Stories, Community, and Place: Narratives for Middle America. JOHNSTONE, Barbara. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1990. 148 p.in
Teachers College Record 95:185-6.
A book received for review is to be opened first at random. Only later should one give it a linear reading. Thus is a first impression formed which, in this case, was very positive: Here is, I thought, a profound renewal of an important genre among those we use to learn about our contemporaries in the detail of their hidden everyday life: the community study where a careful observer tells us about conditions someplace we didn't quite know.
Such positive first impressions may be hard to live up to. What Johnstone is doing may be too new, newer and more daring perhaps than she is aware, to be pulled off the first time around. Here, she tells us, are voices from Fort Wayne, Indiana, as they tell "the relationships between individuals and communities." Here are the stories that the people tell each other. Here is an analysis that highlights how these stories reveal what kind of world these people make for each other. The stories were tape recorded in various settings and among various people. They were transcribed, and then Johnstone's own voice takes over as she points this or that interesting aspect of the stories.
Her approach, she warns at the outset is "eclectic." In an exploratory study, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, it is such eclecticism, with borrowings from anthropology, linguistics, literary criticism, discourse analysis, etc., that promises to revivify genres of social science research that had become quite stale. I would thus not want to criticize Johnstone for a lack of systematicity in her search for the words that will tell a story of Fort Wayne stories. Still, for many pages, she seems to lose her way as she summarizes the most recent contribution of this or that research tradition, and then briefly shows how a certain set of stories does demonstrate the usefulness of this contribution. Typically, the first half of a chapter about "Stories and Social Relations" concerns the ways in which the stories confirm what Gilligan and others have been saying about the differences between male and female speech: "women's stories tend to take place in the social world... Men's stories tend to take place in the physical world..." (p. 75). This ends with a blanket retraction: "Not all men's stories are like Bill's, and not all women's stories like Marge's... Each individual has his or her own reason for storytelling ..." What then are we left with?
Most of the rest of the book is about even more technical, if not formal, details. The second half of the chapter on social relations is about a stylistic quirk in American English that makes a story teller reporting an encounter with an authority figure use present verbal forms ("he says") when describing this figure's speech, and past verbal forms ("I said") when reporting on the speaker's speech. This had apparently been noticed in other similar research--but can only be of interest to sociolinguists unless it is used as a tool to tease out a person's possibly inarticulate identification of authority relationships.
As always, when one borrows eclectically from a literature to which one is not contributing, technical errors are inevitable. For example, in a discussion of the audience's participation to the telling of stories, Johnstone distinguishes between conversations (which she identifies as taking place "among whites") in which the audience does not display "overt cooperative attempts to arrive at the meaning of an account of events," and conversations where the audience does ("among Blacks"--is the shift capitalization of white/Black significant?). Here again, there is really no evidence given for an identification that gets close to stereotyping. More importantly, all research in the construction of discourse has shown that audiences always fully participate in the elaboration of the meaning of an account. What may vary is the exact medium through which this audience participation proceeds (from the blinking of an eye or the raising of an eyebrow, to paraverbal mumbles, to the overlap of alternate phrases which is what Johnstone gives an example of in her discussion of a "Black" performance). This, in fact is what Johnstone is talking about, but the whole topic is too charged to allow for sloppy vocabulary.
Still such technical issues should be secondary issues. This is not a book about discourse in its general property, but about the people of Fort Wayne, and the conditions of their lives, in their particularity. We can trust these stories to be subjected to all the formal mechanisms that are being identified by the new universal grammarians of interaction. What we want to know is: what are these people saying?
Happily enough there is an exemplary chapter that fulfills the promise of the introduction: the chapter that describes how a historical event (a serious flood) becomes a mythical story about "the city that saved itself." In the process, the individuality of the voices gets obscured while an impersonal voice affirms itself. Here we are beginning to touch something fundamental about the particular conditions of the people who live in Fort Wayne, something that they can struggle with, but that they cannot escape--what I would call their "culture." There we follow the process by which historical facts become community stories, how the physical world become personalized and the social world communalized. We hear about individual joining together voluntarily in a community that saves itself in a moral and physical struggle against a force of evil. Having read this one understands better why the Gulf War was cast the way it was in the United States (but not in Europe) and why it played so well in places like Fort Wayne...
With this in mind, one can start wondering about other things that have escaped Johnstone: There is much in common between the mythical voice of people coming together and the feminine voice identified earlier. But of course, the "community voice" was fully controlled by men during and after the flood. And so...
This is not the place to develop such thoughts. But they indicate how Stories, Community and Place should be used, and that is as a kind of proposal for further research along the lines Johnstone explores. There is no doubt in my mind that Johnstone is contributing to the opening of a new road that will help all those interested in learning more about human beings in their cultural environment. This is reason enough to pay close attention to what she is saying.