Narrative and Reality

ABSTRACT
The article explores the narrative construction of reality in life stories. First, the context of the research is introduced and second, the concept of reality is discussed. Third, narrative construction of one life story is analysed, turning to the relationship between performance and content. As researchers, we have no access to the reality of past events, but only to memories, stories and documents. In oral history, both factual information and the meanings attributed to the past by the people who have lived through it are of equal importance, and both are constructed through emotional, involved, figurative production by the authors of life stories.

One of the greatest challenges faced by researchers analysing narratives is how to approach the construction of social reality through the life stories told by individuals. How are these performances related to facts? Since oral history specialists are interested in social reality and social history (facts, events), this issue is of utmost importance. To quote the prominent Italian oral historian Alessandro Portelli: “Oral history shifts between performance-oriented narrative and content-oriented document” (1998: 26, emphasis in original). During field work the interviewer is often carried away by listening to narratives, following the thread of the story spun by a narrator. Yet, as these marvellously absorbing stories are transcribed and turned into written text, an interviewer often discovers that many of them contain very little factual information, are fragmentary and even chaotic, and not all of them have been told in formal or even grammatically acceptable language. Although some stories are told in a captivating and expressive manner, transcription may reveal a lack of order, with only a few brief passages appearing to be of scholarly interest. In my study of life stories I often confront a problem: what to do with the narratives that I suspect contain interesting information which is buried in a chaotic and artistic articulation?
The aim of this essay is to explore the narrative construction of reality in life stories and the relationship between performance-oriented storytelling and content-oriented description. First, I will discuss the context of the research; second, I will explore the concept of ‘reality’. Third, I will analyse the narrative construction of one life story, from the perspective of the relationship between performance and content.

The National Oral History research project
My interest in the narrative construction of reality was initiated by listening to, and analysing, life stories collected within the context of the National Oral History (henceforth NOH) research project in Latvia. The NOH project was founded at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia. Its aim is to research the diversity of Latvian social life within a broad historical perspective; to record, preserve and analyse the life stories of the older generation, whose life experience covers the most important social changes and historic events of Latvia’s recent history. There are approximately 3,000 audio-recorded life stories in the NOH archive.
The NOH research project was launched in 1992. In the early 1990s, life stories had a special significance for the post-socialist countries in general, and for Latvia in particular. Memories were used to construct a sense of continuity with the first period of Latvia’s statehood (1918–1940) and they served as testimonies of the years of Soviet occupation (1940–1941 and 1944–1991); memories also played an important role in the process of mobilizing ethnic consciousness and constructing new identities at an individual as well as a national level (Tisenkopfs 1993: 4); and memories opened up new themes and new interpretations of events when official history from the Soviet period provided an incomplete, if not false, version of the past. As individual memories were told as testimonies to the past and as a part of national history, the question of authenticity of experience and truthfulness of story was of great importance.
I started to work with the NOH project as an interviewer and assistant about ten years ago. More than one hundred life stories have been recorded since then. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on the social construction of life stories a few years ago. Yet I am still intrigued about the subtle relationship between life, experience and story, as well as the complex task of solving this puzzle.

‘Reality’ in the context of oral history
By using biographies as sources in research, we are exploring the connections between biography and history, between individual experience and social change. Oral history research is sensitive to the historicity of personal experience and the role of the individual in the history of society and in public events (Portelli 1998: 26). In oral history research the balance between personal and social, biography and history is important.
However, there is no consensus on methodology: how this balance is to be achieved, the role of the historian and the kind of reality which is revealed through life stories and thereafter constructed in the historian’s text. The term ‘reality’ can be defined in various ways and has a long and complicated linguistic history. In the Platonic sense, realism was clearly connected to the sphere of the absolute and objective existence of universals while in the fifteenth century the English word ‘real’ refers to something that actually exists. From the sixteenth century the sense becomes more general as ‘real’ is contrasted with ‘imaginary’ as well as with ‘apparent’: realism is connected with the purpose of revealing things as they really are (Williams 1988). These conceptions are well known to historians, who are interested in the broad picture of the past. But even the term ‘history’ has a double meaning in English, for it refers both to actual past events and to the narration or description of past events (Tonkin 1992: 117); the border between what actually happened and what appeared to spectators is blurred. What is more, as social historian Paul Thompson (1988) cautions, history is never knowledge for its own sake; it always depends upon its social purpose. This makes the problem all the more complex, for it means that in our memory we not only make note of some events and dismiss others, but that the historian of the past can also do the same thing.
Historians are generally interested in past events, how they really happened. In other words, they are keen to render an accurate picture of the past. In the 1960s, the task of the oral historian was thus formulated: eyewitnesses were interviewed in order to reconstruct the past. Drawing a distinction between true and false history and evidence was of great importance. Although contemporary oral historians now speak about the ‘construction of the past’ rather than its ‘reconstruction’, the question of truth continues to be of contemporary concern. For example, in his discussion of the achievements of oral history, Paul Thomson says: “Oral evidence, by transforming the ‘object’ of study into ‘subjects’, makes for a history which is not just richer, more vivid and heart-rending, but truer” (Thompson 1988: 99, emphasis in original text). ‘True’ being the adjectival form of ‘truth’, we now have an even more tendentious term than reality. Common dictionary definitions for truth include “agreement with fact or reality” (Wikipedia), or “the body of real things, events, and facts” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus), but in philosophical discussions there is no single agreement about the meaning of truth.
There are two main approaches dealing with the problematic character of truth and reality in the social sciences. One view is based on a positivist approach, which is closely related to the natural sciences—reality or truth objectively exists (furthermore, only one truth is possible), and a scientist goes out into the field and discovers it (correspondence theory). Another view, the constructivist approach, contends that there is a significant distinction between nature and human society: in human society reality is always socially constructed in a particular time and space (constructivist theory). For example, the same events of the past can be seen and interpreted differently in various periods of time (Charmaz 2002). A telling example is the written or official history produced during totalitarian epochs. Even in a less controlled situation, however, social reality remains constructed and an opinion is recognised as true only according to mutual understanding and agreement. In these circumstances it is possible that people will be unable to agree on a single version of the truth (or the past), and that various social groups will hold distinct opinions on what happened—on what is objectively true and what is not. Oral history, to a large extent, is a child of postmodernism and pluralism, and projects a view of the recent past as a room where different voices coexist, thereby demonstrating just how complex and versatile so-called objective reality actually is.
The advantage of oral history is that, unlike most documentary sources of history, it proffers various views of the same event, in some cases challenging the established version accepted by the majority. Oral history sees the world as significantly diverse. However, this issue is even more intricate, because in oral history we have to deal not only with history, but with memory as well. As we know, reality and our perception and experience of it, as well as its recounting, differs according to circumstance (Bruner 1986; Riessmann 1993). The oral historian works with evidence—narratives that essentially are interpretations of experience in language and always structured according to some conventions. But the goal is to reveal a truer picture of reality.
As mentioned before, oral history shifts between performance-oriented narrative and content-oriented document. A life story recorded during a biographical interview is performance-oriented narrative, while the product of the historian’s research should be a content-oriented document which constructs or reconstructs the reality of past events. In a life story the division between genres is nebulous—narrators do not draw a line between a true story based on facts and a good narrative, told with expression. Possibly, narrators are inspired by the joy of telling itself, whereas the historian looks for factual information. Portelli asks just what kind of truth can be found in narratives. For him, the answer resides in the possibility that the aesthetics of the narrative, through its symbols and feelings, may enlighten our understanding of history (Portelli 1998). Consequently, the task of the oral historian is much broader than simply being a rational analyst of the past. A symbolic and aesthetic narrative may turn out to be just as important as factual information if we are seeking to understand meanings attributed to the past by people who have lived through it, and how these meanings are constructed.

The introduction to Elvira’s story
The following is an analysis of the construction of a particular story with an aim to explore the tangled web of narrative and facts (something factually existing). In oral history research it is relatively easy to analyse clear, well structured and factually-oriented narratives. Yet few narrators tell their tales to please the scholar, and scholarship would be impoverished if only the model narrators were studied. I would like to present a rather ordinary interview from which a life story was recorded. Recorded in 1996, it is a three hour interview conducted by researchers from the NOH project in the small village of Vadakste in Latvia. Elvira was born in 1935 and adopted when she was one year old. An agriculturist by education, she spent all her working life on a collective farm, mostly as a simple farm worker, but at some periods also as agriculturist. Thematically, the narrative focuses on the time of the collective farms and it is told as a web of anecdotal situations. Elvira’s story is a very expressive performance, with rich intonations, changes in the speed of speech and various means of expression. It contains vivid information about the establishment of collective farms and the particularities of work on these farms. Nevertheless, the structure is chaotic, the narrative mode is mixed with the factual mode, and the episodes which are remarkable are often hidden amidst awkward narrations.
The sequence of episodes bears more resemblance to stream of consciousness texts than to a chronologically arranged life story. Succinctly put, the structure revealed during the first forty-five minutes makes it possible to distinguish twenty-four episodes or passages. To mention the first few: Elvira’s origins; her foster-parents and the change of residence; the beginning of her schooling; her father, his education; schooling during the war; self-appraisal (the fanatical country dweller); attitude towards learning; attitude towards work in former times and nowadays. While some episodes do not exceed more than a minute, the few longer ones add up to five minutes of narrative. Two themes, namely education and work, predominate in these episodes. Each small episode or passage contains some interesting details, personal information or a scrap of factual information, as well as an abundance of reflection and appraisals. However, this entanglement of episodes is more associative than chronological, even though overall the narrative follows a linear sequence in the development of events (it begins with childhood, proceeds with school and work, and concludes with the time after Latvia regained independence).
For example, when Elvira begins the story of her schooldays, a redirection takes place as she characterises primary-level education in pre-war independent Latvia based on the educational level of her father (who received only primary schooling), contrasting it with the level of training courses in the agricultural professional schools during the 1950s. She notes that her father was given the task of supervising the work of other trainees in the tractor courses, despite his ostensibly ‘low’ educational qualifications. When speaking of herself, she relates that she worked on a collective farm after graduation from primary school and it was only after three years of work experience that she went on to continue her education; then her son is mentioned, who went to professional school but after his first year there was contemplating abandoning his studies. The episodes are united by the same geographical location of action, and most importantly, by the same moral: simple labour makes one appreciate the value of education. Through the narrative, even though it is not a coherent, linear account, we discover facts about the life of the narrator and her close relatives, but more importantly, analysis allows us to explore Elvira’s values and world view.

Knowledge or understanding

In order to elucidate the complexity of the narrative construction of reality, a specific transcription about the virtue of work makes a good example. The passage is a byplay (or redirection) in Elvira’s story about her first work experience: it opens and closes with a reference to her first work experience on the collective farm but the middle is taken up by a comparative appraisal of the human virtue of industriousness; it appears to be an explanation of the changes that took place during Soviet times and simultaneously a juxtaposition which sheds light on the narrator’s perception of work. In the course of the transcribed passage one can observe the complicated temporal construction characteristic of autobiographical narratives: events that are temporally distant from one another (the 1950s, the 1970s and the present 1990s) are brought together side by side and compared in one episode. This short narrative is seventy-seven seconds long, told in rapid-fire speech, with a sober intonation. Here it is not abbreviated; pauses are marked with dots and stronger emphases are marked in italics, but smaller intonation changes are not notated. Obviously, transcription from Latvian to English poses further problems, not specifically at issue here.

So you see, I worked on a collective farm for a while, didn’t I.

But then just... what then, they just did not work then as they do now, when they work. By the way, I have such a saying, don’t I, well, let’s say a collective farm at the end of the 1970s, of the 1980s, isn’t it... I used to say: “If we, let’s say, in the beginning of the 1950s, when the collective farms began, had had the machinery of today and the people of those times, suppose: we would not know what to do. We would have managed it all, cultivated and... and... and then looked for, as they say, picking weeds off the roadsides, suppose.”… But then, still, that exceptionally…

By the way, between us, then there is an anecdotal expression, brought back sometime from Riga: why do we dis... why do we dislike Russians, don’t we… The answer is then…, that famous Armenian radio, and the answer is, then—because they stole the joy of working from us… It is an anecdote, after all. The jobless of today, all of them. Well... well... well... is it...? Simply a man just does not realise, does not understand, what he should do and that he should do anything at all, if he has gone in the morning to... there to the repair garage, hasn’t he, and you don’t tell him—… do that and go there, and this here, he is not able to think of it himself. The young ones, as well… Well...Well, so it is. /a sigh/... Well, then I worked properly at that time, for example, my duties were...

Does this excerpt tell us any facts about reality? We may deduce that in the 1950s all agricultural work was manual, people were hardworking and self-directed, but nowadays there are groups of people who have lost these qualities (jobless, youth). And thus we have one unit of Soviet folklore. The narration also reveals the narrator’s perception of work—her evaluation of work habits, her explanation for changes in the attitude towards work during the Soviet period. It is the usage of a popular anecdote that links her subjective opinion to the one prevailing in the wider society. This episode is an illumination, elucidating a perception of the past: we are told that something happened to the work habits of people during the Soviet period and its consequences are still felt even today. Rather than the so-called hard facts of reality (statistics, concrete events), the saying and the anecdote are used so as to concisely and accurately characterise the age and the people. For the narrator it is important not only to mention her tasks, to describe the working day, but also to explain the attitude and to show the changes in work habits. Are historians interested in facts like these? For a constructivist approach, the understanding of the meanings attributed to facts is just as important as reaching for the knowledge of ‘facts’ themselves.

The work of genre
In the analysis of life stories we pay attention not only to what is told, but also to how it is told. After all, experiences are represented through language in narrative. The past may be constructed differently. Life stories may be told as testimonies, reports, or even simply as stories. The genres themselves structure the account. The rules of form and the means of expression are the tools through which reality (the past) is constructed. Elvira tells her life as a story by making use of rich cultural resources and it is their presence which allows one to perceive the factual information of the text rather like the elucidation of truth, as perceived by the narrator in her sense of that age.
The narrator often uses the word “anecdote”, referring both to anecdotes as a recognised genre of folklore, as well as to various episodes of her life—not only comical, but also those in which individual values are juxtaposed with the officially dominant ones. The units of narrative in this case are also often built according to the principles of the structure of an anecdote, forming short stories which vividly show a particular aspect of life which contains a lesson for the listener and makes one smile (or sigh) at the same time. The narrator calls these small episodes anecdotes, stories and even—novels. Timothy G. Ashplant (1998) has studied anecdotes and jokes as a narrative genre in the life stories of British workers; these succinct narratives allow their narrators to characterise, and their listeners to recognize, an episode as comical. Ashplant (1998) has shown that the form of the narratives is borrowed from popular musicals, which provide an example based on which the story of private experience is constructed. Like British workers, who have adjusted the form of musicals to narrate their life stories, the former farm worker in Latvia has adjusted an anecdote as a form which aids in the communication of her life experience. It must be noted, however, that some elements of the episodes are not comical at all, but the irony in this case makes for an easier telling and perception of a story which also includes difficult life situations (for example, the lodgement of new farm workers in the property in 1940, joining a collective farm in 1949, not entering Komsomol at the beginning of 1950s, etc.). The ironic anecdote is a lens through which life events are told. In these episodes the narrative mode prevails over the factual mode.

Certainly, the overall form of a life story involves far more complex modes of expression than that of an anecdote. This story also contains other manners of expression as well, such as language formulas that are related to the texts of folklore or their contemporary interpretation, and popular elements of colloquial speech which impart life and expression to the narrative (Bela-Krūmiņa 2004). The narrator uses expressive metaphors such as, for example, “Upeniek’s church” (when talking about a technicians’ workshop—‘Upeniek’ being the surname of the premise’s builder). She freely borrows means of expression from the folk repertoire when describing her job experiences: “I was one smart wife” (Wagtail was a smart wife, Latvian folksong No. LD 2594-0); (1) “mixing about up there” (As I mixed about at the front, Latvian folk song No. LD 7918- 4). Stories of some episodes in her life often create ‘a special time’ and begin with a reiterated linguistic formula: “then again it was so”; “and then the situation was such that” (‘once upon a time’—a typical introductory formula to a fairy tale). She also introduces some narrative episodes with a title, just like a tale: “how the new farmers were made”; “how the collective farms were made”. The narrator uses the popular elements of contemporary colloquial speech and a humorous mode of expression, for example: “And I look, dear me!—Those are fields of beetroot!” and “Because, you see, I entered there from a farm, and got to be a head specialist for some reason, isn’t that right.”
The narrator builds expressive and picturesque scenes by using contrasts: “Damn! However didn’t I get white hair, do ya know? Maybe I did, it just can’t be seen in my case. That was a silent horror.” “Even though I lived on with a hope—it will all be alright somehow. It might become better, or then again it might not, we’ll live to see, won’t we?” The narrator uses, as she calls them herself, private sayings: “I served in a collective farm all my life as a notes puļķis” (a virtually untranslatable term describing someone who can substitute for others in almost any situation); “Well, it is no different than a manor” (about the collective farm); “I said: I have it well, I do not have to restructure, as I have not structured anything yet!” (about perestroika, the economic reform policy of Mikhail Gorbachev).
On the basis of a classic oral history interview (as well as in a classic oral text) one can find motives and themes emphasising the interconnection between the individual and the public. For example, narrators relish stories of ‘standing up to the big man’: theatrical anecdotes about a personal confrontation with representatives of institutional authorities (workers against superiors, students against the teaching staff, and so on), and personal courage, professional pride or political resistance in complicated representations (Portelli 1998). Elvira’s story is not an exception. A narrated discussion with the secretary of the Komsomol is just such a classic motif and simultaneously this episode depicts important aspects of life during the Soviet regime and bears witness to the self-identity of a contemporary Latvian:
And then she tried to convince me all night—a person with the highest education of the Party— that I needed to enter Komsomol, did she not. And I, with my collective farm experience, a bit over 20 years and no child anymore, with my Party non-education contradicted her. And, do you understand, all night, and she did not convince me. She is telling me all the time, how it should be, but I oppose her from what I have seen every day. It even went as far as 1937, when Stalin shot two out of three of the Politburo. That was already a national secret. And she admits it all, and in the end I drove her to tears. And she said: “Shoot me today, but I am convinced that it is so.” And I said: “Here, I see the first that is [there] for her persuasion.” Because before that I’d had some unpleasant experiences that when you enter [Komsomol] for career reasons, well—because of some kind of advantage. I said: “If I had met someone earlier, who entered because of conviction, I might have entered a long time ago. But I don’t have that conviction that I must be there out of obligation.” (…) When she cannot convince me ideologically, she says: “It will be of a great importance at the allocation, when you will finish the professional school.” But I have a lot of heart, so I say: “I shall go herd the pigs, but I will not enter just to get a better allocation.” And, please, I have herded pigs all my life. I came to the collective farm, when the boss of agricultural inspection says: “You need an agriculturist in the collective farm.” “That agriculturist”, says the head of the collective farm, “will come to work, who can be a Party secretary.” Maybe then I would have started my career as an agriculturist right after that, wouldn’t I? But now, please, you see how her words fulfilled themselves.

Here, understanding Elvira’s version of ‘standing up to the big man’, or the depiction of the role and functioning of ideology and instruments of control in the Soviet system, becomes a matter of disciplinary training and education. The sociologist and oral historian will probably pay closer attention to the description of events, whereas the folklorist will focus on the cultural aspects. Power relations, the connection between ideology and upward mobility, the consequences of individual decisions in some aspects of Soviet reality are so vividly drawn in the narrative; colloquial speech, linguistic and performance skills are the means employed.

A tentative conclusion
Reality is a confusing term in oral history, the accepted view being that we have no access to it in terms of ‘what really happened’. All we have left are memories, stories, and in many cases, various documentary sources, also invariably coloured by their author’s subjectivity, aims and assumptions. All we can do is to attempt to bring these pieces together, evaluating their construction and the conditions of social use.
Life stories in the Latvian context are seen as authentic testimonies about an obscure or corrupted past. The value of eyewitness accounts is often taken for granted and narratives are considered as imprints of experienced events. In the National Oral History research project we want to collect testimonies of memories but we approach such testimonies as constructions of reality. Memories about ‘what really happened’ on the one hand, and the narrative strategies, genre and language repertoire, on the other, together shape life stories. In Elvira’s story, the figuratively depicted functionaries of the Party or Komsomol characterise the reality of that time, as do the changes that the narrator notes regarding the peoples’ work ethic during the Soviet period. The stories of economic management in post-war conditions, the formation of new labour farmers and the ensuing collectivisation reveal the feelings of the people involved and the details of everyday life masterfully. Almost every episode contains a well-targeted message that throws light on past events. Subjectivity is clearly visible and reality is constructed using tools associated with fiction rather than factual report. Elvira’s story is a typical oral performance, an expressive message to the listeners; the narrator uses anecdotes, expressions, proverbs, as well as nonverbal tools such as intonations, speed of speech, and so on to tell her tale.
The language of life story interviews is an oral language and it depicts reality in a different way than written language and especially scientific discourse. The scientific description of reality is systematic, argument-based, well-ordered, critical and reflexive. An oral life story, however, is made up of vivid dialogue; quite often it is figurative, expressive and it primarily reveals appraisals and feelings, not a neutral configuration of events. Even though the discipline of oral history claims to reveal the view of the events from the vantage point of the witnesses, and, subsequently, the emotional appraisal and symbolic depiction which are an integral part of it, the framework of the academic tradition does not easily provide a corresponding form uniting the emotional, involved, figurative author’s discourse and critical, systematic, argument-based scientific discourse into an organic whole. As genres, life stories and oral history offer different views of ‘what really happened’.

NOTES
 (1). The number of the song in Latvju Dainas (LD), an edition of Latvian folksongs.

REFERENCES
Ashplant, Timothy G. 1998. Anecdote as Narrative Resource in Working-class Life Stories. In P. Thompson and M. Chamberlain (eds), Narrative and Genre. London: Routledge.
Bela-Krūmiņa, Baiba 2004. Dzīvesstāsti kā sociāli vēstījumi. (Life Stories as Social Messages.) Doctoral Thesis. Rīga: University of Latvia.
Bruner, Edward M. 1986. Experience and It’s Expressions. In Victor Turner and Edward M. Bruner (eds), The Anthropology of Experience. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
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Portelli, Alessandro 1998. Oral History as Genre. In Mary Chamberlain and Paul Thompson (eds), Narrative and Genre. London: Routledge.
Riessman, Catherine Kohler 1993. Narrative Analysis. Newbury Park: Sage.
Tisenkopfs, Tālis 1993. Dzīve un teksts. (Life and Text.) Latvijas Zinātņu Akadēmijas Vēstis (Proceedings of Latvian Academy of Sciences) 5 (550): 1–8 lpp.
Thompson, Paul 1988. The Voice of the Past: Oral history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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INTERNET SOURCES
Wikipedia. Truth. Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth>. Accessed 19.7. 2007.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus. Truth. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.
Merriam-Webster 2004. <http://search.eb.com>. Accessed 12.11. 2007.

BAIBA BELA , Ph.D
RESEARCHER
INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY
LAT VIAN UNIVERSITY
Baiba.bela-krumina@lu.lv

Source: SUOMEN ANTROPOLOGI, Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, Volume 32, Number 4, WINTER 2007, pp: 24-33.