna: Identity in Narrative. A study of immigrant discourse. 2003. xiv, 252 pp. 2 Sell, Roger D. (ed.): Children's Literature as Communication. The ChiLPA project. 2002. xii, 352 pp. 1 Brockmeier, Jens and Donal Carbaugh (eds.): Narrative and Identity. Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. 2001. vi, 307 pp.