Published in: Wolfgang Maiers, Betty Bayer, Barbara Duarte Esgalhado, René Jorna

and Ernst Schraube (Eds.) Challenges to Theoretical Psychology, Captus Press, 1999,
pp. 235-244

Life Narratives and the Construction of Normality

Alessandra Fasulo

University "La Sapienza", Roma, Italia

Life narratives will be looked at in this paper not only as sense-making

machineries, but also as life-making craftworks. The constructive power of narratives as

concerns everyday experience and self-understanding is often taken for granted in the

relevant literature, but the nature of the relationship among the concepts just mentioned

is viewed differently by different authors (see Brockmeier, this volume, for a review of

existing hypotheses at this regard). The approach adopted here consider narrative to be a

social activity, as all discourse is, but having, given its structural properties, the capacity

of embodying other kinds of discourse as well as action. By putting together in coherent

accounts things such as event reports, descriptions, evaluations and social categories,

narratives produce local patterns of interconnection among these elements, sets of

meaningful relationships that are at the same time linguistic and worldly, expressive and

practical. In autobiographical talk, the self can be presented, described and understood

with reference to the position and moves it takes within such shared and value-laden
narrative webs. To be sure, the self can only live, so to speak, in this social and narrative

“habitat”, by which it is created in the first place1

This paper will thus be addressed to investigate the processes whereby narratives of

the self are produced interactionally, with a focus on the way in which ordinary

activities are used, understood and re-produced as evidence for autobiographical

statements. First an overview it is provided of the basic theoretical points guiding the

analysis of the conversational material that will be presented.

Theoretical overview

Narratives as cultural archetipes

The more one considers narratives in abstract, formal terms, the more it is possible

that they be ascribed to well established genres in the history of literature or in folkloric

motives. One may refer for instance to Gergen and Gergen (1983, 1988) and their

graphic representation of Frye's typology of miths, or to the patterns identified by

Elsbree (1982), such as consacrating a home, engaging in a contest or taking a journey.

Certainly there is a definite number of plots or patterns which is provided by culture in

the broad sense of the term and constitutes the horizon of the "thinkability" of any story.

This view has fascinating aspects to it and has produced nice results, but it accounts for

a limited portion of the process, as acknowledged also by some of the cited authors (see

Gergen & Gergen, 1983). For one thing, it is difficult in such terms to account for

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change in social life and for the process whereby some events are perceived and told

along a particular storyline and not another one.

An ethnographic-conversational perspective seem to offer a more subtle and

effective description of how narratives relate to life-events and to the inscription of

identity in the tissue of social reality.

Local story-telling and world fabrication

A clear illustratrion of the role played by narrative in social life is the research of

Bauman (1986), who analyzed tales and anecdotes of personal experience in a Texan

community. These were tellings of "practical jokes", which are not only verbal but

include a good deal of manipulation of the cognitive and perceptual reality of the victim

or "dupe" (like the movie The Sting), a verbal activity very frequent and appreciated in

men gatherings. In examining the tellings Bauman finds that narratives are operating

devices for the accomplishment of the “practical joke”, since fabrication and

organization of the joke, debriefing of the dupe and epilogue of the joke are all story

tellings, and that the jokes’ narrative accounts have a modelling influence in the creation

of new jokes.

So, not only are narratives the tools to build the artificial reality of the joke, but

they also exert an influence on the shape of the social activity as a whole. The figures of

the joke-teller and that of the joke-maker are merged, and, since are both socially

valued, narrative ability contributes substantially to the definition of the local identity of

the participants. A similar interplay between action, discourse and identity mediated by

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a particular narrative genre is what emerges also in the dialogues that will be examined

later in the paper.

Bauman concludes his discussion arguing that anecdotes within a community have

a metaphoric and metonymic property, are "a kind of extended name or label for the

recurrent social problem they portray", conveying an attitude toward such situations as

well as a strategy for dealing with them (Ibidem:76).

The allegorical nature of stories is considered at some length by Clifford (1986).

Examining ethnographic reports, he notes that their relevance for the reader stems by

the possibility of a comparison of aspects of the culture described with similar ones in

the receiving culture, such as meaningful moments in a woman life cycle, giving birth to

a child and the like. Clifford does not see the allegorical feature of ethnographic

narratives as a secondary byproduct or an arbitrary addition of the reader: on the

contrary, the allegorical reading is made possible and elicited by distinct registers in the

text and is "the conditions of its [the text’s] meaningfulness" (Clifford, 1986:99).

When viewed as allegories, narratives are as much accounts of the past as

programmes for the future. They look forward toward their next instantiation.

The processual nature of identity

Anthropological reflections are also relevant here for what concerns the processual

nature of identity as established in the dialogue between ethnographer and native

(Clifford, 1988; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Crapanzano, 1980). Identity is considered to

be an emerging feature of the encounter, and a field effect much more than a stable set

of traits or behaviours. In other words, identity would stem in this view from the

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particular sets of categories, and their internal opposition, that the situation makes

relevant, and from the alternating interpretations of the dialogue’s participants. The

external boundaries of both self and other descriptions would thus coincide with the

acknowledgment of a contextual difference within an ongoing confrontation.

The conversation analysis’ (CA) approach is close enough to the dynamics of social

interaction to enable inspection on the processual emergency of identity.

Taking into account the portion of identity available in public descriptions in the

form of social categories (baby and mummy, hotrodders, elderly), CA’s work has been

addressed to the way in which the categories give and receive meaning by being used in

particular discursive activities. Sacks (1964/1992) has named MIR (Membership

Inference-rich Representatives) those expressions of a language used for classyfying

persons. If you put one of these categories instead of a name of a person in a sentence

like "X did such and such", (like for instance in “that woman”, “the policeman”, “an

Englishman” and so on) you get an addition to the body of knowledge currently

available about the X category. When thinking of persons in terms of categories, any

action taken by one of them can be assumed as exemplary.

Categorical ascription is fundamentally linked with 'perspective', in that it reveals

(or it is interpreted differently according to) the position of the speaker. Categories are

thus names for classes of behaviors, and behaviors are related to categories by discourse

in which they are spoken. This functioning of categories is relevant here in that it can be

used for autobiographical purposes: any given behavior which can be related to those

listed under a given class can be used for ascribing one self to the class or category, e.g.,

displaying one’s membership. Becoming a member means "to make stateable about

yourself any of the things that are stateable about a member" (Sacks, 1992:47).

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 Autobiographical narratives along the therapeutic path

I will turn now to some data with the aim of showing how the

narrative/categorizing operations described can be deployed in the "fabrication" of a

new identity by people who live under a strong marginal and negative label.

The corpus I have worked on is made by 8 group therapy sessions in a community

of ex drug abusers. Six people were living in the community, a house high up on a hill,

all men, with a period of residentiality ranging from a few days to almost two years.

The initial choice for this kind of situation had been rather unspecific: I thought it

could be interesting to study autobiography through the talk of some people involved in

revising their life history and trying to change their self-image within society. Soon after

the beginning of my visits to the place I realized that the development of

autobiographical accounts in this context could not be disconnected from the specific

trouble that they had gone through, but also, and more important, that the particular

frame of the therapeutic discourse was providing words and structure to the accounts.

Sad stories in shape of tragedy

Some of the narrative themes I found are largely common to other situations, and

structures are visible which can be understood in formal terms. A former study (Fasulo,

1994) has shown that the history of the contact with heroin and entering dependancy

had the structure of the "tragedy" in Gergen and Gergen terms, namely a plateau

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representing normality or happiness and a sudden fall due to causes external and

independant from the protagonist. This is the structure of "the sad story", as Goffman

(1969) called it, of which he found versions in the accounts of different kinds of "fallen

angels": prostitutes, jail prisoners, psychiatric inmates.

Together with the casualty of the negative turning point, the sad story implies a

description of the antecedent period in terms of "normality", and this is the part of the

story that we are asked to use for judging the teller. As shown in the excerpts 1 and 2,

"normality" is constructed here by reference to the most ordinary activities: "to have a

good job", "to lead an active life", "to not cause trouble to the family", even "to play

soccer" (not in the excerpts) are amongst the things mentioned to evoke a maximum

degree of typicality - and unpredictability of the events to follow.

The reports in the excerpts are recallings of a former therapy session, held with a

larger group and with other therapists.

[The sessions are organized as individual colloquia between the therapist and one participant, with

the others occasionally called in from the therapist or asking him the right to talk. Patients names are

fictional ones. Transcript notation (see appendix) has been reduced to a minimum, since the talk has been

translated from Italian. Arrows indicate the turns illustrating the points made in the analysis]

Excerpt 1
Therapist: What did you say when you talked about yourself last sunday?

Francesco: About myself? I said that:

 That I was always: an active guy.

 I've always worked, eh: always worked, I have never given

troubles at home because I was working and: I had (...) money

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Excerpt 2
Therapist: What did you say about yourself,

Nino: ...I don't know. About myself that:

 that I was a very lively boy,

 I liked to go to the se:a=I liked to travel abroad,

 I liked to go in the mountains skiing- I like water skiing-

 I was a guy who enjoied life and worked.

Through iterative tenses, adverbs like always and never, and absence of particular

episodes, the activities recalled in the opening of the narratives are assigned a “scripted”

character (Edwards,1994)., becoming representatives of the ordinariness and positive

simplicity of these person’s former life But here the usefulness of the common template

stops, because the therapeutic dialogue is oriented to transform the sad story in a

different account, involving psychological realities and demanding detailed narratives

beyond the glosses used to present infancy and youth as normal. The narrative form

encouraged by the therapist is a genre the residents learn through the therapeutic talk,

and it is encouraged since it addresses the supposed problem of the patients and

consequently the goals that the participants have to pursue during their stay.

The following excerpt starts just after the therapist has challenged2 the patient’s

“normality picture”, so Luca is going back again to his childhood providing a quite

different account:

Excerpt 3
Luca: My father: he seldom came home 'cause he had to run the bar.

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 I was seven, eight years... he had this bar and he brought

home some bottles... whiskey, sweet liqueur this kind of

things, y'know? I took them and drink them out and-

I threw the empty ones in the garden.

And my father went "but who 's drinking all these bottles?"

Quite a few times they have come fetch me out of the ditch

dead drunk

Therapist: Well then he realized it was you who drank them

Luca: Yeah, yeah he understood (h)

Therapist: Seven-eight year old

Luca: Mh

Therapist: Candies weren't nice at seven-eight years

Luca: Sure they were but there was something better (h)(h)

Therapist: You mean at seven eight years you had some problems already

Luca: Yes

The revised version of the sad story implies a change in the global shape of the

narrative, anchoring todays’ troubles in negative past experiences which become the

bases for therapeutic work.

Narratives in social situation are not static: although, when isolated and analyzed

formally, they can be reconduced to well known cultural patterns, it is the way in which

they are produced sequentially and changed along that conveys a good part of their

meaning. In the former excerpt Luca, by revising his story, displays his understading of

the therapist’s wants, his willingness to cooperate, and a general acceptance of the

overarching requirement of the community, that of personal change.

Narrative and language

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 Interestingly, in the addicts’ jargon the life of a drug abuser is referred to as "the

Stories". The Stories is a very broad action category meaning heroin search, buying,

assumptions; theft, police incursion, jail; being kicked off from the parents, losing job,

girlfriends and old friends who are not on drugs. The narratives concerning the period of

heroin’s use see heroin itself as their real protagonist, the only character endowed with

true agency. It is represented as a tyrannic power hampering any act of will and making

everyone alike. This is linguistically rendered by collective subjects (plural pronouns)

and, narratively, with the staging of an intrapersonal conflict, as in sentences going like:

"we were ready to create ourselves alibis", "we always said - tomorrow I quit- knowing

that we wouldn't". In Excerpt 4 we see how such forms are interactionally sanctioned

and substituted with different ones.

Excerpt 4
Nino: I can go away but I'd give too much pain to the people around

me. this is something I=

Therapist: =And you? you wouldn't be sorry?

Nino: 'Course I'd be sor- but here you are we are like this

 we are: always ready to find ourselves an excuse

Therapist:  Who "we are like this"?

Nino:  I am like this ((smiling))

Daniele:  Hahahaha

...

Nino:  Also when we "do" ourselves ((to have a fix))

Francesco:  We do

Nino:  Eh we [I do myself

Francesco:  [You do yourself

Daniele:  Ehi! oh: ((laughing))

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Nino: You find excuse in yourself

Therapist:  Now then. do you feel you can take a committment?

Nino: No

When asked about his feelings, Nino offers psychological descriptions of a whole

category of person, referred to as “we”. This kind of sentences are bounced back to him

by the therapist, and negatively commented by the other participants, entitled to do it by

their implicit involvment in the “we” Word use has effects on the participation frame,

and the audience exerts a pressure on the way accounts are linguistically formed.

Autobiographical statements are not just an individual enterprise, but have social

consequences, and also discursive ones, in that the therapist at the conclusion of the

exchange asks Nino to take a committment (concerning the length of his stay in the

community), about which he can only speak personally.

In the next excerpt it is shown how, at a semantic level, the category of drug abuser

is emptied of its literal meaning, redefined as not just the consumer of chemicals but as

a person entertaining particular types of attitudes and behaviors apparently unrelated

with consumption. The category has now different components, enlisting among its

elements "not being able to delay gratifications (like smoking a cigarette)", "denying

responsability", "avoiding asking for help", "not fighting against boredom", "not

bothering to express and value positive feelings", "not accepting rules".

Excerpt 5

(escaping the rule of not smoking during the session, Nino has gone out with the excuse to take the heater and has

prolonged his absence for a smoke)

Therapist: Ni:no, I am just giving you the proofs.

Because I don't give a damn that you go out to smoke

 You are behaving as outside.

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  You do the drugged inside here Nino, do you realize that?

Nino: Why?

Therapist:  'Cause there are rules and you don't want to follow them.

That's it.

The action to linger outside the therapy room is interpreted as the “proof” that Nino

still belongs to the category of the “drugged ones”, those who do not respect rules like

they did “outside” the community. The narrative of recovery is constructed through the

rubrication of behaviors under the dual category of outsider and insider, which is

substantially provided by the therapist in its behavioral specifications and repeatedly

presented to the assembled audience. Any move of the residents can be picked up to

instantiate their present position in the recovery path: insofar, the physical space of the

residence and the daily activities taking place in it become strongly interrelated with the

discourse that can always potentially appropriate them, and with the participants’ life

stories.

The community itself is redefined not only as the place where drugs are forbidden

and one can heal, but where one learns to be a different person. “Entrance in the

community” in this second sense could not coincide with the physical trespassing of its

gate, to be instead celebrated with the first act of responsibility that the therapist is

willing to acknowledge. Someone can be told he is still out.

Excerpt 6
Therapist: Let's not forget you came in just to fool your parents

Andrea: Yeah yeah but this was at the beginning, now I'd already done

it. I could go out now. I'd go home now you see.

Therapist: So what,

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Andrea: But I know I'd go home but:

I'd have given nothing to me personally.

Therapist: Then Andrea what does it mean

And Well what does it mean. I told you what does it mean

It means the problem I have it is not solved yet. If I go.

Therapist: Y'know what it means Andrè?

 It means that you come in the community just now.

Andrea: Yeah indeed

Excerpt 7
Therapist: How much is it you are in the community?

Nino: Almost two months

Therapist:  Zero Ni:no. You haven't put a foot in yet

So, in community terms, Andrea has just come in, despite its several months of

stay, and Nino is still considered to be out. Recurrent discursive interaction produces

new, situated vocabularies (Goodwin, 1997), and these on turn give shape and meaning

to verbal and non verbal features of the context and of the action of interactants.

In the same fashion, the proofs of the conversion are offered in the form of

narratives instantiating one of the range of good behaviors necessary for membership.

Excerpt 8
Mauro This is true. When you do something-

If before you did it superficially you know?

I have always been a very superficial person but now I can

change. One can do things more seriously.

 For instance you can be tidier.

At home if they didn't do my bed what did I care?

I never went home at night. Here I know I have to do it.

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 "You'd better do it well" you think- “otherwise Luca can come

or Daniele and he'd say – ‘ehy the bed is not done well’ “

Again, an activity drawn from the daily routine is used to evaluate one’s position in

the therapeutic path. Being tidy and doing the bed properly is a small fragment that

takes meaning at the light of the internal attitude it is evidence of, namely that of caring,

accepting one’s duties, having internalized the voices3 of the more authoritative

members of the group (Mauro is the younger one both in age and time of arrival).

The community is a collection of fables of identity: everyday life is mythical in the

sense that every episode can be elevated to allegory at any time, and can even be

transmitted to further generations of residents. The anticipation of self narratives in the

saturday therapy is the operator of such a density of meaning attached to behavior, and,

ultimately, the vehicle of change.

Final remarks

The self-defining power of narratives is discussed in regard to the interplay of

social categorization and narrative accounts. Some data have been offered with the

intent to show that, to understand how life narratives shape everyday life, the analysis in

formal terms must be integrated with the analysis of the particular social position of the

tellers as represented in social discourse. Narratives of transformation are built with the

help of a very restricted circle of relevant others who lend each other their stories, and

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within a value oriented dialogue with an authoritative voice who can challenge

established patterns and show how to construct different ones. The stories of personal

experience drawn from the everyday life of the participants can be evaluated as to the

belongingness of the person in one or the other of the categories at stake. The regularity

of the narrative sessions make those action structures and their meaning get back to

daily practices, especially in a condition where all the surrounding persons share the

same grid of evaluation and can inspect the others' loyalty.

The close community I have observed shows this phenomenon with a peculiar

intensity: the mythopoeic capacity of narrative probably tends to increase during phases

of socialization into new social contexts, but the reflexive processes that it implies can,

without much hazard, be generalized to the entire life. Paraphrasing Clifford, narratives

are the conditions of life meaningfulness.

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APPENDIX: Symbols of transcript notation.

[ Brackets denote the onset of simultaneous and/or overlapping utterances

= Equal signs indicate contiguous utterances, in which the second is latched onto the first

- Dash indicate a sudden stop in talk fluency

:: One or more colons represent an extension of the sound or syllable it follows

you Underlining indicates emphasis

. Period indicated descending intonation of the previous word

, Comma indicates slightly rising intonation

? Question mark indicates clearly rising intonation

((laughs)) Various characterizations of the talk are italicized and inserted in double parentheses

... Three dots indicate that some words or turns have been skipped.

References

Bauman R. (1986) Story, performance, and event. Contextual studies of oral narratives. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Clifford J. (1986) On Ethnographic Allegory. In J. Clifford J.& G.E. Marcus, cit.

Clifford J., Marcus, G.E: (1986) Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley:

University of California Press

Clifford, J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture. [Ed. it. I frutti puri impazziscono. Roma: Bollati

Boringhieri]

Crapanzano, V. (1980) Tuhami. Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Edwards D. (1994) Script formulations. An analysis of event descriptions in conversation. Journal of

language and Social Psychology, 13, 3, 211-247

Elsbree, L. (1982) The rituals of life. Patterns in narratives. Kennicat Press, New York

Fasulo, A. (1994) La psicoterapia come traduzione tra linguaggi dell'esperienza. (Psychotherapy as

translation between languages of experience) Rassegna di Psicologia, XI, 3, 123-142

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Fasulo, A. (1997) Other voices, other minds. The use of reported speech in group therapy talk. In L.

Resnick, C. Pontecorvo, R. Säljö, B. Burge (eds.) Discourse, tools and reasoning. Essays on

situated cognition. NATO Series, Springer Verlag

Gergen. J. e Gergen, M. M. (1983) Narratives of the Self. In T.R. Sarbin, K. E. Scheibe (eds.) Studies in

Social Identity. New York: Praeger.

Gergen, K. J. e Gergen, M. M. (1988) Narrative and the self as relationship. In L. Berkowitz (ed.),

Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 21, 57-95

Goodwin C. (1997) The Blackness of Black. In L. Resnick, C. Pontecorvo, R. Säljö, B. Burge (eds.)

Discourse, tools and reasoning. Essays on situated cognition. NATO Series, Springer

Verlag

Sacks H. [1964-1972] (1992) Lectures on conversation. A cura di G. Jefferson, Blackwell, Cambridge

U.S.A.

Stern D. (1985) The interpersonal world of the infant. New York: Basic Books

1
See Stern, 1985, for a developmental account of the narrative self.
2
Such therapeutic challenges are conventional question or comments that the patients soon learn to
recognizeas requests of narratives redrafting (Fasulo, 1994). The readiness with which patients accept to
change their version might be linked with the goal to keep the therapist engaged in the individual
dialogue.
3
On the role of direct speech in therapy talk see Fasulo, 1997.

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