Narrative studies seem
to have become one of the major trends in the humanities and social sciences.
More and more journals and books are devoted to them, and even subdisciplines,
such as narrative psychology, have emerged and thrived. Nowadays, each book on
the topic needs to prove the reason for its existence to the readership. The
volume written by Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps provides that reason in a very
simple and elegant manner: It covers a somewhat neglected domain. While authors
in the field usually discuss influences from literary theory and/or philosophy,
or apply their conclusions to literary and artistic masterpieces, Ochs and
Capps took a completely different route. As is obvious from the very title,
this book deals with everyday narratives: family conversations over dinner,
children’s recollections of their days in schools, friends chatting or
gossiping, etc. I hold that this is definitely enough to make the book quite
extraordinary and worth reading.

But
there is more. The opening chapter provides a very useful presentation of five
dimensions of personal narrative (defined as "a way of using language or
another symbolic system to imbue life events with a temporal and logical order,
to demystify them and establish coherence across past, present, and as yet
unrealized experience" – p. 2):

1.      tellership, which they
define as "the extent and kind of involvement of conversational partners
in the actual recounting of a narrative"  (p. 24);

2.      tellability – "the
extent to which personal narratives convey a sequence of reportable events and
make a point in a rhetorically effective manner" (p. 33);

3.      embeddedness of a
personal narrative in surrounding discourse and social activity (p. 36);

4.      linearity – "the
extent to which narratives of personal experience depict events as transpiring
in a single, closed, temporal, and causal path or, alternatively, in diverse,
open, uncertain paths" (p. 41);

5.      and moral stance –
"a disposition towards what is good or valuable and how one ought to live
in the world" (p. 45).

These dimensions will
provide a framework for the analysis of any given narrative. But the topic of
the authors’ research is not what is usually studied in social sciences. Since
the book is focused on ordinary social exchanges, rather than on polished
narrative performances, its subject are narratives that usually have at least
some of these dimensions: multiple, active co-tellers; moderately tellable
account; relative embeddedness in surrounding discourse and activity; nonlinear
temporal and causal organization; and uncertain, fluid moral stance (p. 23).

The first type of
narratives they review in the book is children’s narrative. In the second
chapter ("Becoming a Narrator"), after examining some limitations of
current psychological approaches to the topic, the authors try to reveal the
process through which children become narrators. They constantly organize their
discussion around the five dimensions, revealing the features of children
narratives, child-parent narratives, and developmental changes. Among many
interesting data and conclusions, I would like to point out the authors’
suggestion that children who grow in families with tendencies toward
co-narration of children’s experiences feel more emotionally secure.

This
emphasis on co-construction is present throughout the book. The authors claim
that "from their inception, life narratives are joint productions"
(p. 128). This leads them to a conclusion they consider "a central
paradox", namely, that "the practice of rendering personal experience
in narrative form entails de-personalization" (p. 55). While this is quite
a common conclusion at least since Durkheim, and was masterfully treated by Ricoeur,
what this book offers is many examples stemming from developmental,
cross-cultural, and clinical studies.

The book has enough
clinical implications that I believe it could stimulate further interest in
clinical applications of narrative studies. The authors write about specific
forms of narration in children of agoraphobic mothers and about attachment
patterns and forms of child-parent narrative. They use the important work of
Cheryl Mattingly on the connections of narrative with the nature of self and
the therapeutic action. There are valuable segments on childhood amnesia,
trauma, and narrative discontinuity, and we can only hope that more and more
findings of this kind will accumulate in years to come.

Chapter five examines
the role of anticipation. It deals with temporal and explanatory sequences, and
their mutual influences. Besides that, the authors discuss the role of grammar
in our experience of time. One chapter of the book is devoted to specific forms
of narrative in prayer and religious practices. And the last chapter is focused
on untold narratives.

Despite
the authors’ claim that their writing is "in the interface of linguistics,
anthropology, and psychology" and that it "also incorporates literary
and philosophical reflections on self, text, and social life" (p. 58), the
theoretical part of the book is underdeveloped and insufficiently elaborated. Though
the authors mention some important names (Heidegger, Ricoeur, Bakhtin, etc.)
and Jerome Bruner was their first reviewer, their use of these fundamental
works is not systematic and comprehensive. The book’s second important problem
is that it does not include a concluding chapter that would summarize the basic
ideas and underline the most important implications.

Still,
the book is a valuable contribution, primarily because it provides research
data where we most often used to have theoretical considerations only. The
continuation of its contributions can now proceed in different directions. Its
richness and influence, unfortunately, will not be enjoyed by Capps, who died
shortly before publication of the manuscript, leaving behind a lot of unedited
material. I can only look forward to their publication and further studies
inspired by this book, both by Ochs and other researchers in the field.

© 2004 Aleksandar Dimitrijevic

Aleksandar
Dimitrijevic, Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Psychology, Belgrade,
Yugoslavia.

Categories: Psychology, Philosophical