Conversational Narrative. Storytelling in Everyday Talk, by Neal R. Norrick. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2000. xiii + 233 pgs. Hardcover. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 203)

Dr. Amadeu Viana (web | aviana@filcat.udl.es)
Universitat de Lleida

Neal R. Norrick has written a clear and comprehensible book, useful to the ethnography of everyday life. There narratologists will recognize many dimensions of their usual practices: orality, specific attention to genres, a communicational approach, literary concerns, memory and discourse organization. On this review I will focus on the advantages of ethnography in order to relate those problems, linking them with current and everyday experience.

The design stated in the first chapter, to explore "the forms and functions of storytelling in everyday conversation", is fulfilled by a transparent and elegant prose, showing a glimpse of Norrick's reading and theoretical orientations, without ever allowing these to dominate his writing. He makes a substantial contribution to an old challenge: what ethnography (and more accurately, conversation analysis) can contribute to discursive and linguistic knowledge. Norrick collects a sufficiently wide range of data and focuses on an integrated approach, where internal structure receives as much attention as the narrative contexts of individual stories. Clearly, the novelty consists in the unfolding of narrative dimension through hesitations, resumptions and the organization of ordinary conversation —essentially a dilemma between polyphony, spontaneity and contiguity of contexts.

Yet, Norrick’s study is full of all sort of observations, reminding us that today ethnography cannot be ingenuous and that it depends on its own object –furthermore, that discourse theories are more productive if they are context-bounded. The examples of micronarrative merge with explanations and commentaries through well written and precise pages, avoiding formalization and excessive generalization. Norrick’s book put forward students tales, domestic anecdotes, stories about family or friends, references to flirtations, misunderstandings or witty remarks, as part of his commitment with thematic diversity.

His work is organized into eight chapters, plus an appendix with conversation transcriptions, the bibliography and the name index (Norrick’s website is also mentioned with available narratives: http://www.unisaarland.de/fak4/norrick). The first chapter is dedicated to introduce the work and to discuss the analytical possibilities of oral narrative, from Labov & Waletzky’s pioneer work (1967). Norrick argues in favour of a polyphonic treatment of storytelling, emphasizing from the very beginning the interactive role of the teller, and the creative contributions from the listeners. It is not by coincidence that Norrick refers to Ingarden (1973) & Iser’s (1978) Reception Theory to reinforce his idea of the conversational community as a (re)creator of the current story. What is interesting here is the combination of Reception Theory with the ethnography of the speech à la Sacks, while boarding on the continuities and discontinuities of conversational narratives.

In Norrick’s first approach to the teller, he clearly shows that he is a participant in what is happening (Norrick speaks of "conversationalists", to refer to the participants), somebody who has to gain control of the floor and who, like everyone else, works with materials which are repeated again and again, according to the knowledge and memory of the group. Traditional interruptions, competitions to take the lead and parallel stories (those which are told according to stories which have already come up), are strategies to evaluate and certify collective memory.

The search for observational naturalism is the driving aim of Norrick’s reviews of pioneer works. He looks for flexible theoretical proposals which redirect the search towards an interpretive community, and which give consistency to the typical lack of definite purpose in storytelling. As conversation goes on, the group succeeds in reaching a topic, and these real conditions of talk let us also know how the topic is perceived by the group. It is also his search for naturalism which makes him aware of generic or thematic differences: the rise of anecdotes, put-down stories, tales around the hearth, or chats about boy/girl friends, are all examples of variations which, towards the end of the book, are given a special mention and comparative methodology.

I would say that Norrick’s most important finding is already stated in this introduction: the fact that telling and retelling requires an effort "towards contextualization of something remembered". The term which interests me here is "contextualization". After talking endlessly with our students about what is context, we realize that stories, explanations and paraphrases are the link between the building of contexts and memory –all that is a healthy respite. Every time we reformulate we put things into a new framework which acts as a starting point for memory. This is a book about contextualization in time and everyday conversation. As Norrick’s analysis moves on, his interest in collective recalling becomes more evident and profound. For this reason in the first chapter he discusses serialization and quotes Bartlett from Remembering (1932). Serialization points out the basic connection between numeric order in instructions and orientations ("the list") and the art of narrating ("the story"). The reasoning in everyday conversation is also matter of serialization. It is also serialization which allows Norrick to introduce formulaicity and repetition, both topics which he has looked at in other works.

Chafe, Tannen and Ong are also mentioned in this chapter to draw us to everyday orality and its productiveness, as well as Fludernik’s (1996) and his "natural narratology". But above all it is the classics of Frame Theory (Bateson, Goffman, Fillmore) which are used by Norrick to illustrate his multidimensional approach. His first examples of oral narrative are purged in order to get the plot lines (those needed by conversationalists to reconstruct the story), and then looked at again to collect scattered materials: intonation, repetitions, verb tenses, parallelisms —effectively reminding us that conversation is a genre in which many things happen at once, where many different channels mix with the narrative.

The corpus, as Norrick explains here, comes from audio-taped conversations recorded at different periods of time since 1985 (by teams of students and investigators drilled by the author himself), and obtained with the participants permission, from a mainly (but not only) Anglo-American population. The transcription conventions are clear and simple, following the usual practise of conversation analysts; the exact adaptations used by Norrick are discussed summarily on some pages (20-24). Also here he calls for the naturalness of the data, and for readers’ tacit recognition of conversational situations presented —all in line with what has been explained above.

The second chapter looks at internal narrative structure of conversational storytelling, beginning with a close look at Labov & Waletzky’s narrative clues. Norrick does not set out to summarize but to amplify, so that his proposals include more details and more attention to episodes, ways of narrating, particular techniques and their pragmatic value. I believe all this discussion holds great interest today. One of the intriguing questions about stories is to discover that they cannot be rushed: that the narrator has taken his time and that details cannot be omitted. Leaving out parts (the wadding; as in conversation, overlooking the bulk or the repetitions) would be to disregard the rhythm or narrative argument. If the narrator wants to go into detail —colours, reflections— it’s up to him, and this is just what he is explaining. Storytelling does not stand up well to being hurried up. For this reason Norrick wants to draw our attention to peripheries and to see how they make up different contextual dimensions. Towards the end of the second chapter he asks how Frame Concepts (as macrostructures) shape the kind of narration that we have in front of us —a subject developed in later chapters.

The third chapter looks at Norrick’s well known topic, the rise of formulas and the uses of repetition. Conversational analysts have always been touched by the dilemma between analytical perspective and the regular rising of clichés and stereotypes in conversation, the common resort to idioms and shared knowledge. In this book conversational clichés receive attention and their contribution to the story is appreciated. Norrick illustrates it with examples of openings and closings and figurative formulas, and develops his ideas about local formulaicity, that marvellous capacity for making up set expressions or clichés from something mentioned before, by fixing it in the course of storytelling itself (a particular approach which I consider one of this chapter’s merits). Repetition’s multicontextual effects (reconstruction, parallelisms, intonational rhythms, dramatic meanings, conclusions and evaluations) have been pointed out in other works but can never be mentioned enough, because they constitute one of those key epistemological boundaries between speech and writing; now in this work about narrativity they gain content and perspective, as signs (for instance) of tacit arguments or discoursive presuppositions.

The fourth chapter deals with narrative repetition (not repetition within the narrative). Norrick distinguishes, from the beginning, the two basic modalities: the act of retelling stories, that is author’s repetition, and the act of telling stories more or less well known (retold stories), that is story’s repetition. Both rhetoric types pose two crucial questions in an opposite way: one, wether we are dealing or not with the same story, retold with the appropriate changes; and correspondingly, the second, what elements are conversationalists supposed to introduce or replace in order to make the story understood and/or recognized.

Retelling implies that the narrator reconsiders the story in front of a new audience. Obviously, if there is only a newly arrived person to the group, the teller quickly adapts the story to newcomer’s needs in presence of the others. In this case, parallel stories are practically adjoining, there is continuity in the situation. The other possibility is that the narrator has in front of him a completely different audience, and has explained something similar in another context. The problem of whether or not we are dealing with the same story can be evaluated empirically. Norrick publishes (as exactly as a philologist) two versions of the same story to evaluate the changes undergone (81). The recycled material and degree of litteralness (in the repetition) seems to vary according to the time lapse between versions and the salience of the subject matter –something which depends on conversationalists’ involvement. As stated by the author:

The object’s repetition, or retold stories, take for granted firstly that the topic is partially known. Tellability conditions vary according to the tolerance of participants and often involve co-narration. Tellers collaborate to save themselves part of the story, to reconnect fragments or to introduce outsiders to the intrigue. Familiar stories are prototypical of co-narration among partners.

Retold stories, like retelling stories, generate synopsis, abstracts, short versions for the younger ones, for the newcomers, for the confused or just to find out up to what point the conversational community knows the details, or wants (or does not want) more of the same. Norrick also discusses stories of this type which fail, unfinished narratives which are not well received for a variety of reasons. The author also displays here his observational skills and his attention to motives. The chapter finishes with an analysis of elicited stories, but leaves us with the impression that we have been looking at significant rhetoric categories —behind this simple front is hidden a lot of reading and a fair bit of savoir faire.

The fifth chapter deals with the question of how stories tell more than what is told. It opens with a discussion about telling rights and event types depending on who and how they get to know (only the narrator/ friends/ family/ cultural group/ stories heard second-hand/ etc.); and continues by looking at internal narrative structure according to these external anchors: how the turn is transmitted, who asks for the story to continue, when and why a narrative is evaluated verbally, what comments are produced, and the parallel stories generated by a former story (which in reality are replicas of that preceding move). All this peripheral information is transmitted through the current narrative, a kind of ecological site where stories rise and are transformed into collective memory. Listening to tales, conversationalists show their alignment, or contribute with their stance markers; or show their gladness as a way of participation and they launch on what Norrick calls collaborative fantasy, the communal development of imagination. In Norrick’s example, two room mates talk about cloning a third companion, so that in him they each would have a more hardworking and accommodating companion than the one they have now. Norrick wisely points out that this kind of stories (including fantasy) is very common in his conversational data, but up to now they have not received much attention in the literature. Like many of Norrick’s examples, these stories are humorous, and the book becomes more and more amusing as the reading goes on. Two chapters later we will attend at this analysis applied to jokes.

The sixth chapter seems to be a turning point in which conversation is looked at through different levels of organization and different thematic purposes. We find self-aggrandizement stories, and its opposite, embarrassment stories; trouble stories and also dream tellings. Nobody says anything for nothing, in the void: an account about a dangerous move in basketball and the referee’s opinion can serve to praise the narrator and detract from the opponent. Stories say more than what is actually told. On the contrary, a smart narrator can develop a whole set of verbal resources to explain an embarrassing story of a finger caught in a hole. In trouble stories, religious oaths express attitude without going to the depth of the problem. Finally, dream tellings provide a perfect ground to deal with specific narrative conditions (purposes, contexts) in which a speaker gets involved in explanations (and/or interpretations); this is another topic without much analytical literature which should be linked to psychological research. The chapter closes with unfinished tales which are in need of elaboration, with samples of collective storytelling and diffuse narratives, abandoned stories difficult to recover, leaving us wanting to know more. We would expect Norrick’s analysis to take into account length in these curious halfstories, as length is a variable over the articulation and complexity of the narrative, as those who study short stories are well aware.

The seventh chapter continues covers the study of jokes and comic narrative passages in drama. Norrick’s joke analysis follows his 1993 proposal, looking closer at narrative aspects of the genre. His interesting inquiry about unsuccessful comic narrative performances matches the remarks made in earlier chapters. In the same tone, the analysis of theatre comic dialogues looks for the naturalness of everyday interaction. Norrick chooses two lovely examples: firstly, the Nurse’s story of the young Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (Act 1, Scene iii), and secondly, the tailor’s joke from Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. The first is a splendid example of narrative and memory: seen retrospectively, an earthquake, a nurse who breast-fed, and at the same time, the memory of a child’s fall, a bump on the head, and a witty remark. Shakespeare introduces the scene with all the repetitions and typical humour of everyday situations. His example shows how anecdotes (in this case, fitting one within the other) can locate actions, which later link to subjects coming up in actual conversation. Nurse’s story is a wonderful and funny case for multidimensional study. The tailor’s joke in Beckett’s Endgame, a lovely Jewish tale akin to a "cosmic joke", is effectively introduced into dialogue with the typical hesitations of everyday talk ("I never told it worse", 191), and comes up against the listener refusal to laugh, as a case of unsuccessful joke performance. Here the circle closes: there is no doubt that Beckett is using uneasy everyday interactional solutions in a literary manner.

Norrick points out that these discussions must serve to test and refine the conclusions of his approach, and so the last chapter summarizes the other seven. Norrick goes through his personal development to tell us how he arrived at his topic after exploring conversational humour, and he continues in the same narrative tone going over the ideas of his study. Little by little we notice how the author presents conversationalists' building of collective memory, by means of contextual retelling, prototypical of conversational narratives. Hesitations are no longer boring or repetitions superfluous. Ethnography discovers the memory of the group. We all talk and remember. By repeating things context changes and memory strengthens. All this offers interesting research topics, which Norrick recognizes and points out: names, for instance, which are precise details, are sometimes remembered, sometimes left out and sometimes forgotten by conversationalists. How does memory intervene in speech? This study provides sufficient observational bases to speculate on the social components of this relationship.

As stated above, the pieces of this puzzle may be integrated in our different practices. Literary narratologists may learn from instability and vagueness; literacy scholars may use verbatim repetitions to evaluate changes; discourse studies may infer organization from extreme crosstalk; textual approaches may gain complextity with abandoned and failed stories. Norrick's book has brought those questions near to conversation and has obtained the right data.

REFERENCES
Bartlett, F. C. (1932): Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fludernik, M. (1996): Towards a "natural" narratology, London: Routledge.
Ingarden, R. (1973): The cognition of the literary work of art, trans. by R. A. Crowly & K.R. Olsen. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Iser, W. (1978): The act of reading: A theory of aesthetic response, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Labov, W. & J. Waletzky (1967): "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience", in Essays on the verbal and visual arts, ed. by J. Helm, 12-44, Seattle: University of Washington Press.