Beyond Narrative Coherence PDF

Beyond Narrative Coherence
Studies in Narrative (SiN)

The subject of SiN is the study of narrative. Volumes published in the series
draw upon a variety of approaches and methodologies in the study of
narrative. Particular emphasis is placed on theoretical approaches to narrative
and the analysis of narratives in human interaction.
Editor
Michael Bamberg
Clark University
Advisory Board
Susan E. Bell David Herman Eric E. Peterson
Bowdoin College Nort Carolina State University University of Maine
Jerome S. Bruner Janet Holmes Catherine Kohler Riessman
New York University Victoria University of Boston University
Wellington
Jennifer Coates Theodore R. Sarbin
Roehampton University Charlotte Linde University of California,
Institute for Research Learning Santa Cruz
Michele L. Crossley
Edge-Hill University College Dan P. McAdams Deborah Schiffrin
Northwestern University Georgetown University
Carol Gilligan
New York University Allyssa McCabe Margaret Wetherell
University of Massachusetts, Open University
Rom Harré
Lowell
Linacre College, Oxford
Volume 11
Edited by Matti Hyvärinen, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo
and Maria Tamboukou
Edited by
Matti Hyvärinen
University of Tampere
Lars-Christer Hydén
Linköping University
Marja Saarenheimo
Central Union for the Welfare of the Aged
Maria Tamboukou
University of East London
John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Beyond narrative coherence / edited by Matti Hyvärinen ... [et al.].

p. cm. (Studies in Narrative, issn 1568-2706 ; v. 11)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Discourse analysis--Psychological aspects. 2. Cohesion (Linguistics) 3. Narrative inquiry
(Research method) I. Hyvärinen, Matti.
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Table of contents
Chapter 1
Beyond narrative coherence: An introduction 1
Matti Hyvärinen, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo and
Maria Tamboukou
Chapter 2
Weird stories: Brain, mind, and self 17
Maria I. Medved and Jens Brockmeier
Chapter 3
Identity, self, narrative 33
Chapter 4
‘Mind-reading’, a method for understanding the broken narrative of an
aphasic man 49
Tarja Aaltonen
Chapter 5
Broken narratives, visual forces: Letters, paintings and the event 67
Maria Tamboukou
Chapter 6
Artists-in-progress: Narrative identity of the self as another 87
Linda Sandino
Chapter 7
Breaking of self-narrative as a means of reorientation? 103
Vilma Hänninen and Anja Koski-Jännes
vi Table of contents
Chapter 8
“There is no fear in my lexicon” vs. “You are not normal if you won’t be
scared”: A qualitative semiotic analysis of the ‘broken’ discourse of Israeli
bus drivers who experienced terror attacks 121
Alison Stern Perez, Yishai Tobin and Shifra Sagy
Chapter 9
Beyond narrative: The shape of traumatic testimony 147
Molly Andrews
Chapter 10
Afterword: ‘Even amidst’ — Rethinking narrative coherence 167
Mark Freeman
List of contributors 187
Index 191
Chapter 1
Beyond narrative coherence

An introduction
Matti Hyvärinen, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo and

Maria Tamboukou
University of Tampere, Finland / Linköping University, Sweden / Central
Union for the Welfare of the Aged, Finland / University of East London, UK
The introduction suggests a paradigmatic turn in narrative studies as regards

the coherence thesis. The classical, Aristotelian, notion has been widely shared
among scholars who otherwise often disagree, often drastically, from folklore
and linguistics to philosophy, psychology and narrativist theory of history. Once
and again, the key function of narrative is seen to be the creation of coherence.
Recently, this conception has faced increasing criticism both from the ranks of
narratology and in particular, from scholars who study “naturally occurring”,
oral narratives. The normative mission to find and value coherence marginalizes
many narrative phenomena, omits non-fitting narrators, encourages scholars
to read narratives obsessively from the perspective of coherence, and poses
ethically questionable pressures upon narrators who have experienced severe
political or other trauma.
The purpose of this book is to suggest and nurture a kind of paradigmatic change
within narrative studies. The narrative turn in social sciences, beginning in the
early 1980s and gathering momentum in the 1990s, almost exclusively assumed
that there is a vital and many-layered relationship between narrative and coher-
ence. Narratives were conceptualized in terms of coherence: linguistic, temporal,
sequential and so on. Coherence was considered a virtue — or, alternatively, a
mortal sin — and hence the ultimate guarantor of the quality of narratives. Coher-
ence was assumed as a norm for good and healthy life stories and coherence in-
deed was something that scholars ventured to investigate and to find, for instance,
in life-story interviews.
The coherence paradigm generally implies that (i) good and competent narra-
tives always proceed in a linear, chronological way, from a beginning and middle
to an end, which also constitutes a thematic closure; (ii) the function of narrative
2 Matti Hyvärinen, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo and Maria Tamboukou
and story-telling is primarily to create coherence in regard to experience, which is

understood as being rather formless (which may be understood as a merit or dis-
advantage of narrative); (iii) persons live better and in a more ethical way, if they
have a coherent life-story and coherent narrative identity (or, in contrast, narrative
is understood as being detrimental because it creates such coherence).
Beyond Narrative Coherence challenges this paradigm theoretically (position-
ing it historically; indicating its problems), methodologically (in showing its often
problematic consequences, finding out new methods with which to approach bro-
ken narratives) and ethically (by showing how the coherence paradigm privileges
middle-class conventionality and marginalizes the experiences of artistically cre-
ative as well as politically traumatized people). The volume does this by drawing
from a wide range of disciplines and approaches: philosophy, linguistics, sociol-
ogy, psychology, social psychology, conversation analysis, health research, and
historiography.
We go about this by posing some general theoretical arguments, and more
particularly by suggesting cases of narratives and storytelling that do not fit into
the received and dominant idea about narrative coherence. We invoke cases, for
instance, where the storytellers do not necessarily comply with the often implicit
norms of narrative theory — persons that are not able bodied or that have severe
communicative disabilities; or stories that are told in circumstances and settings
that severely constrain the telling; or telling about experiences that do not allow
the use of conventional narrative forms. In all these cases people tell stories that
are often fragmented, disorganized or where the narrative text is superseded by the
performance of the story. In order to be able to listen to these stories it is important
that researchers, as well as all other listeners, suspend their preconceived narrative
norms and rather treat these stories as invitations to listening in new and creative
ways. Sensitivity to these stories also requires new methodological solutions.
Undoubtedly, coherence will remain a useful concept in narrative studies long
after this volume, but hopefully in a substantially re-thought manner.
The historical vicissitudes of narrative coherence
As Maria Medved and Jens Brockmeier write in this volume, theoretically the idea
of coherence “can be tracked back to Aristotle”. While noticing this lineage, it is
vital to recognize what Aristotle in fact was doing when he discussed coherence
and the role of the beginning, middle, and end. When presenting these concepts,
Aristotle was not theorizing narration, diegesis, but drama and in particular good
tragedy. Of course Aristotle did not have the same generalized concept of narra-
tive that only became possible in the 1960s, thanks to structuralist narratology.
Chapter 1.â•‡ Beyond narrative coherence 3
To develop this thought ad absurdum: Aristotle never seriously considered ev-

eryday oral stories as a research topic and it never occurred to him to impose his
aesthetic and normative concepts on factual statements about narrativity. Over
the centuries following Aristotle’s death, his normative and aesthetic notions on
tragedy started to be used in a way that, in practice, limited the understanding of
empirical, factual narratives.
William Labov and Joshua Waletsky (1967/1997; Labov 1972) have a particu-
lar merit of beginning the story from the entirely opposite end of the continuum,
namely from orally rendered everyday stories. Yet the extremely influential struc-
tural model they suggested also presumes a structured whole; a whole that has a
distant resemblance to the Aristotelian idea of good tragedy. On the other hand,
Dell Hymes has identified traces of more recent literary theories in the Labovian
model:
All this is part of an adaptation and extension of categories from traditional rheto-
ric. A famous text of the time (Brooks and Warren, 1949) has distinguished four
categories: Exposition, Complication, Climax, and Denouement. Labov and his
co-workers recognized six categories; Abstract, Orientation, Complicating Ac-
tion, Evaluation, Resolution, and Coda. These six are said to constitute a fully
formed narrative. (1996, p.â•›192)
There is of course no problem in using categories from literary theory, but perhaps
this adaptation highlights the difficulty in theorizing oral narratives in terms of
their genuine characteristics, without the help of aesthetic categories.
It is often argued that the narrative turn in humanities, including literature
studies, was strongly influenced by the English translation and publication of
Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale in 1958. Propp characterized himself
strictly as being an empirical researcher. He insisted that he had read all available
Russian wondertales and had drawn conclusions on the permanence of the form,
functions and agents from this material alone (1968, 1984). Thanks to the impact
of French structuralism, this bottom up model was turned around, and introduced
in a radicalized form into new areas as a top-down model, suggesting the potential
of a universal model of narrative. Because the Saussurean, structural linguistics
was understood to be the pilot science for literature as well, the distinction be-
tween langue (language system) and parole (actual and imperfect use of language)
informed the study of narratives. Broken, unfinished, or incomplete narratives
could only be considered to be less interesting instances of parole, whereas the
fundamental problem of study was to locate the narrative form or the deep narra-
tive grammar (Doležel, 1999).
When the narrative perspective came to the field of social inquiry, both nar-
rative grammar and the Proppian model turned out to be widely influential. As
Jerome Bruner writes in his book Actual Minds, the earlier discussion “suggest(s)
that there is some such constraining deep structure to narrative, and that good
stories are well-formed particular realizations of it” (1986, p.â•›16). Good stories,
in this language, no doubt are coherent and complete stories, reflecting the deep
structure of language and narrative.
Structuralism and neo-Aristotelianism put an equal emphasis on narrative co-
herence, although for partly different reasons. The difference, best observable in
the work of Alasdair MacIntyre (1984) was the Aristotelian emphasis on the nor-
mative aspect of narrative coherence. MacIntyre was worried about modern indi-
vidualism and moral fragmentation, and suggested that understanding our lives as
evolving, coherent narratives might make the difference and help us to resolve the
modernist dilemma. MacIntyre was obviously the first to introduce the theme and
dilemma of narrative identity. Personal identity cannot simply be reduced to its
strict categorical meaning (John is or is not Peter’s son) but includes a fuzzier as-
pect of “more or less”: your characteristics at the age of fifty are more or less similar
to what they were at the age of forty. Mere psychological traits can only account for
the strict meaning, says MacIntyre, not the “more-or-less” aspects of identity. Thus
he comes to the conclusion that “personal identity is just that identity presupposed
by the unity of the character which the unity of a narrative requires. Without such
unity there would not be subjects of whom stories could be told” (1984, p.â•›218).
This proposal to use the model of novelistic character to inform the character
of personal identity is of course a profound idea, and might even suggest impor-
tant historical changes in the ways personal identities have been understood. Un-
fortunately, MacIntyre leaves the idea here and says nothing more specific about
the unity of character. More alarmingly, his literary example (The Count of Monte
Cristo) does not even allude to the complexities and dis-unities of character ex-
posed by such modernist authors as Robert Musil, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce
and many others who followed them. In other words, MacIntyre does not consider
the option that the history of the novel might inform a parallel history on un-
derstanding identities. From the beginning, the concept of narrative identity was
thematized from the perspective of unity and coherence it was able to afford, not
in terms of complexities, contradictions and undecided elements it might include.
Historical narratives
Narrative coherence was an idea that was soon shared by most disciplines and
most otherwise competing schools of thought. The narrativist school of thought
in historiography (Louis Mink and Hayden White as its most remarkable early
representatives) for example, soon established a binary opposition between the
coherence of narrative and the multiplicity of the facts of life. The philosopher of his-
tory, Louis Mink, summarizes much of the inherited understanding of narrative in
an essay written in the late 1970s:
There are also at a more general level conceptual presupposition of the very idea
of narrative form itself, and these supervene on its many varieties. Aristotle’s com-
ment that every story has a beginning, a middle and an end is not merely a truism.
It commands universal assent while failing to tell us anything new, simply because
it makes explicit part of the conceptual framework underlying the capacity to tell
and hear stories of any sort. And in making a presupposition explicit it has impli-
cations that are far from banal; it makes clear that our experience of life does not
necessarily have to form a narrative, except as we give it that form by making it the
subject of stories. (1987, p.â•›186; emphasis added)
What are the implications of “a narrative form itself ”? Mink’s choice of words is
informative: narrative form was a singular, stable, coherent formation which was
already known by Aristotle. Indeed, so obviously strong is the intellectual power
of structuralism that even the philosophers of history constitute an entirely a-his-
toricized, essential conception of narrative. In order to criticize naïve narrative
historiography, following the worst genres of the realistic novel, Mink postulates a
conceptual eternity, immovable narrative that “commands universal assent”.
Hayden White, the leading figure of the narrativist school of historiography,
conforms to this collapse of history when it comes to the concept of narrative.
His often cited, celebrated and criticized passage from the essay “The Value of
Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” repeats this idea of eternally similar
narrative form:
Does the world really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories,
with central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that
permits us to see ‘the end’ in every beginning? Or does it present itself more in
the forms that the annals and chronicle suggest, either as mere sequence without
beginning or end or as sequences of beginnings that only terminate and never
conclude? (1981/1987, p.â•›24; italics added)
Resistance to narrative comes here with the price of presenting a timeless observer
of “the world”, who either receives the world in the forms suggested by Aristotle’s
aesthetic theory or in the form of annals or chronicles. In order to criticize nar-
rative foreclosure in history, White employs conceptual foreclosure and a binary
opposition between the multitude of life and the full, fixed and eternal form of
narrative.
Without going deeper into this debate here (see Hyvärinen 2006) it is note-
worthy that philosophers of history have continually rejected the option of histori-
cizing narrative when criticizing it. The other ironic aspect of the ongoing debates
is the way critics of narrative almost systematically subscribe to the essentialist,

conventional and immovable conception of narrative, as Galen Strawson has re-
cently done. He reminds us that
The paradigm of a narrative is a conventional story told in words. I take the term
to attribute — at the very least — a certain sort of developmental and hence tem-
poral unity or coherence to the things to which it is standardly applied — lives, part
of lives, pieces of writing. (2004, p.â•›439, italics in the original)
Indeed, beginning from such a limited view of narrative it is rather easy to argue
that narrative cannot articulate characters’ “episodic” experiences.
The Coherent Self
The emerging narrative psychology often followed MacIntyre’s example in under-

standing narrative as an instrument for achieving a complete and intact self or
personal identity. Dan P. McAdams, in particular, has emphasized the coherence
creating function of the life story:
It is an individual’s story which has the power to tie together past, present, and
future in his life. It is a story which is able to provide unity and purpose in his or
her life. (1988, pp.â•›17–18; italics added)
We are all tellers of stories. We each seek to provide our scattered and often con-
fusing experiences with a sense of coherence by arranging the episodes of our
lives into stories. This is not the stuff of delusion or self-depreciation. (McAdams,
1993, p.â•›11)
This understanding of the benign role of the coherence-creating narrative can also
be found in many other disciplines and subject areas. The overall middle-class ori-
entation of this idea is equally well formulated by Charlotte Linde (1993, p.â•›3): “In
order to exist in the social world with a comfortable sense of being a good, socially
proper, and stable person, an individual needs to have a coherent, acceptable, and
constantly revised life story.” The philosopher Marya Schechtman (1996, p.â•›96) pro-
vides a similar argument considering the social necessity of expressing one’s iden-
tity in the form of a linear and conventional story, by saying that “this means that
constituting an identity requires that an individual conceive of his life having the
form and the logic of a story — more specifically, the story of a person’s life — where
‘story’ is understood as a conventional, linear narrative”. Because we normally are
socially accountable for a certain chronology of events in our lives, Schectman ar-
gues, our life stories and identities need also be chronological and more or less con-
ventional. This, of course, is a wrong conclusion in a number of ways, but most of all
it ignores the possibility of self-narrative as a creative study of one’s history and its
complexities, and transforms it almost as a curriculum vitae demanded by others.
The coherent self further emerges as a cultural construction and an effect of
gendered and racialized discourses and practices. In this context it has been richly
theorized, discussed and deconstructed in feminist and postcolonial critical stud-
ies. Critical feminist interventions in narrative studies have indeed shown that
there are many different ways of narrating the female self, ways that are always
embedded and embodied and often experimental, transgressing the limitations
of coherence and closure. (See Smith & Watson, 1998, for an excellent review of
this literature). For postcolonial critics, hybridity and multiplicity have emerged
as catalytic factors in the ways we read, analyse, understand and evaluate “coher-
ent” narratives. What happens to the desire for textual coherence when place and
location as material coherences par excellence, melt into fluid spatialities, forced
displacement and diasporic subjectivities? How can coherence be sustained in
narrative texts produced as effects of discourses of colonization? How can “the
coherent self ” be located across different national territories, ethnic locations and
multicultural places when narratives of return cannot be imagined, let alone ex-
pressed or inscribed, when there is no material place of origin or beginning? (See
amongst others, Bhabha, 1986; Gillroy, 1993, 2000; Hall, 1990; Spivak, 1987.)
In light of the above, it is therefore no big surprise that later critics of narrative
and narrativity often criticized the generalized vision of every human individual
as a life-story teller (Strawson, 2004) or the outlined life as a “teleological project”
(Sartwell, 2000). The profusely cultivated “we” does not exactly invite deviating
experiences. Without exception “we each seek to provide our scattered and often
confusing experiences with a sense of coherence” (McAdams, 1993, p.â•›11).
Can narrative coherence be a harmful phenomenon, how, and in which con-
text? This is a question posed much less frequently, yet the ideological implications
of an overtly coherent and linear life story should at least be questioned in the kind
of world(s) people have been living in since the First World War. Ian Craib (2000)
indeed disturbed the benign understanding of narrative identities by alluding to
the possibility of “bad faith narratives”. Mark Freeman (2000), using the concept
of “narrative fore-closure”, showed how an overly crafted and coherent life narra-
tive may actually lead to severe constraints of life options. Freeman (2003) has also
directed outspoken criticism at the tendency to idealize the presumed narrative
coherence within narrative psychology. The question that has finally been posed in
the above-mentioned feminist and postcolonial literatures is not simply why sub-
jects deemed to be different — women and slaves to state but the obvious — have
not written “coherent” narratives, but also how the imperative of coherence works
to legitimize certain narratives while excluding or marginalizing others from the
narrative canon.
Coherence, linearity, and completeness
Thus far we have discussed all aspects of narrative coherence as if they formed a
unitary package of temporal linearity (as in Aristotle and in Labov and Waletsky),
strong cohering power of the ending (White) and completeness in terms of ac-
tantial roles (Bruner). However, if we want to see cracks in the unitary picture
of coherent narrative and to re-theorize narrative coherence, we obviously need
take these aspects separately, and also see incongruent packages of these elements.
The attempt to read these aspects separately and in a more sophisticated way is
compelling, of course, for the reason that recent criticisms of narrative often seem
to present all these aspects as being necessary and essential parts of the narrative
approach in general (Strawson, 2004).
Paul Ricoeur most emphatically was a theorist who early on (1981) resisted
the structuralist reduction of temporality into linearity of sequences. Although he
understood narratives to be complete, he nevertheless systematically resisted the
ideas of temporal linearity and thematic coherence. He did this partly because he
did not base his theory of narrative solely on the work of Aristotle, but drew heav-
ily from St Augustine’s thinking on temporality and its paradoxes. He also resisted
the idea of full causal and thematic coherence by maintaining that “[e]mplotment
is never the simple triumph of ‘order’â†œ” (1984, p.â•›73). The purpose of narrative ac-
cording to Ricoeur is not simply to produce coherence out of disorder. It is above
all an attempt to cope with the “discordant” aspects of acting and suffering.
It is interesting how Ricoeur’s persistent criticism of sequentiality was neglect-
ed and pushed away during the early days of the narrative turn. Jerome Bruner
(1990, p.â•›43), for example, argues that narrative’s “principal property is its inherent
sequentiality,” and supports the view by a quote from Ricoeur. In this quotation
Ricoeur discusses the sequentiality of “story” using the term the way it is used in
narratology, as equal to the supposed sequence of events, and not at all as “narra-
tive” per se.
Bruner himself is a contradictory figure in terms of coherence. He draws heav-
ily from the Proppian and structuralist heritage, for example, and often repeats
his trust in the sequential structure of narrative. Nevertheless Bruner does not
believe in coherence in the same unconditional way as many other narrative psy-
chologists. Indeed, in his article “The Narrative Construction of Reality” (1991)
he famously claims that narratives are “designed to contain uncanniness rather
than to resolve it” (p.â•›16). A deeper (potential) deviation from the unilateral under-
standing of coherence is embedded in Bruner’s account of “folk psychology” or the
script-like knowledge of common sense. Bruner emphasizes a conceptual distinc-
tion between scripts and narratives, maintaining that it is “only when constituent
beliefs in folk psychology are violated that narratives are constructed” (1990, p.â•›40).
By contrast, for example, McAdams’ outlines of successfully coherent life stories

rather resemble folk psychological expectations than narratives worth telling.
One of the paradoxes of the coherence thesis is that it so obviously contradicts
what avant-garde literature and film have been doing with narrative. What, for
example, has the sequential, chronological and coherence-oriented model to do
with James Joyce, Virginia Woolf or Henry James? In other words, why is it that
the paradigmatic models of narrative were so often taken from simplified literary
models of 19th-century realism? Monika Fludernik’s project to build “natural nar-
ratology”, meaning narratology based on everyday oral narration and capable of
understanding both literary and “naturally occurring” narration, took an entirely
different tack (Fludernik, 1996). Fludernik argued that the sequential and linear
beginning, middle, and end model of narratives represent only “zero-degree nar-
rativity”. Fludernik sees “experientiality” to be the core of narrativity and argues
that both the modernist consciousness novels and imperfect oral narratives ex-
press this experientiality more fully than the strictly sequential and conventional
stories.
In another attempt to displace the discourse on sequence and coherence Da-
vid Herman in his book Story Logic (2002) takes Bruner’s proposal of folk psychol-
ogy and pushes it a bit further. Herman locates narrativity on a scale between, on
the one hand, cultural-cum-cognitive scripts, presenting the expected and normal
courses of events in a sequential model and, on the other hand, a totally chaotic
and idiosyncratic scribble. Herman’s proposal is completely fatal for the admira-
tion of coherence and sequence because it suggests that pushing too far in this
direction actually leads toward the thinning away of narrativity. The coincidental,
unexpected, experimental, even the chaotic, are all necessary and integral aspects
of a narrativity that tries to capture an uncharted aspect of experientiality. Under-
standability (resorting to a rich number of cultural expectations) and tellability
(distance from the scripts and deviations from the expected) work constantly in
different directions and create the innate tensions of narrativity.
The impetus to reject and challenge the sequential model came from many
theoretical and practical sources. Just to mention a few exemplary studies that
did not privilege separate, complete and coherent stories, Elinor Ochs and Lisa
Capp’s Living Narrative (2001) portrayed the lively and fragmented interactional
narration in everyday situations. The authors noticed that many conversational
narratives are incomplete, and get completed and finally evaluated only within
interaction. Kristin M. Langellier and Eric E. Peterson’s Storytelling in Daily Life
(2004) similarly rejects the idea of separate and complete narratives and fore-
grounds instead the interactional performing of family realities by storytelling.
Similar arguments and findings have been reported by researchers dealing with
trauma studies, brain trauma, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias (cf. Hydén
& Brockmeier, 2008). Catherine Kohler Riessman (1990) has challenged the idea
of narrative linearity by suggesting the important category of “hypothetical nar-
rative”. Narratives routinely play with multiple options, and this is also reflected
by Gary Saul Morson (1994; 1998; 2003) and Michael André Bernstein (1994),
who have introduced the concept of narrative “side-shadowing”. The idea of one
single, relatively coherent life narrative has equally been challenged in the study of
“small” and conversationally situated narratives (e.g., Bamberg 1997, 2004; Geor-
gakopoulou 2007).
Does it matter?
Above, we have documented the great number of different research orientations

that take the idea of narrative coherence for granted. However, has this orientation
signified any problems in practical, empirical narrative analysis? Does it matter in
terms of research methodology? We would like to argue that it matters. The nor-
mative attitude privileging coherent narratives may give rise to at least four kinds
of problems.
First, scholars may privilege coherent stories as better and more thickly rep-
resentational material, and neglect other, more challenging cases. Many chapters
in this volume take apparently “incoherent” and defective narratives and narrative
situations, and show how meaning is made interactionally (Medved and Brock-
meier, Hydén, Aaltonen), as a performance (Medved and Brockmeier, Hydén)
or evaluation (Hydén). Narratives that may appear to resist chronology and clear
temporal order can turn out to be extraordinarily rich studies about the life course,
as argued in the chapter by Vilma Hänninen and Anja Koski-Jännes.
Second, an overly normative attitude towards coherence may lead to a biased
reading strategy as the scholar is desperately working towards “finding” the deep-
est, coherent meaning of the self-narrative. We believe that coherence is not an
objective feature of an individual narrative as a text, but rather is something that
has always been produced interactionally, thus implicating the researcher as a co-
herence-creating or coherence-declining agent (Brockmeier, 2004).
Interpretive projects always run the risk of looking for ready-made and overly
neat solutions, and this risk is made that much greater if a coherent and complete
life narrative is the blueprint. Reading may instead go in the other direction, as
for example in Linda Sandino’s chapter. Sandino employs Paul Ricoeur’s theory
of triple mimesis and the dual nature of narrative identity to portray the turning
points, the contemplation of art works that mark the turn of a career, the other who
becomes part of one’s own work and thinking. Similarly Maria Tamboukou offers,
in her chapter, both the non-linear and resistant epistolary narratives written by the
artist Gwen John, and a consciously Deleuzian reading of the cracks, hesitations,
and formations of insecure identifications when writing and painting self-portraits.
Alison Stern Perez (with her co-authors), in her chapter on the Israeli bus
drivers, who have experienced terrorist attacks, takes an obvious incoherence of
pronoun use and straightforwardly contradictory statements given by a bus driver
about not fearing and having feared, of course, as the starting points of her analy-
sis. Perez’s reading of the variable use of the Hebrew gendered ‘you’ opens up dif-
ferent layers of vulnerability and dominant masculinity, and how the contradic-
tions of the statements are attached to contradicting societal expectations, which
render the individual interviews seemingly incoherent.
Third, the biased emphasis on narrative coherence and coherent narratives
seems to impoverish the narrative thought and reduce narratives once again more
or less to adequate representations of past life, experiences, or thoughts. Many of
the chapters in this volume foreground the performative and evaluative roles nar-
ration takes. Lars-Christer Hydén, in particular, shows how the performance of a
narrative and narrative evaluation may survive the textual coherence in the story-
telling of dementia patients. This urge to tell, and to do it interactionally through a
network of family members even after severe brain damage or aphasia is analysed
in the chapters of Medved and Brockmeier and Aaltonen.
Molly Andrews’s chapter on political trauma narratives addresses a fourth
set of problems with the coherence bias. Extreme political traumas often seem to
block the whole capacity to tell, and the ideal of coherent and standard narration
stands in cruel contrast to what the victims and witnesses can actually do. As a
dramatic example, Andrews recounts how the translation process during the work
of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa often cleaned out im-
portant personal details in order to fit the purposes of the national project of uni-
fication. All in all, a significant part of the politically and humanly most important
narration comes out hesitantly, often incoherently, replete with contradictions and
resistant to chronologically smooth, linear progress. Again, as Andrews argues,
the performance of telling seems to be the most urgent task, where the meaning
and coherence of the accounts remain secondary in importance.
In addressing the four sets of problems identified above, the chapters of this
volume challenge the sequential, coherence-oriented model of narrative from
three major subject areas: illness, the arts, and trauma in the political context.
Typical for these areas is that they confront the middle-class normalcy and the
vision of life as a teleological project that the narrator-protagonist creates with the
same ease as he or she tells it.
Maria Medved and Jens Brockmeier open the volume with a survey on re-
search constituting the coherence paradigm in illness and brain injury research,
and show compellingly with their case studies, how this paradigm limits the
recognition of genuine narrative performances. Lars-Christer Hydén, in his ar-

ticle on narrative, self, and identity also foregrounds the performative and evalu-
ative aspects of storytelling, showing how Alzheimer patients whose coherence
in narration is far from complete, nevertheless can interactionally produce the
desired evaluative point of the story, the affirmation of the suggested identity. Tarja
Aaltonen continues with the narrative difficulties of an aphasic patient, and ar-
gues that the family members and the speech therapist use “mind reading” as a
technique in teasing out the correct interpretation from the very limited and dis-
ordered speech of the patient.
Maria Tamboukou begins the section about artistic impediments and chal-
lenges to linear and coherent narration. The painter Gwen John, writing postcards
and love letters to the leading artistic figure Rodin, is impeded by wrong language
(French instead of English), mixed identity (a female artist and model within a
male dominated scene), and wrong media (an artist writing), thus constantly
struggling with several kinds of evasions in her epistolary narration. Linda San-
dino, by contrast, studies interview narratives of British ceramic artists. Sandino
works within the Ricoeurian paradigm, reading out the changes and challenges of
identity, pointing out how the idem (sameness) identity cannot help us to under-
stand the changes artists experience through visiting and receiving artistically ex-
plosive work by other artists; and shows the relevance of the identity as temporally
evolving and changing ipse. Vilma Hänninen and Anja Koski-Jännes introduce
the third artist, now in the context of dilemmatic recovery from severe drinking
problems. The authors argue that, in contrast to many coherent and conversion-
like stories by recovered drinkers, the female artist of this story rejects a linear,
chronological, and sequential model of narration, and instead proceeds through
large temporal cycles, and only cautiously approaches the most traumatic experi-
ences of her youth. The article presents a marvellous narrative moment of creation
and investigation of the self, rather than delivering a repeatedly told, finished and
polished narrative of the self.
The last section consists of papers discussing trauma in the political context.
Alison Stern Perez, with her co-authors, discusses the oral narratives of Israeli bus
drivers who have faced terrorist attacks in their line of work. What could be a more
dramatic break and challenge to the linearity and coherence of a life story? Perez
goes on to reveal highly telling incongruities in the use of Hebrew pronouns, and
focuses her analysis on the obvious factual contradiction of the narrative. More-
over, precisely the departures from the coherent ideal turn out to be the most
telling elements of the bus drivers’ stories, not a deficiency of the material. Molly
Andrews’s article on narrative difficulty in accounting for severe political traumas,
from the European Holocaust to other genocides and to the work of the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Committee, foregrounds the utmost difficulty
to provide a narrative account after such an experience. Coherent, linear, and tra-
ditional narrative is often the most unlikely account of such experiences, even
though the witnesses struggle with the obligation to tell and not to remain silent
after such atrocities. It is a huge methodological challenge to approach such com-
plex and potentially re-traumatizing narrative situations, a challenge, which can-
not be met just by trusting in the inherited representational model. As Andrews
concludes, the performance of the narration is again the key aspect of the contra-
dictory situation.
In the final chapter, Mark Freeman encounters the challenge of coherence
again from a new angle, and discusses the ideas presented in the previous articles
of the volume. Freeman makes the initially surprising observation that ‘nearly ev-
ery chapter in this book seeks to show that, behind the manifest in-coherence or
“a-coherence” of the narratives in question a latent coherence lurks. Moreover […]
most of these chapters suggest that there is some relationship between narrative
coherence and well-being’. Freeman’s nuanced article suggests that perhaps it is,
after all, both impossible and unnecessary to go beyond narrative coherence, if the
terms of coherence and in-coherence are rethought one more time.
Note
We are grateful to the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change,
the research team Politics and the Arts, for arranging and funding the Third Tampere Confer-
ence on Narrative, Living, Knowing, Telling, taking place June 26–29, 2007; and finally to the
Academy of Finland Research Project The Conceptual History of Narrative (1111743) for making
the editorial process of this volume possible.
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Chapter 2
Weird stories
Brain, mind, and self
Maria I. Medved and Jens Brockmeier

University of Manitoba, Canada / University of Innsbruck, Austria
In the literature on autobiographical narrative, self, and identity construc-

tion, many researchers have taken narrative coherence as an important feature
that reflects and shapes identity and sense of self. Commonly, this feature is
defined and assessed in isolation, as if at stake were an autonomous text. We
argue this approach is too narrow to represent things as complex as narrative,
self, and brain. We explain this argument in discussing narratives by individu-
als with serious neuropsychological challenges: people who, due to illness or
disability, cannot fully rely on their neurocognitive and narrative resources for
their identity construction. We offer a broader view of the issue of coherence in
autobiographical narrative that goes beyond a decontextualized concept of nar-
rative, especially, by including (i) the intersubjective context in which stories are
told, (ii) the larger autobiographical context of their narrator, and (iii) the wider
socio-cultural context in which narratives and narrators are situated. Using
narrative excerpts from adults with acquired brain injuries and neurocognitive
disabilities, we point out how what is seen as (narrative) coherence of one’s brain,
mind, and self changes when these contexts are taken into account.
Narrative identity and coherence: The Aristotelian version
The idea that autobiographical narratives are not only essential to the construc-
tion of human identity but also in the creation and reflection of one’s sense of self
is wide-spread. In psychology, Jerome Bruner (1986, 1990) was one of the first
to emphasize the link between autobiographical narration and personal identity.
While this view — sometimes called the narrative identity thesis — initially was
met with reluctance and resistance, there has been an exponential increase in the
number of studies investigating self and identity by examining people’s narratives.
This is true both for more theoretical studies in psychology, the social sci-
ences, and the humanities, as well as for areas of applied research. We want to
take a closer look at how the narrative identity thesis is drawn out in one applied
18 Maria I. Medved and Jens Brockmeier
area, a landscape of the mind that we think is of particular interest because it in-
volves people whose “natural” resources both for narrative and the construction
of identity are seriously challenged: individuals who cannot rely on “normal”, that
is, typical neurological and neuropsychological functioning because their brains
went awry.
There are, indeed, many researchers and theorists concerned with neurologi-
cal and psychopathological issues who have discussed the interweaving of auto-
biographical narratives and the self. Oliver Sacks (1985) argued, from the point of
view of what he called a new neuropsychology, that “each of us constructs and lives
‘narrative,’â†œ” concluding “that narrative is us, our identities” (p.â•›105). (For a discus-
sion of this “strong narrative identity claim,” see Eakin, 1999.) Similarly, Daniel
Dennett (1986, 1992) argued that the self, since it does not have any neuronal
correlates, only makes sense if thought of as an abstraction. It is a purely linguistic
arrangement, a “center of narrative gravity.” While the self, for Dennett, is fictional,
it is not fantastical. It is not real in the way brain processes and structures are real,
but still plays an important role because it allows us to explain, predict, and narra-
tively organize human behavior. In short, there is no real self, but the assumption
of a self makes sense — narrative sense, that is.
Antonio Damasio has suggested a neurobiological theory of consciousness
that includes a “narrative core”: “The story contained in the images of core con-
sciousness is not told by some clever homunculus. Nor is the story told by you as
a self because the core you is only born as the story is told, within the story itself”
(1999, p.â•›191). In the same vein, Michael Gazzaniga (1998) has viewed “the self as
the product of stories we tell about ourselves.” He underscored the argument that,
biologically, there is no such thing as a self, but only the illusion of a self created
through and by narrative. Drawing on his work with split-brain patients, Gazzani-
ga proposed that there is an “interpreter” in the left hemisphere of the brain whose
function is to seek explanations for internal and external events and, in so doing,
constructs intelligible and coherent narratives about these occurrences. Recently
even cognitive psychologists, for a long time the staunchest critics of all things
narrative, have taken over some of these ideas and adapted them to their models.
Greenberg and Rubin (2003), for example, believe that our ability to narrate is so
fundamental and unique to human beings, that it represents a distinct cognitive
process associated with a distinct neural network.
Commonly, neuroscientific authors do not assume a biological substrate for
the self, viewing it rather as a “secondary” construction in which narrative may
play the role of an organizer. There are, however — in clinical, social, and devel-
opmental psychology, education, and even in narrative psychology — stronger
claims regarding this kind of this narrative organization. Here many researchers,
investigating the narrative construction of identity, have postulated coherence as
Chapter 2.â•‡ Weird stories 19
the dominant feature not only of autobiographical narratives, but also more gener-
ally of identity construction. Typically, coherence and integration are thought to be
linked to the ability to sustain a sense of continuity, directionality, and meaning in
one’s life (e.g., Angus & McLeod, 2004; Linde, 1993; McAdams, 2003; Neimeyer,
1994). There seems to be extensive agreement that people whose narratives about
themselves are assessed as coherent report a high level of psychological well-being,
whereas individuals whose narratives are incoherent report psychological difficul-
ties (Androutsopoulou et al., 2004; Baerger & McAdams, 1999; Lysaker, Wickett,
& Davis, 2005; McAdams, 2006a & b; Pals, 2006). It has even been claimed that
coherence not only influences people’s own selves and well-being, but also those of
their children. Main (1991), for example, argued that adults who are able tell coher-
ent stories about their childhood experiences, no matter how troubled or traumatic
these might have been, have children who develop into psychologically healthier
adults. Generally, the underlying assumption of this literature is that if peoples’
autobiographical narratives are incoherent, their sense of self is also incoherent,
and this mostly seems to imply that it is psychologically unhealthy or troubled.
And conversely, if a person’s autobiographical narrative is coherent, their self is also
psychologically healthy and generative.
On these grounds psychotherapists aim at co-constructing with their patients
new and coherent narratives to replace disorganized or incoherent ones (McLeod,
1997). Developing a coherent life story, the story of a coherent self, is seen to be
the outcome of recovery (e.g., Davidson & Strauss, 1992), if not redemption (Mc-
Adams, 2006a). To put it even more technically, increased “self-narrative coher-
ence indicates ‘improvement’â†œ” (Androutsopoulou et al., 2004, p.â•›385). Again, these
and numerous other authors seem to be convinced that the coherence of personal
stories, in general, and stories about oneself or autobiographical stories, in par-
ticular, correlates with psychological functioning, health, and well-being of the
teller. Ultimately, narrative coherence equals both a coherent mind and a coherent
self. In McAdams’s (2006b, p.â•›109) terms, coherent life stories reflect the “richness
of experience” of a good life; these stories therefore provide “convincing causal
explanations for the self.” Moreover, they organize the self into a “unified and pur-
poseful whole” (2003, p.â•›189).
If narrative coherence, then, is taken to be such a powerful indicator, how is it
defined? A common definition of coherence draws on what we would describe as
the traditional notion of narrative, as it is characteristic of 19th century European
genres of realist fiction. Theoretically, this idea can be traced back to Aristotle. An
Aristotelian narrative is a well-structured story; it has a clear, temporally ordered
plot with a dramatic complication that eventually is resolved. Its components are
constituted by the elements of Burke’s (1945) “dramatist pentad,” which includes
an act (with a beginning and an end), a scene, an agent, agency, and a purpose.
All of this endows Aristotelian stories with a high degree of coherence and poten-
tial complexity. Now, in the literature on the relationship between self and narra-
tive the idea of coherence is, however, more narrowly defined, and its Aristotelian
model typically is not addressed. These more specific versions of coherence, to
mention a few, range from “internal consistency” (based on causal and themat-
ic linkages in one’s life story) (e.g., Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Habermas & Paha,
2003), the organization, flexibility, and congruence of affect and content (e.g.,
Fiese & Sameroff, 1999; Fiese & Wamboldt, 2003), “micro- and macrolinguistic
structures” organizing “semantic information”, to “intelligibility” (Androutsopou-
lou et al., 2004) in terms of both narrative form and content, which is expected “to
advance living action” (McAdams, 2006b). Furthermore, most concepts of coher-
ence using narrative frameworks include time — typically understood in terms of
temporal sequentiality — as a strong criterion of coherence (for a critical discus-
sion see Brockmeier, 2004).
How does the narrative identity thesis “apply” to people with hardcore brain
problems? By hardcore we refer to what clinicians call neuropsychological defi-
cits or dysfunctions due to accidents, diseases (stroke, dementia), or syndromes
(developmental disabilities). This is an area of research, assessment, and therapy,
where one’s sense of self and the construction of identity are almost always cen-
trally affected — and so are people’s self-narratives. In examinations of the way
in which people with these neurological problems situate themselves in their life
worlds, the traditional definitions of narrative coherence are also used to assess
the opposite, namely, the incoherence of their stories. Mostly, here only a weak
version of “mental coherence” or “mental incoherence” is implied; still, the idea of
a nexus between brain-mind-self and narrative coherence underlies much of the
literature in this area.
As the literature on neurotrauma is vast, we mention only a few representative
studies to give a sense of this kind of research on mental and narrative coherence.
Snow, Douglas, and Ponsford (1999) argue that individuals with traumatic brain
injuries demonstrate more story planning errors on what they call an objective
story-telling task (e.g., composing the plot of a story); these are seen as signs of
lower narrative coherence than found in stories by individuals without brain in-
juries. In a single case study, Caspari and Parkinson (2000) examined unrelated,
abrupt, and inappropriate topic shifts in the stories of a woman with a memory im-
pairment. In numerous similar investigations of stories by people with closed head
injuries, clinicians and researchers have pointed out deficits in “logical,” “causal,”
and “temporal” coherence, “referential cohesion,” and/or “structural incoher-
ence” (e.g., Coelho, 2002; Davis & Coelho, 2004; Heartley & Jensen,1991; Mentis
& Prutting, 1987). Irrespective of which brain area is damaged or what ability is
impacted, narratives of affected people are commonly classified as “incoherent” or
“incohesive.” Such findings are almost always interpreted as suggesting a disturbed

sense of self.
Let us at this point change our perspective. We shift from reporting and re-
viewing to taking an analytical and critical stance towards the idea that the crite-
rion of (narrative) coherence and incoherence, as used in the above studies, is ca-
pable of adequately “assessing” the mental state and the sense of self, let alone the
identity, of a person affected by neurotrauma, neurodegeneration, or neurodis-
ability. We want to make the case that narrative coherence, at least in the way it is
typically understood in mainstream psychological and neuroscientific research, as
well in neuropsychological assessment and in therapy, is a construct that is all but
capable of reflecting the sense of self and the construction of identity in individu-
als who cannot fully rely on their brains. We believe that the standard — Aristote-
lian — view on what represents narrative coherence in autobiographical narrative
is misleading because it offers too narrow a picture of coherence and incoherence,
be it of autobiographical narrative, the mind, the brain, or the self. In what follows
we flesh out this argument theoretically and empirically, drawing on our own re-
search as well as on that of others with individuals with neurological damage and
disability. In offering a broader narrative, discursive, and socio-cultural approach
to the question of how incoherent stories may be linked to the mind, the self, and
the brain, we propose that not all weird autobiographical stories are necessarily
incoherent, and not all incoherent stories mirror a weird self.
Narrative identity and coherence: A discursive version
The first problem we see with the focus on narrative coherence as the key criterion
of a coherent mind and self is that it generalizes specific concepts of narrative
and coherence — we have called them Aristotelian — and employs them to the
wider field of human social practice and self-experience. A second problem arises
from examining people’s autobiographical stories in isolation, more precisely: in
textual isolation. In a sense, isolating narratives from their discursive contexts and
cultural life world is also already part of the Aristotelian conception of narrative.
While such an approach may seem plausible if we take narrative to be a written
text, it is precarious if we want to approach a person’s autobiographical narratives
in order to understand his or her brain, mind, sense of self, and identity construc-
tion. Here we clearly need to go beyond the limits of the narrative text, at least if it
is not understood in a poststructuralist sense (and we can be sure that this is the
case in the literature under discussion).
We believe the main difficulty of this approach results from its tendency to de-
contextualize stories. More precisely, it decontextualizes self-narratives from three
essential areas or aspects of what Alexander Luria (1979) called the “living reality”
of human beings: the intersubjective context in which all stories are told (which
includes the dialogic or discursive relationship between teller and told), the larger
autobiographical context that is behind all self-narratives (which includes one’s life
history), and the socio-cultural context (which includes the social environments
in which narrators share their lives with others). Limiting the focus of investiga-
tion to pure cognitive (or mental or neurological) “functioning” brings with it
the danger, as Luria put it, of “reducing living reality with all its richness of detail
to abstract schemas” (quoted in Wasserstein, 1988, p.â•›440). In abstracting from
the psychological and social embeddedness of every narrative discourse, it even
excludes the possibility to understand narrative incoherence as rooted in real-life
worlds.
In our own research with people suffering from neurological memory impair-
ments (Medved & Brockmeier, 2008a & b), we wanted to explore how these indi-
viduals experienced the catastrophe of a neurotrauma and how they continued to
live their lives afterwards. In other words, in which ways were they able to nar-
rate their experiences retrospectively? Not surprisingly, all of the individuals we
visited, talked to, and interviewed, struggled to formulate narrative accounts be-
cause their linguistic and cognitive resources were seriously limited by their brain
lesions. Others experienced difficulties because they had simply no or very few
autobiographical memories after their accidents or strokes on which their stories
could draw. But what we did not expect was that many of them, although they
complained about the lack of autobiographical memories and the impossibility
of formulating their experiences in the form of stories, did not complain about
changes in their sense of self and their identities in time. The stories they told
us were occasionally a bit tricky — for example, they invented, “imported,” and
“appropriated” memories they had heard from others into their own narratives
(Medved, 2007).
Often, these stories were presented in a weird fashion — they were discon-
nected, fragmented, and implausible. But they were amazingly coherent in an
important respect: they suggested an unbroken continuity between their lives
and selves before and after the neurotrauma. Most surprisingly, our participants,
people with severe memory impairments, appeared to have maintained a strong
sense of sameness, in fact, of self-continuity — despite the chaos in their minds
and lives. Although they acknowledged, and complained about, their lack of auto-
biographical memory, the gist of their stories unveiled a sense of self and identity
that hardly seemed to have been disturbed by their brain injury.
A similar picture emerged in a study by Örulv and Hydén (2006). They re-
interpreted another form of weird narration, so called confabulation, that they
observed among the elderly residents of a dementia day care. Instead of examining
the confabulatory stories of the residents as an isolated cognitive event (for ex-
ample, of thematic and temporal distortions), Örulv and Hydén describe them
as products of a particular social and discursive situation. They plot the story of
Martha, a woman with Alzheimer’s disease whose narratives are about receiving
friends at home whereas she is at her day care clinic. When decontextualized, Mar-
tha’s story clearly appears nonsensical and incoherent by all Aristotelian standards.
But when the immediate context of the day care, her life history, and the limita-
tions due to her disease are taken into account, her story does not seem so bizarre
at all; rather it is a story that, in fact, establishes and maintains a personal identity
for Martha, what the authors call self-making.
Coherence in context
We now want to illustrate in more detail how we see autobiographical narrative

and the question of its coherence as a discursive phenomenon contextualized in
the “living reality” of its narrator and co-narrators. Although we have set up our
argument wider in range, we will flesh out our views by closely looking at auto-
biographical stories told by individuals who are badly equipped for such narrative
discourse, individuals who are in one way or another neurologically and neuro-
psychologically challenged. Here the issue of coherence and incoherence reveals
still another existential meaning; to get a sense of it we must not only consider the
isolated stories of these people and the clinical accounts of their problems but also
engage with the reality of their life worlds
We start with Ann, a teenage girl with Fragile X Syndrome, a genetic syn-
drome that leads to various cognitive problems or, as neurologists would put it,
intellectual deficits (Medved & Brockmeier, 2004). Ann was born in a Caribbean
country and, as her mother was unable to care for her, she was raised by her grand-
parents who allegedly had been abusive. Soon after her birth her father left the
family and immigrated to North America. She followed him a few years later, and
shortly afterwards was diagnosed with Fragile X Syndrome. Ann told us that in her
father’s new household she had to do most of the family chores, duties she deeply
disliked. When we first met her, she had moved into a semi-independent home
and worked as a cleaner. She also started taking a course, “a course in animal care,”
she told us, “because I love animals.”
To be sure, the first time we talked to this shy and quiet girl we had difficulties
understanding her. Ann’s stories were told in strange fragments that seemed to be
only associatively connected. No doubt, when her story fragments or collections of
such fragments were assessed as isolated statements in a traditional neuropsycho-
logical fashion, they unavoidably appeared to be incoherent, particularly in terms
of their causal, temporal, and semantic relations. The picture changed, however,
when we examined what she told us not against the standard of well-formed sto-
ries, which they obviously were not, but as contributions to a dialogic exchange. To
understand them as narratively charged conversational turns — turns, admittedly,
in an unusual conversation — meant integrating them into a discursive context in
which the task of making them intelligible and, that is, creating coherence, was not
just on one side but on the sides of both participants of the conversation.
Ann: I know a secret.
Interviewer: What’s that?
A: My sister is pregnant, my brother told me.
I: Gosh, that IS a big secret.
A: She’s only 16 years old. I don’t feel sorry. How will she go back to school. She
can’t go back.
I: You think school is important?
A: I go to college for a course.
I: What kind of course?
A: For animals. I want a good job.
I: You want to change your job?
A: I don’t want to clean trays.
While traditional assessments focusing on rounded and autonomous Aristote-

lian stories told by an isolated individual easily result in “deficit diagnoses,” in this
small example the girl and the interviewer demonstrate different things. They act
as what in recent narrative theory is called “co-narrators” and their exchange un-
folds, as a result, into a fully-fledged discourse. This discourse includes the trans-
formation of one storyline — the “secret” of Ann’s sister’s pregnancy and its dra-
matic consequences — via a reflection on the importance of education for life to
another, autobiographical storyline that reveals Ann’s discontent with her pres-
ent job and the consequence she has drawn from it: attending a course in order
to realize her dream to work with animals. Reconstructing these, at first sight,
simple plots which capture, however, existential human concerns implies shift-
ing the focus from the construct of an autonomous narrative to a social, interac-
tive situation. It means creating a discursive space in which this girl, encouraged,
supported, and interpreted by the interviewer — who, as any co-narrator in any
everyday conversational narrative, fills in the gaps, comments on and bridges dif-
ferent elements, and brings in personal interest and warmth — is able to give nar-
rative shape to personal experiences and thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and intentions.
None of this would have been (and, in fact, was) possible in the context of a
neuropsychological assessment or any (causal, temporal, semantic, or narrative)
coherence-centered approach. In fact, curtailing acts of narrative interaction in or-
der to fit traditional assessment requirements and “construct” a decontextualized
clinical subject necessarily emphasizes impairment, disorder, and deficits and, in

this way, confirm the hypothesized view of an incoherent brain, mind, and self.
The idea that a narrative is jointly constructed and performed by co-narrators
elaborates on an understanding of narrative as primarily a communicative activity.
This is in contrast with most of the literature mentioned earlier which is based on
an idea of narrative (and of language in general) as primarily representational. In
viewing each narration as a discursive venture, as a process of interaction and mu-
tual understanding — a view that we see nicely illustrated in the quoted exchange
— we suggest a different, discursive, and interactional approach to the question of
coherence. Although we have illustrated this approach by referring to the special
stories of a special narrator, a girl with Fragile X syndrome, we believe it is a gen-
eral, in fact, constitutive feature of stories that they are not told as such but always
embedded in a conversational dynamic. Thus the coherence of stories, as discussed
in more detail elsewhere (Brockmeier, 2004), can change relative to the rhetorical
dynamic of the conversation which, in turn, depend on the interplay among the
different strategies, intentions, and narrative competencies of the participants.
In our second example we present another weird autobiographical story. In
this case we want to draw attention to a different context which, we believe, must
also be taken into account in order to understand the coherence, and incoherence,
of this kind of story. Here the context is that of the narrator’s life history which,
quite like the discursive and interactional context, typically is excluded by the fo-
cus on the Aristotelian coherence of personal stories.
How essential it is to be aware of the life history of a person in order to make
sense of her autobiographical stories and conceive of them as either coherent or
incoherent (or both), we experienced in our work with a woman suffering from
the neurological and neuropsychological consequences of a stroke. Admitted to
the hospital, this woman, Ms. E, showed many symptoms of what clinicians call
an “anterior communicating artery syndrome,” which often includes dramatic per-
sonality changes, amnesia, and confabulation. This means, for example, that she
tells highly unusual stories, if one can call them stories at all. To give an idea of how
this looks, let us quote a narrative she abruptly started in the middle of a conversa-
tion about her life that had been changed so profoundly by the aneurysm.
See, that’s why some like me. I told somebody this before, I don’t know who I told
this before but its coming right back to me. We were talking about drugs, taking,
not medical drugs but illegal street drugs. That’s what you call them. That’s why
someone like me could never do it. I’m too afraid something would happen to me.
That someone would guide me the wrong way. I have to be … I have to have my
wits about me. Like drinking. If we go out drinking, oh I’ll drink, but when I order
my drink straight up, lots of ice please and it just sits there. Cause I always have to
be in control. And [my husband] knows that, cause he’s told me…
Reading this transcript, it is not difficult to confirm our impression as we first

listened to Ms. E’s agitated monologue (which went on for quite a while, and oc-
curred in one way or another in almost all our visits): What is, we were wondering,
the point of these endless story bits and pieces? What do drugs and alcohol have
to do with the life of this woman, a middle-aged, middle-class professional, wife,
and mother with a house in the suburbs? Why does she have to be so in control,
even restricting herself to one drink? And what does all this have to do with her
stroke and her present life? In no way could this sudden narrative eruption claim
any coherence — unless, well, unless we go beyond the concept of an isolated nar-
rative (if we, for once, call it a narrative) and contextualize it within the broader
knowledge we have about the life of the narrator. Linguists refer to this as world
knowledge, the knowledge beyond the word and the text, completed with the in-
terpretive and imaginative ability, and the emotionality and intentionality shared
by members of the same culture. Typically, these are resources every speaker and
listener brings to a discursive event.
When cast against the backdrop of the life story of this woman, her weird
sort-of-narrative begins to make more sense. An established business woman, just
before her stroke, she was in charge of an office staff of about 20 people, priding
herself on running a “tight ship.” For many years working hard to combine her
career with her family, she apparently was very successful in both domains. Now,
imagine what a catastrophe not only for her brain but for her entire being in the
world was triggered by a stroke that, at the time she told us this story, left her in a
state that made it most unlikely for her to ever return to her former life.
In our work with her we have come to suspect that this truth, together with all
the havoc caused by the stroke on her brain, might have been simply too much to
bear. So her stories went on to suggest, to others but perhaps most of all to herself,
a picture of herself as the woman she always was and wanted to be: a strong and
energetic woman, a woman in charge. Given her clinically reduced state, her sto-
ries were no doubt obsessive, bizarre, and weird; but they were not incoherent sto-
ries, at least not when understood as — shall we say, psychological — attempts to
struggle against the utter breakdown that fully realizing and accepting her desper-
ate situation would have entailed. They were narratives that gained intelligibility
and, indeed, coherence, if understood as counter-narratives. What they were sup-
posed to counter was the horrifying perspective of this woman’s future in contrast
with her lived life history.
The third context in which we propose to situate the issue of coherence wid-
ens the narrative and discursive framework even further into the sociocultural
environment in which people talk about themselves. Typically, individuals are en-
gaged in all kinds of ongoing discursive interactions that involve family members,
friends, neighbors, colleagues, baristas from a favorite cafe, and many others. All
of them know something about me and my past, and all of them contribute to my
sense of self, to the way I see, feel, and understand myself in this world. And what’s
more, they will likely continue to do so even if I have forgotten things about myself
that are considered fundamental. This discursive net of everyday communication
is of particular importance when I may have forgotten, due to illness or dementia,
essential parts of my autobiographical identity — say, the names of new friends,
babies, and acquaintances, what I did on my last birthday, whether I thanked you
for the gift, whether you gave me a gift, and in fact, whether we are still friends at
all. One could assume that these bits of information are essential for maintaining a
sense of personal continuity and perhaps even of identity in time. Can there be any
kind of coherent self if there is no coherent knowledge of who I am, not to mention
of memories about my personal past?
Studying sense of self-continuity and identity in people with serious brain in-
juries and disabilities we found that the discursive net of one’s social environment,
with one’s family in the center, plays an essential role in holding together the sense
of a coherent self even when individuals cannot rely on this kind of self-knowl-
edge and autobiographical memory anymore. As already pointed out, we were sur-
prised that, despite profound neurological problems, many individuals with whom
we worked did not feel they had to recover their former sense of self — simply be-
cause, as we concluded, they subjectively seemed to have never lost it. In order to
understand these findings we believe it is important to see that there are countless
everyday practices, micro acts of recognition, reaffirmation, and reassurance in the
social environments that individuals share with others that seem to compensate
for what is missing. In fact, these interactions provide a social network of support
and stability that leads people to feel no fundamental alteration in their sense of
self (see also Roger, 2006, for a similar discussion involving people with dementia).
If they had been, however, “measured” in terms of individual and decontextualized
cognitive and narrative performance, these people might have revealed a funda-
mental “incoherence” not only of their brains and minds, but also of their selves.
To demonstrate this, we do not want to present, as in the previous two ex-
amples, a narrative from an individual with neurological challenges but from an
interview with the entire family of such an individual. In our example this includes
the sons of a woman with whom we had a number of meetings and interview ses-
sions. This woman, a divorced 56-year old former bank teller and mother of two
teenage-aged sons, suffered an aneurysm which left her with cognitive impair-
ment and serious memory problems. Unable to return to work she had to stay at
home most of the time. While she was assisted by her sons as well by her brother
and sister with many of her daily living activities, she appeared, however, amaz-
ingly unchanged in her self perception and self understanding, despite her com-
plaints about her poor remembering and, especially, the lack of autobiographical
memories. This is how her sons talk about her situation, and it also is about how
she experiences herself as perceived and understood by her sons:
Interviewer: …I also talked to your Mom on her own and whenever I leave, I’m
under the impression that the way you [talking directly to the mother]
present yourself is really, really impaired. Like you know, like really.
Older son: That’s the way SHE presents herself.
Interviewer: Yeah?
Older son: WE don’t present her as impaired, we think she’s quite normal,
SHE’S the one that always has to bring up the aneurysm thing. I
don’t know why.
Younger son: Everybody you [looking at his mother] meet likes you.
Older son: Half my friends don’t even know she had an aneurysm.
Younger son: They come into our house and “Your Mom’s really nice,” you know,
and we’re like “yeah, she is.” Mom will cook, she will clean the floor,
she will vacuum a little bit. So what?
Older son: Yeah, like a normal Mom. I don’t see her as if she’s impaired in any
way. The only thing is that she has a memory problem, sometimes.
Even if she does have a memory problem, who doesn’t?
Clearly there is an enormous difference between assessing, in a decontextualized

fashion, the ability of this woman to tell coherent autobiographical narratives and
observing herself acting and interacting within her familiar social environment,
supported and encouraged by the people with whom she “shares” her identity (and
who, like her sons, may just wish to have a healthy and “normal” mom). It is this
sociocultural framework of agency and identity practices which, we suggest, con-
stitutes the only appropriate context to consider the question of coherence and
incoherence of this woman’s mind and self. A more adequate examination of this
question (if we still assume it is a meaningful question) must obviously also en-
compass the social and discursive fabric in which she lives, a fabric of many voices
and practices, woven by many social actors.
A community of brains
We have presented three different ways of contextualizing narrative coherence,

integrating the issue into larger frameworks of autobiographical intersubjectivity.
All these frameworks highlight the communicative and, more generally, social di-
mension of human existence, be it on the level of brain, mind, or self and identity.
Since the argument of humans’ interactional and intersubjective nature is, in one
form or another, wide-spread in the “discursive” literature on narrative, identity,
and the mind (in contrast with the literature on narrative coherence referred to
above), we want to conclude with a few more remarks on the social dimension of
the brain. One reason we have emphasized this dimension is because of its par-
ticular importance for people with neurological damage, people with whom we
have worked and whose personal and autobiographical narratives we have mainly
drawn on in explaining our argument.
Steven Sabat and Rom Harré (1992; Harré, 1998; Sabat, 2001) have made
similar observations in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease. Within a discursive
context that allows them to be active and live a socially embedded life, the people
Sabat and Harré worked with demonstrated abilities that were obviously better
preserved than one would have assumed on the basis of their performance on
standardized dementia tests. These tests operate on the same decontextualizing
and individualizing premise as the narrative coherence tests. Sabat and Harré’s
studies confirm the assumption that the human mind cannot be exclusively local-
ized in the individual brain, nor can it be identified with an individual self; what is
needed is a broader context that does not negate people’s discursive and affective
interactions.
As Goldstein (1934/1995) and Luria (1973) have already pointed out many
years ago, the experience of individuals with lesioned brains makes it obvious
that our neurological and neuropsychological functioning is socially intertwined
with that of other brains. In fact, it is dependent on other brains, especially, when,
as a consequence of brain damage and traumatically caused deficits, they take
over certain neurocognitive functions, “bridging the cognitive gaps” (Goldstein,
1934/1995) and creating new “functional systems” (Luria, 1973).
What on the level of consciousness, mind, and self has been discussed in terms
of “distributed cognition,” “discursive mind,” “transactional mind,” “relational self,”
“interactional self,” and “social self ” finds an equivalent on the level of the brain.
This is hardly surprising considering that the human brain not evolve in isolation
but that its specific qualities stem from the fact that what has evolved has always
been a community of brains, a community that has co-evolved with human’s ca-
pacity to symbolically interact (see, e.g., Deacon, 1997; Donald, 1991; Hobson,
2004; Rose, 2006; Tomasello, 1999). We see here a further rationale for our ap-
proach to situate the issue of narrative coherence in the context of communities of
selves, minds, and brains.
Note
This research was supported by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research/Canadian Neu-
rotrauma Research Program (JPF-50718) and the University of Manitoba Research Grants
Program.
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Chapter 3
Identity, self, narrative
Linköping University, Sweden
By tradition many narrative researchers interested in questions about identity

have focused on interview narratives and especially on their discursive organiza-
tion in terms of coherence and referentiality. This paper argues that other aspects
than coherence are of importance in negotiating identity. Examples are taken
from narrative research to show the ways in which persons with dementia ill-
nesses, brain injuries, and related problems actually use and tell stories in order
to claim various identities. There is a special focus on the way the storytelling
activity and all kinds of expressive resources are used in order to establish and
negotiate identity.
It is … the narrated past that best generates our sense of personal identity
(…) Narration into some form of story gives both a structure and a degree of
understanding to the ongoing content of our lives. (Kerby, 1991, p.â•›33)
The American philosopher Paul Kerby and many other narrative researchers have
argued that it is by turning our lived experiences into events in a story that we give
meaning to our lives. The story not only connects events with each other, but also
configures these events in relation to a plot. Through the plot a direction is intro-
duced and the life acquires a higher order of meaning, letting particular events and
happenings be part of a larger movement. Through the development and elabora-
tion of the life story the individual self emerges. As Jerome Bruner writes, “In the
end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives”
(1987, p.â•›15).
In telling autobiographical stories we are constrained by certain “rules” or
conventions. Telling the truth is a basic rule in autobiographical telling; you relate
only experiences you actually have had and can claim ownership of. In describing
events it is necessary to adhere to normatively accepted views of what a person
is and avoid use of the imagination. If we break these and other rules at least the
listeners hold us accountable.
In discussing the consequences of breaking the rules and conventions of au-
tobiographical storytelling the literary scholar Paul Eakin suggests that there is
34 Lars-Christer Hydén
a “disciplinary potential confronting those who fail to display an appropriately

normal model of narrative identity” (2001, p.â•›120). The question is of course what
consequences a failure to adhere to the “normal” expectations of autobiographical
tellings has for both narrative theory and for the person in terms of the person’s
ability to present, establish, and negotiate his or her identity.
This is something that becomes especially compelling when persons have dis-
eases that affect their ability to use language and tell stories (Alzheimer’s disease,
aphasia) or their ability to tell certain types of stories (psychiatric diseases). The
obvious question is of course whether the inability to tell stories about the past and
to establish a plot implies a loss of identity, replaced by a void that is never to be
filled again. A further range of questions has to do with the often taken-for-grant-
ed assumptions about narratives, especially the narrative as a coherent discursive
representation of a temporal unfolding of events.
In the following these questions will be discussed, using examples from narra-
tive research into the ways persons suffering from illnesses and related problems
actually use and tell stories in order to claim various identities. I will especially
focus on the way the storytelling activity and all kinds of expressive resources are
used in order to establish and negotiate identity. At first some of the paradigmatic
modes of discussing illness narratives will be discussed, and then three examples
are given in order to illustrate how autobiographical storytelling can be used as a
tool for presenting and negotiating identities. The first example deals with specific
ways of organizing the narrative discourse in order to expand identities. In the two
following examples the performance of narrative — that is, the storytelling event
— as well as the performative aspects of autobiographical narratives are discussed.
In conclusion the concepts of ritual and move are suggested as ways of conceptual-
izing this type of identity work.
Illness, disease, and narrative
In his classical article about narrative disruption and reconstruction, Gareth Wil-
liams (1984) quotes the character of Ulrich in Robert Musil’s novel The Man With-
out Qualities. In a lengthy discussion about narratives Ulrich says that the narra-
tive order is “the simple order that consists in one’s being able to say, ‘When that
had happened, then this happened.’â†œ” Gareth Williams continues:
The trouble is that sometimes the ‘orderly sequence of facts’ gets broken up. It
cannot be sustained against the chaos and, for a time at least, the life course is lost.
The routine narrative expressing the concerns of the practical consciousness as it
attends to the mundane details of daily life is pitched into disarray: a death in the
family, serious illness, an unexpected redundancy and so forth. From such a situ-
Chapter 3.â•‡ Identity, self, narrative 35
ation narrative may have to be given some radical surgery and reconstructed so as
to account for present disruptions. Narrative reconstruction, therefore, represents
the workings of the discursive consciousness. (Williams, 1984, p.â•›178)
To Gareth Williams — as well as for the literary character Ulrich — narratives are
primarily about something happening. Narratives are representations of events.
The ideal is to be able to re-present events as progressing and to tell a coherent nar-
rative. Illnesses tend to disrupt the smooth flow of events and demand “surgery”; a
new order of events has to be reconstructed out of the temporary chaos.
Gareth Williams’ seminal article is a very good example of when physical
changes (traumas, chronic illness) shatter the taken-for-granted assumptions of
everyday life and as a consequence also make almost all everyday stories about the
past, present and future impossible to tell or listen to. This situation in turn makes
it necessary to reconstruct a new autobiographical story, covering the events re-
sulting in a chronic illness and revising both the past and the future.
The autobiographical story is a type of narrative and storytelling situation
that has become almost paradigmatic for much of the research on illness narra-
tives. From a narrative point of view they are stories that are told in an interview
situation to an actively listening researcher collecting his or her material. In these
interviews there is almost no competition for the discursive space, giving the in-
terviewee/storyteller the opportunity to tell a lengthy story, from beginning to the
end, without being interrupted by another speaker. In this sense the interview
situation is quite different from storytelling in ongoing conversations involving
several interlocutors, as for instance in family dinner conversations.
The study of illness narratives in interviews has often implied a view of narra-
tive as mainly a representation of events, i.e. the events leading up to the illness, the
events linked directly to the illness, and the relationship between all these events.
Identity is often thought of in terms of a person being able to tell a coherent and pro-
gressing life story, covering all salient events, especially those related to the illness.
Going outside this paradigmatic idea of illness narratives shows that stories
can be told in other situations pertaining to health and illness, resulting in other
ways of organizing narratives and also stressing other social functions compared
to interview narratives. Telling stories in encounters with medical doctors or ther-
apists generally means that it is the functions of the story in the ongoing relation
between the parties that come to the foreground. When patients are telling stories
in medical and clinical settings, this context often has profound consequences for
how the story is organized and what functions it has — in many cases leading to a
fragmented story (cf. Clark & Mishler, 1992). Furthermore, patients telling stories
in medical and clinical settings often do so in order “to reconstitute a self during
medical examinations (…) by inserting into the realm of medicine (…) a narrative
enclave” (Young, 1997, p.â•›33).
Other patients tell stories as part of their treatment. This is true of persons go-
ing through psychotherapy or treatment for drug-related problems. To these per-
sons it is essential to learn to tell new stories about themselves in order to change
(Schafer, 1992), that is, to reconfigure their stories in the ongoing dialogic, thera-
peutic conversations with a psychotherapist or psychoanalyst. Focus is on change
through dialogue and the establishment of a new plot, rather than on just being
able to re-present events from the past.
A further problem in the field of illness, health, and narrative is that some
persons may either be in a process of losing their abilities to tell stories — as in
the case of an illness like Alzheimer’s disease (Hydén & Örulv, 2009) — or may
already have lost them through a brain injury (cf. Medved & Brockmeier, 2008). In
these cases people generally have no access to some of the cognitive and linguistic
resources needed to tell autobiographical stories that adhere to the conventional
norms and expectations. This will often result in autobiographical narratives that
are perceived to be flawed or incomplete.
In general, broken narratives are rather the rule than the exception in connec-
tion with illness narratives (Hydén & Brockmeier, 2008). This is especially impor-
tant as the question about the relationship between identity and narrative in many
ways becomes highlighted in illness; traumas and diseases challenge the taken-for-
granted everyday identities.
As a consequence of this, other aspects of narratives than those having to do
with the coherence of the textual organization of the narrative has to be observed.
This is especially true concerning the relationship between narrative and identity.
It has been suggested by Oliver Sacks and several others that narratives represent
events coherently and in that way constitute identities (for a critical discussion of
the role of coherence, see Brockmeier & Medved, in this volume). If we instead
look at narratives as a special way of organizing speech and interaction, focus will
be both on the ways narratives become part of ongoing interactions (like conversa-
tions) and on how the telling of narrative acquires a performative force.
In the following I will focus on three aspects that I consider to be especially
salient in this context. The first aspect is how the teller of the story discursively
organizes the relationship between the physical teller and the teller as a figure or
character in his or her own story. The second aspect is the way the teller organizes
the point of the story in the interaction. And finally, the third aspect is the fact that
sometimes the content of story is almost irrelevant or superfluous; it is instead the
telling of a certain type of story to a certain audience and in certain situations that
counts.
The teller as character
One of the wonderful things about telling a story is the possibility to create new
realities existing in the here-and-now of the speech event. As tellers and listeners
we can travel thousands of miles, visit other times and places, and even familiar-
ize ourselves with events that may never have taken place at all — at least not in
historical reality.
Basically, it is this possibility that we use in telling autobiographical stories.
Just by telling a story we introduce other times, places, persons, circumstances,
and events right into the middle of the ongoing speech event, in order to define
and redefine ourselves. That is, storytelling can be used as a tool to establish and
negotiate identity in specific situations.
First of all, in telling autobiographical stories the speaker introduces a “double”,
the speaker as a character or figure in a story. This character is often the protago-
nist of the story or a witness to the transpiring events, and it is generally through
this character’s perspective the listeners witness what takes place in the storyworld.
It is important to remember that the character in the story is not the teller; it
is rather an historical version of the teller. The character is often a previous version
of the teller, for instance the teller as a young person, sometimes as a small child,
at other times as a teenager or as a young adult. In some stories the character may
even exist in several versions. For instance, the character may appear as a teenager
commenting on himself as a child.
There is not only a temporal difference between the teller and the character
in the story. The story probably takes place somewhere else, in other geographical
and social places, and in different kinds of situations.
As a consequence of this, the character in the story may have different proper-
ties than those of the physical teller in the storytelling event. The character may
share certain things with the teller, but probably has different experiences, knowl-
edge, outlook, moral values, and so on. This fact gives the teller a possibility to
introduce new versions of him- or herself into the ongoing conversation in order
to display other possible identities or to revise existing identities.
Let me give an example of these phenomena. Some 20 years ago I conducted
a series of interviews with former psychotherapy patients (Hydén, 1995). They
had all been in psychodynamically oriented psychotherapy for 18 to 36 months,
and they all had completed their therapy at least six months before the time of the
interview. I will call one of these interview subjects Peggy. She was a woman of
40-some years at the time of the interview, and had undergone psychotherapy for
a period of two and a half years. She had completed her therapy about a year prior
to the interview.
In the interview she gave a description of the chain of events that led to her
coming into contact with a therapist, but she also gave a description of herself be-
fore the beginning of therapy and of what caused her to seek help. Her description
has the form of a short autobiographical story.
Example 1
(Int: Had you ever been in psychotherapy before [this time]?)
1. No / I’ve always been interested and thought a lot about it
(…)
2. I realized / I was pretty awful at helping myself
3. and I also realized / I had built up these high defensive walls against all kinds of
things in my life / and repressed a lot of things
4. because some things had happened when I was studying to be a nursery school
teacher / my mother died / and I met a guy there too / it was very intense in many
ways
5. and I chose to put on these blinders / and tried when my mother died / I tried
to take some time off to help my father and that’s when I realized I was the one
who needed help
6. tried to flee into doing different things / ran marathons like a lunatic / flying
around the country and competing
7. but it worked only so far / and then I began to react / to scream [in my sleep]
(…)
8. so there was a lot that has just been building up / that I never did anything about
/ just tried to flee from it all / and it got worse and worse of course later on, when
I became a mother / tiredness / and unable just to creep aside like
This story about the events leading up to the decision to enter into psychotherapy
is structured around some basic themes (numbered 1 through 8). These themes
in turn consist of further sub-themes (marked by slashes). The flow of events pro-
gresses in time as told and commented on by a storyteller. The storyteller or psy-
chological subject that determines the perspective in the example is an “I.” If we
look closely we will find that this “I” actually consists of several different versions
of herself, which allows Peggy to tell about and make comments about herself.
The interview starts with the initial interview question. In this Peggy is ad-
dressed by the interviewer as the addressee in the speech situation; that is, she is
the physical person sitting opposite the interviewer. Then in Line 1 we encounter
a new version of the “I”, namely the narrator of the story. That is, the voice that is
going to guide us through the events (“I’ve always been”).
In Lines 2 and 3 the “I” refers to Peggy as a young person reflecting back on an
even younger version of herself (Line 4: “when I was studying” and Line 5). Further
on in Line 5 the “I” has become somewhat older and is starting to realize that she
needs help. If we jump to Line 8 a new version is introduced: Peggy as a mother.
As observer and commentator Peggy appears in two guises in relation to time;

one is the narrator in an interview situation who talks about herself without giving
any explicit time indication at all, as in Line 1 (“I have always”). But the narrator
can also observe a second guise, an observing “I” in past time as in Line 2, “But I
realized I was pretty awful at.” This “insight” is historical; the realization comes to
an observing “I” in past time and is conveyed by a narrating “I” in present time.
These different “I”s and the time indications are devices that allow Peggy to put
events, experiences, and states of being into perspective in a very complex manner.
They also enable her to establish distance between the different subjects (the “I”s);
the observer can, for example, express criticism of the acting subject in past time,
as in Line 8: “I never did anything about.” By establishing this temporal distance
Peggy can create an inner dynamic in her narrative between different perspectives
of time (then and now), between different vantage points (observer and observed),
and in any combination of these polarities.
It is crucial in the telling of this story that the implicit contract with the lis-
tener (the interviewer) states that the physical teller of this story is identical with
or is the same as all the different “I”s in the storyworld. That is, the teller is claim-
ing to have actually experienced all these things; she has thought the thoughts,
felt the emotions, and so on. In other words, the interviewee is claiming not only
that all the versions of herself have existed historically and that all the experiences
and reflections have taken place. She is also claiming that she owns these experi-
ences, that they are part of her, defining who she is now in the present situation (the
interview).
In other words, when telling autobiographical stories the teller claims to be
not only the actual physical person standing before the audience, but also several
other versions of him- or herself. The teller asks the listeners to allow her (or him)
to have the right of claiming the experiences established in the story and letting all
these other versions define her.
Why could anyone ever want to claim these things? One reason is that by
expanding one’s identity, one’s relation to the other persons in the speech event is
altered — and probably also the person’s relation to him- or herself. Telling auto-
biographical stories is a way to expand the present reality and thus expand one’s
own identity. By introducing new versions of the self, the teller is able to relate to
these figures, by identifying with them, by rejecting them, or by claiming that a
change or development has taken place, a development that may be continuous or
discontinuous.
Through this narrative expansion of identities, the teller is able to put forward
something new about him/herself; something that he/she wants to highlight at a
certain moment in the ongoing interaction. In this way the teller is able to negoti-
ate his or her identity with the audience by presenting contrasts and alternatives,
by stressing continuity or discontinuity. The teller to some extent becomes some-

one else, or becomes at least a bit different compared to before the telling of the
story.
Presenting several versions of identities in the story is something that is done
in relation to the ongoing social interaction. It is done in order to persuade the
audience to think about the teller’s identity in new ways. To use Erving Goffman’s
terminology, it would be possible to regard this kind of discursive organization of
the autobiographical story as a move in the ongoing social interaction (Goffman,
1981). By introducing new versions of the self, the teller changes both his or her
relation to him- or herself as well as to the other participants in the interaction. As
a consequence the relationships between the participants are redefined, making it
possible for the teller to claim a new social status.
In the interview above, Peggy positions herself as a person who has gone
through a long process of change, from being a person who without much reflec-
tion rushed through life, to a person who has created a distance to that self, living
a different life — and being a different, transformed person. In this case it is the
interviewer who has to be persuaded about these changes and as a result hopefully
will regard her as a successful psychotherapy patient. It is all these various identi-
ties that Peggy makes available through her storytelling.
Performing autobiographical stories
Sometimes narratives become part of the illness process. This is especially true
when a person’s ability to tell and use stories is affected by the disease, and the tell-
ing of stories at the same time becomes a central part of the life with the disease.
This is true, for example, for persons suffering from certain forms of brain trauma
(aphasia) or age-related dementias like Alzheimer’s disease. To these persons the
struggle to tell stories, and in that way sustain their senses of self, could be re-
garded as a way of dealing with the new brains the disease gives them, with which
they have to make a life.
Persons suffering form this kind of disease can make use of narratives and the
telling as a way of creatively dealing with their communicative limits (Medved &
Brockmeier, 2008). This often includes telling stories by using other communi-
cative means besides the traditional verbal ones, for instance gestures and body
movement, but also by engaging other participants in the storytelling in order to
be able to tell the stories using their voices (Goodwin, 2004; Hydén, 2008).
Suffering from traumatic brain injuries, Alzheimer’s disease, or other types of
dementias generally implies either a disruption or a gradual change of identities.
One aspect of this change has to with the question of whether the person is the
same as before the onset of the disease or the trauma. That is, if the person is iden-
tical with his or her “pre-morbid” self or has become a different person. This has
been called the idem-aspect (or sameness aspect) of identity and one of the crucial
questions concerns the limits of sameness.
Paul Ricoeur has suggested that although the idem-aspect of identity has been
the one most discussed, another, maybe even more important aspect of identity
has to with what he called selfhood (ipse-identity). According to Ricoeur, selfhood
has to do with what kind of person one is. It concerns, for instance, the person’s
moral values and is central to understanding the commitments of the person.
The ipse-identity is of course something that can be described and explained
using words. It is probably even better to be able show whom and what one is. This
is something that can be accomplished through the telling of autobiographical
stories. In stories characters act (or refrain from action, which also is an action),
they do things to themselves or others — things that are displayed through the
story. By telling about actions it becomes possible for the audience to make moral
inferences about the story characters and in that way appreciate what kind of per-
son the teller is. The teller has a further possibility to claim his or her moral value
by evaluating the events depicted in the story. This is accomplished through the
evaluation.
William Labov, who introduced the term story evaluation, defines the evalu-
ation as “the means used by the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative, its
raison d’être: why it was told, and what the narrator is getting at” (1972, p.â•›366).
In other words, the evaluation in the narrative is important not only to ac-
count for the storytelling, but also as a way of conveying the point of the story. In
autobiographical stories and stories about personal experience, the evaluation also
tells the audience something about the teller or the narrator. By crafting the evalu-
ation it becomes possible for the teller to highlight the way an event is handled and
hence the moral commitments of the teller.
In stories evaluation is often placed after the core (or complication) events and
actions in the story — those events that answer the question, “What happened?”
The evaluation of the events in the story can be accomplished in more than one
way.
One is to let the teller evaluate the events in the speech situation (external
evaluation). This means that the teller in the present looks back at the events that
took place at another time than the present speech situation, and evaluates these
events. In an autobiographical story this means that the teller steps out from his
or her story to directly address the listener, explaining his or her own view about
the event.
Another possibility is either letting the main protagonist evaluate what hap-
pened at the time of the event, for instance by a quotation, or letting someone else
in the story make an evaluative statement at the time of the events (embedding of
evaluation).
The evaluation part of the story is complex in that it connects life events and
makes them meaningful, and requires simultaneous involvement of the audience.
In terms of interaction, the evaluation is often an occasion for the listeners to ac-
tively engage in the storytelling by showing emotion, empathy, and shared appre-
ciation of the story. This is accomplished with devices like evaluative statements,
dramatized engagement in the story, laughter, gestures, rewordings of central parts
of the story, expressions of surprise, and other communicative means.
Alzheimer’s disease, identity, and narrative
Researchers interested in how persons with AD tell stories have primarily been
interested in the discursive organization of autobiographical narratives, especially
the temporal and referential aspects of narratives. Focus has been mainly on the
ability of the person with AD to remember or retrieve and present memories of
certain events correctly, and to elaborate and connect them into a story. This ap-
proach tends to preclude other ways for persons with AD to use autobiographical
narratives in order to sustain their identity.
In order to avoid these limitations in previous research an ethnographic study
based on collecting naturalistic data was conducted (Örulv & Hydén, 2006; Hydén
& Örulv, 2009; Hydén & Örulv, 2010). Over a period of five months video record-
ing was done at an elder center in Sweden serving eight residents, seven of whom
were diagnosed with some form of dementia, mostly of the Alzheimer type.
Two elderly ladies living at the nursing home are sitting and talking to each
other. No staff is present, just the researcher behind the video camera. One of the
ladies, Martha, tells stories about when she learned to drive and bought a car. At
that time, neither her husband nor her father believed she would be able to learn to
drive and then afford to buy a new car. But she surprised both of them. Catherine
is her listener. Catherine has difficulties finding words and hence to actively tell
stories, but she is a great audience.
Before the example starts Martha has been telling stories for some 30 minutes
about getting a driver’s license and buying a car. Some of these stories are told
three or four times in a row; sometimes she mixes the stories, making them quite
confusing.
But one thing she never gets wrong, and that’s the evaluative sections of the
stories. Just before the beginning of the example starts, Martha has told Catherine
about when she asked a professional driving teacher to teach her to drive. The
teacher’s answer is shown in Line 1.
Example 2
1 Martha: ” you want to” he said.
2 ”Yes that’s what I want” I said.
3 ”My … my brother has a driver’s license but (..)
4 but he ehh (.)
5 It’s better if I can learn from a real teacher”.
6 Catherine: Yes that’s right.
7 Martha: =Yes ”You are really careful” he said
8 ((puts her arm on Catherine’s, moves close to her and looks into
her eyes))
9 ”so you’ll be okay whatever happens” he said
10 [((leans backwards and laughs))]
11 Catherine: [That was nicely put!]
12 Martha: ((laughs)) *Yes.* ((points towards Catherine))
13 Catherine: She got these nice words!
14 Martha: *Yes
15 ((makes a pointing gesture towards Catherine again and keeps
the gesture until the sentence is completed))
16 that’s what he said. Yes.* ((nods and glances at Catherine)) ehh
17 Catherine: Yes that’s what I think too (xx xx)
18 Martha: =Yes.
What we see here is Martha’s evaluation of the events in the story. She quotes
the driving teacher when he says: “You’re really careful. You’ll be okay whatever
happens.” This is an evaluation of Martha — not Martha of today, but Martha as
a young person. She’s a careful person that will manage, whatever happens. Cath-
erine supports this evaluation several times (Lines 6, 11, 13, 17).
If we look at the non-verbal aspects of the interaction it is possible to notice
that Martha and Catherine are also physically close to each other. Martha puts
her arm on Catherine’s, leans towards Catherine, points towards her, and looks
directly at her. They also have overlapping talk. All these non-verbal actions signal
closeness, support, and agreement.
Although Martha has problems organizing her stories, particularly the tempo-
ral organization of events in the stories, she is good at organizing the point of the
stories. This is true of most stories she tells.
The evaluation is a way for Martha to show who she used to be. By quoting
her driving teacher she also shows that other persons appreciated her as a careful
and independent person. By adding non-verbal actions she also dramatizes the
telling and actively involves and engages her listener. And her listener supports
and confirms the evaluation.
The evaluation concerns Martha as a young person, but by telling it as an old

person, she gives her listener the possibility to re-consider her character; she not
only used to be a careful and independent person, but she still has at least some of
these traits at present.
As a consequence of the disease Martha has severe problems organizing her
story according to the conventional norms of storytelling. She has special difficul-
ties with the temporal and referential organization of the events in the story — that
is with certain aspects of the cognitive organization of the narrative. The events
tend to be presented without temporal progression, something that generally cre-
ates confusion in most listeners who are expecting a temporally well-ordered story.
However, Martha still masters the social interaction in storytelling. She is even
very good at organizing her interaction with her audience; this is not yet been af-
fected by the disease. This is evidently something she can use creatively in her at-
tempt to present herself to her audience, in this case to her friend Catherine. Martha
successfully engages her listener in the storytelling using her body, eye contact, etc.
Although unable to position herself as a morally capable person through the
discursive organization of the story — the way Peggy did in the preceding example
— Martha uses the social interaction as her means towards an end. In other words,
the telling of autobiographical stories is not necessarily about positioning oneself in
a story, but also about positioning oneself as a teller in relation to the audience (cf.
Bamberg, 1997; Wortham & Gadsen, 2006). Moreover, it is about the creative use
of all available communicative resources in order to present and sustain identity.
This example highlighted the performance of the story and its telling, rather
than the use of the story’s discursive organization. In this way the organization of
the storytelling event can be used as a tool for presenting identity. It still concerns
how the telling of autobiographical stories can be used to change the audience’s
perception and definition of the teller — and probably also the teller’s perception
of him- or herself.
Telling the right story
In both of the cases I have discussed so far, parts of the content of the narrative are
important to the organization of the telling and the performance of the narrative.
I would like to argue now that in some cases the content of the narrative is of less
importance. Instead, it is important who is telling the story and to what audience.
This is the case when stories are told that are fairly standardized or well known
by both tellers and audience. A good example of this is stories about religious con-
version or stories about turning points in connection with problems like drinking
or drug abuse.
Most of these kinds of stories are stereotypical. They are quite often divided
into parts having to do with life before the turning point, the turning point itself,
and life after the turning point, that is, the new life.
The life before the turning point is generally characterized by a life full of sin,
drinking, smoking, criminality, use of violence, or some other undesirable behav-
ior. The turning point itself can consist of an encounter with God or some other
deity, or a sudden insight as when an alcoholic wakes up in an emergency ward,
or someone falls in love. That is, the turning point generally is an event that results
in a sudden change and re-evaluation of the actual lifestyle. Life after the turning
point is characterized by the striving towards a new life, the avoidance of tempta-
tions and sins, and all the benefits of the new life.
This is a type of story that we trace back to at least the fourth century in West-
ern culture. It is quite important to remember that this story doesn’t depict the
actual life of persons or the actual events leading up to a new life. Rather, it is the
telling of this type of story that is important in order to be able to claim an identity
as a changed person — an identity that presupposes a radical disruption between
the past and the present.
Several researchers have studied this type of storytelling. Let me give an exam-
ple from research on the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) movement by Carole Cain,
an American anthropologist (Cain, 1991). She found that in order to become a
member of the AA movement in the US — and this is probably true all over the
world — you had to learn to tell your life story in a specific way. The typical AA
story includes certain topics, like drinking career, drinking experiences, family,
religious life, and so on. It also has to include certain cognitive elements that have
to do with how to interpret and describe life as a life in terms of being a recovering
alcoholic.
New members of the AA movement have to learn to tell this story first by
listening to “old-timers” telling their stories; and later on by telling their own sto-
ries with support from more experienced members. Finally, you can tell your own
story, and create new stories around new themes in your life. Telling a personal
story at a speaker’s meeting signals membership because it is interpreted as the
member “belonging” enough to “carry the message” (p.â•›232).
Here is one small story, told by Gary at a meeting where members shared an-
ecdotes about things they had done while they were drinking (p.â•›231; transcription
changed):
Example 3
One morning I woke up after a night of drinking
and I thought I’d had this bad dream about running into the side of a bridge at 55
miles an hour
Then I went outside
Three inches off the side of my car were gone

And I thought:
“Man, I’ve got to stop driving.”
Carole Cain points out that the telling of this type of story is a way of learning
to tell a new life. The story includes certain episodes, but above all it displays the
views of AA concerning alcoholism. In this way learning to tell these stories is a
way of re-interpreting your identity, creating an AA identity.
It is also a way of being a recovering alcoholic. That is, when a member tells
this story he or she performs the identity of a reformed, recovering alcoholic. Put
another way, being a recovering alcoholic in AA implies telling stories about your-
self as a recovering alcoholic. It’s especially important to tell these stories to other
members of AA. In other words, one important aspect of identities is that they are
performed through the storytelling event. That is, certain stories have to be told
at certain moments to certain persons. This is something that is probably true of
most families; being a family member implies being able to tell stories — often
well-established ones — about the family, its members, and its past (Langellier &
Peterson, 2004). What is important is not basically what the stories are about, but
rather the fact that you tell a certain type of story to the right audience; this estab-
lishes your identity. Similar ideas have been advanced by researchers studying reli-
gious conversions (Stromberg, 1993) or various forms of healing (Kapferer, 1979).
In this way, telling autobiographical stories could be thought of as an example
of what Erving Goffman calls a ritual (1967). By performing a ritual the status of
the participants changes to a new one, like when a couple is married by a priest;
they enter as two individuals, and exit as a married couple. In a similar way, the
telling of autobiographical stories to an audience is a way of ritually changing the
relationship and social status of the participants. The audience can take the telling
of a certain type of autobiographical story as a sign of an identity change. In this
sense the storytelling has a performative force; by telling the story a certain identity
is put in place.
Conclusions
I have tried to argue that how we think about the relationship between narrative
and identity is to a large degree dependent on what type of examples we use. By
tradition many narrative researchers have focused on interview narratives and es-
pecially on their discursive organization in terms of coherence and referentiality.
Even if interview narratives are used it is possible to regard the interview
in terms of social interaction and the ensuing narrative as co-constructed (see
Mishler, 1986 and 1999 for further arguments along this line). One analytical
implication of this approach is to regard the narrative less as a finished product

and more as an ongoing activity in a specific social situation. In this way telling an
autobiographical story is a move in an ongoing interaction with other participants,
a move that aims at redefining the relationships between the participants.
In this perspective it could further be argued that the telling of autobiographi-
cal stories is a tool that can be used in order to establish, negotiate, and redefine
identities. This means that identities are found rather in the way narratives are
organized and performed in relation to the ongoing interaction than ”inside” the
narrative. Michael Bamberg (1997) has presented a similar argument in terms of
positioning.
Methodologically this implies that it is important when studying identity in
social scientific contexts to not only study stories, but also the way stories are told,
received and negotiated. In other words, for social scientists it is important to chal-
lenge the traditional literary idea about narratives, and regard narratives and sto-
rytelling rather as performance and social action.
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Chapter 4
‘Mind-reading’, a method for understanding

the broken narrative of an aphasic man
Tarja Aaltonen
University of Tampere, Finland
An aphasic man tells, an extremely fragmented, excited, and hard-to-compre-

hend “story.” The aim of this article is to mobilize ideas from conversation analy-
sis (CA) and cognitive narratology, in particular those related to “mind reading,”
in making sense of the problematic story and the interactional process in which
the story was processed and endorsed. In cognitive narratology, it is widely
assumed that people routinely interpret and misinterpret other people’s minds.
This capacity to cross over the limits of the “intramental” mind and to flexibly
use the resources of the “intermental” mind may become vital in situations
involving severe speech and communication impediments. The experience from
such cases of storytelling and comprehension may enhance the understanding of
co-authoring of narratives in general.
Keywords: mind-reading, understanding, aphasia, cognitive narratology,

talk-in-interaction
Introduction
This chapter sets out to explore real world mind-reading in the context of a clinical
encounter using literary scholars’ works about fictional mind-reading as a guide.
I will apply the tools of literary theorists to the reading of a transcribed data. Alan
Palmer’s (2004) book Fictional minds has especially guided me throughout the
journey.
I have sought expedients to include ‘mind’ into the analysis of face-to-face in-
teraction when using conversation analysis (CA) as an analytical tool. The mind
is a phenomenon that has not been commonly dealt with in articles reporting
conversation analysis studies.1 In this article I use the term ‘mind’ in the study of
1.â•‡ However, the concept has not been altogether missing; see, e.g., Drew (2005), Heritage (2005)
and Mondada (2006).
50 Tarja Aaltonen
face-to-face interaction arguing that mind-reading in the form of thought report-

ing occurs in episodes of oral storytelling (cf. Mildorf, 2008). I claim that the act
of mind-reading supports the mutual understanding of the narrated storyworld
and participation by way of shared storytelling. I will draw from the narratological
point of view and assume that the theory of understanding a novel by reading the
minds of its characters is applicable to both my study and analysis. Face-to-face
encounters between an aphasic speaker and so-called normal speakers compose
the field of interaction I explore more closely in this article. My data is the bro-
ken narrative of an aphasic man told in the institutional setting of a rehabilitation
encounter.
As a pathological phenomenon, ‘aphasia’ “refers to a family of clinically di-
verse disorders that affect the ability to communicate by oral or written language,
or both, following brain damage” (Goodglass, 1993, p.â•›1). In conversation, apha-
sic speakers have problems due to difficulties for instance in finding words or
constructing sentences (Ahlsén, 1985). Aphasia may manifest itself in different
ways and the constellations of syndromes vary a great deal. Aphasias also differ
in severity from total speechlessness to only a mild ‘aphasic accent’ in speech. The
common feature in all aphasias is that the linguistic syndrome affects the person’s
ability to take part in social interaction and to tell stories in a common way (see,
e.g., Goodwin, 1995, 2003). Aphasia is not a condition that causes so called “mind-
blindness” common to autism. People suffering from autism have no ability to as-
cribe mental states to others because of a neurologically based problem that mani-
fests as a lack of flexibility, imagination and pretence. They do not spontaneously
interpret their own experiences or the observed behaviour of the other person’s in
terms of mental states, minds. (Frith, 2001; Gopnik, 2001; Zunshine, 2006, p.â•›7).
However, every person with or without linguistic capacities narrates in multi-
modal ways. Every utterance is authored and behind utterances, there is an actual
human subject. Utterances are therefore personal; they have a voice, “the voice of
someone´s mind” (Brockmeier, 2005, p.â•›436). The form of the utterance and the
manner it is interpreted cannot be understood separately from the social context
in which the narrative discourse takes place. In my example of understanding the
speech of an aphasic person, more than one semiotic channel is used to evoke a
storyworld. The semantics of interaction is closely linked to the elements of the
situation and as Doležel (1998, p.â•›97) has put it “the semantics of narrative is, at its
core, the semantics of interaction”.
During the encounter, the interlocutors are using many “communicative af-
fordances” (Gibson, 1979/1986; Hutchby, 2001; Raudaskoski, 2003), namely those
action potentials that structure and maintain mutual understanding. Speech is
only one of the communicative affordances used. Charles Goodwin (1995, 2003)
has written of an aphasic man who was able to communicate and co-construct
Chapter 4.â•‡ ‘Mind-reading’, a method for understanding 51
meanings with other people, though he only had three words left. Goodwin’s re-
search has been an inspiration to me. However, in this article I take cognitive nar-
ratology as my primary point of departure.
‘Mind-reading’ is a term commonly used by cognitive psychologists to de-
scribe our efforts to explain people’s behaviour in terms of their thoughts, feelings,
beliefs, and desires (Nichols & Stich, 2003). We explain and predict the everyday
behaviour of ourselves and others by assuming the mental states have a role in
our social life, for example we monitor other people’s attitudes or feelings when
interacting with them. Cognitive narratologists have used the term to refer to the
manner in which readers understand a novel by imagining the functioning of the
minds of its characters in the novel’s storyworlds, that is, by reading the characters’
minds from the text. I work with an incomplete narrative trying to figure out what
takes place between its “characters” and what is happening between the interlocu-
tors when the story is told. The text I analyse is composed of the transcription of
the narrative discourse. I draw parallels with reading a novel but at the same time
stay in the field of social psychology and the study of oral narration.
The “story” I study in this article was told during a rehabilitation meeting in
the Tikoteekki Technology and Communication Centre. Tikoteekki is a unit of the
Tampere University Hospital where the staff is specialised in Augmentative and
Alternative Communication (AAC) methods. This particular piece of the data is
collected in the natural setting of clinical work2 and analysed by using qualitative
methods; the tools of cognitive narratology and conversation analysis (CA) in par-
ticular. CA requires fairly strict transcription conventions (Appendix) that I have
used in this article. The strict transcription, I hope, makes it easier to follow up the
logic of interpretations I have made from the data.3
The studied episode lasts for two and half minutes. As a story it represents a
‘small story’, by which Alexandra Georgakopoulou (2007) refers to non-canonical
narratives. According to Georgakopoulou small stories have been under-repre-
sented data in the field of narrative studies. She describes how small stories may be
only a “fleeting narrative orientation to the world” and hence dissimilar to fully-
2.â•‡ The whole database of my study consists of video recorded rehabilitation meetings of three
people suffering from a severe aphasic syndrome. The meetings take place in the Tikoteekki or in
the homes of the clients. The purpose of the Tikoteekki meetings is to identify the best practices
to support an aphasic person and his or her friends and family to cope with the language impair-
ment. During the rehabilitation process it is essential to figure out what kind of AAC methods,
if any, could be used in each case.
3.â•‡ Medved & Brockmeier (2004) have used both narrative and conversational analysis in their
research. Their article concerning Fragile X Syndrome has been very helpful for me when doing
my own research.
52 Tarja Aaltonen
fledged stories such as autobiographical life stories (pp.â•›vii, 31). If we follow Peter-
son and Langellier’s point, exploring the data of small stories is congruous with the
performance turn4 in narrative studies. As a performance, narrative is “embodied
in communication practices, constrained by situational and material conditions
and embedded in fields of discourse” (2006, p.â•›173).
The article begins with a theoretical description of the main concepts ‘mind-
reading’ and ‘storyworld’. Next, the case analysed in this article is introduced. The
article continues by exploring the practice of mind-reading through extracts from
the data, and then discusses my way of reading the data before making conclud-
ing remarks. The act of mind-reading is seen as a very pragmatic endeavour when
read from the video recorded and transcribed data. I make interpretations on how
understanding is achieved largely through the mind-reading abilities of the oth-
er participants and through a wider knowledge of the situation. I argue that the
mind-reading abilities and contextual knowledge have left readable traces on the
data. From the data I examine thought reports (Palmer, 2004) as if I would analyse
a novel. Instances of thought reporting in the text of the transcribed data are also
instances of mind-reading in situ. I also attempt to find the mind of the whole situ-
ation in the co-operation of the interlocutors.
Reading the mind and creating the storyworld
Mind-reading, or the theory of mind, refers to our propensity to represent (either

correctly or incorrectly) the intentions, beliefs, and desires of others as well as our
own (Gallese & Goldman, 1998; Vogeley et al., 2001). The encounters between
people are meaningful and full of meaning-making but also full of gaps. We apply
mind-reading to be able to fill in the gaps in understanding. In most intersubjec-
tive situations we have a direct, paradigmatic understanding of the other person’s
intentions because their intentions are explicitly expressed in their embodied ac-
tions (Gallagher, 2001, p.â•›86). Thus we need not to always postulate a hidden belief
or desire in the other person’s mind.5 However, we have the effortless, automatic
4.â•‡ For more about turns in narrative studies see e.g. Hyvärinen 2006.
5.â•‡ Yet, according to Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich (2003), imagination and pretence rep-
resentations are phenomena essential to understanding others. Nichols and Stich also provide
a detailed and integrated account of the complex web of mental components underlying the
multifarious skill of mind-reading, as they define it. In their model, a mental workplace called
the Possible World Box, which is a part of the architecture of the human mind, has an important
role in understanding the other. In The Possible World Box we build and store, if necessary,
representations of one or another possible world (hypothetical situations). The box-metaphor
and intuitive understanding that people have mental states and we apply that
“knowledge” in social encounters. Only individuals with autism fail to appreciate
the role of mental states in the explanation and prediction of everyday behaviour
because of a developmental disorder of the brain. (Frith, 2001.)
The term ‘mind-reading’ is not to claim that the mind is readable as such. On
the contrary, an individual mind is never transparent and ‘mind-reading’ as it is
used here has nothing to do with telepathy (cf. Zunshine, 2006, p.â•›6). It is rather
its contents that are hypothetically reconstructed and represented to its modes in
language sensitive ways that are readable (see, for example, Cohn, 1978, p.â•›56).
Moreover, our minds are social by nature. Antonio Damasio (2000, p.â•›12–13) pro-
poses that consciousness and the mind are private first-person phenomena, but at
the same time closely tied to observed external behaviour. Therefore, it is possible
to argue that our minds can be perfectly visible to others (Palmer, 2004, p.â•›133).
The mind is a dynamic, continuous process and discourse captures the interactive
as well as intersubjective nature of the mind (Brockmeier, 2005, p.â•›437). ‘Mind’
and ‘mental action’ can appropriately be predicated of dyads and larger groups as
well as of individuals (Wertsch, 1991, p.â•›14), thus those terms can refer to the mind
of a group of people or the social mind of the situation, as well. For Alan Palmer,
the mind is essentially ‘intermental’, or a joint, shared group; hence the mind also
extends far beyond the skin. The mind is active, social and contextual; neither iso-
lated within individuals nor simply the object of discourse, but the agent of action
(2004, p.â•›53).
In our minds, we construe the storyworlds of novels while reading them. We
are interpreters of those imagined worlds in the same way as we are interpret-
ers of real world encounters and situations. As interpreters, we try to reconstruct
what happened — who did what to or with whom, for how long, how often and
in what order. The surrounding context of what happened is equally important
and interpreted by us. The term ‘storyworld’ is David Herman’s (2002) extension
of the ‘story’ (of classical, structuralist tradition of narratology). By the concept
of storyworld Herman sifts the focus from the linearly plotted happenings and
events of the story to the construction of a whole world as an interpretational basis
for comprehending the narrative. He emphasises that “the term storyworld better
captures what might be called the ecology of narrative interpretation” (p.â•›13–14).
It can be used when talking about fictional narratives as well as non-fictional ones.
What they have in common is the world-creating power of all kinds of narratives.
(pp.â•›5–7, 13–16.) Storyworlds are created in the mind of an individual or a group
of cognitive psychologists links nicely with the idea of possible worlds applied in the theorising
of cognitive narratologists. Storyworlds can be said to be possible worlds, Doležel writes in his
book Heterocosmica — Fiction and Possible Worlds (1998).
54 Tarja Aaltonen
of individuals. A storyworld opens up a frame of reference for one’s thoughts and

sense-making of surroundings, actions, and the utterances of others.
I explore how mind-reading is a mechanism used to create the storyworld
shared at least partly by all participants during an encounter. Participants use ver-
bal and non-verbal means to make themselves understood and to understand each
other. The speech is understood through the way it is tied to emerging courses of
action. In order to construct relevant interpretations, participants attend to the
details of emerging talk, each other, as well as relevant structures in the environ-
ment or even larger cultural context (Goodwin, 2007, p.â•›57). Among other things,
participants try to interpret the minds of each other. Mind-reading is an act of
interpretation and understanding, and as such an essential part of that interaction.
The Tikoteekki case
The client is a 65-year-old aphasic man who suffered a stroke one and half years
before coming to the Tikoteekki for the first time in April 2006. He speaks fluently,
but frequently the uttered words are not correct Finnish. Instead, he produces
classic errors, called paraphasias. Existing words may be paraphatic if used in the
wrong context (for example, herkku (delicacy) instead serkku (cousin)) or they
may be non-existent in the vocabulary of the speaker’s native language (like kirvee
instead of hirvee (horrible)). (Laakso, 1997, p.â•›25.) In short, due to his aphasia the
client’s speech is often unintelligible or hard to understand. However, his compre-
hension seems to remain unaffected. The speech therapist, the aphasic man’s wife,
his sister-in-law and her husband are gathered in the Tikoteekki tiny room, where
I am also video recording.
The excerpt I analyse in more detail is a recording from the client’s third visit
in the Tikoteekki. The analysed episode takes place towards the end of the meeting,
when the participants are discussing the rehabilitation process as a whole and the
opportunities for aphasics and their relatives to take part in an adaptation course.
The husband of the wife’s sister has asked about adaptation courses and the wife
of the aphasic man has commented on that by saying “For some reason we have
not been accepted to those courses.” Aligned with this argument, the topic and the
mood of the whole episode can be read as a story of ‘who has access to rehabilita-
tion and who pays for it?’ The mood is like the tone or colour of the whole episode.
The aphasic man takes the turn to speak and starts to recount something. What is
he saying and how is he understood?
The data is in Finnish and the interaction was transcribed by using simpli-
fied conversation analytical notation (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984, pp.â•›ix–xv). The
transcription is given in three lines: the first line is the original talk in Finnish, the
second line is the translation into English, and the third line is for gestures and
some observations on the situation. Paraphatic, non-Finnish words are transcribed
by using ‘x’, prosody (for example, capital letters when the speaker uses a loud
voice), pauses, and other non-verbal elements of the speech have been preserved.
All the words understandable in Finnish have been translated, even though some
words are obviously used incorrectly in the context. I have also translated my own
assumptions of what some of the used words mean even if they are not pronounced
quite correctly. In those cases I have entered both the word used by the speaker
(though contextually wrong or paraphatic) and the word I think he was looking for
in the transcription. The word I assume he is seeking appears in brackets.
Aphasic problems in speaking and in the comprehension of speech are a con-
crete danger for mutual understanding. In aphasic conversation, sequences of
searching for the correct word, for example, are often long and complex. Long and
complex is also my example, and that is why I cut it in pieces in order to make it
more readable. The original transcription of the episode consists of 55 lines. In this
article I present only 25 lines that are linked to my analytical remarks. Those 25
lines are divided into three excerpts analysed from two points of view: (1) reading
the mind of an individual; and (2) reading the social mind of the situation.
Reading the mind of an individual
The dialogue between the speech therapist and the aphasic man is essential in the
process of joint meaning-making and also a focal point of my analysis. In general,
the speech therapist treats the speech acts of the aphasic man as if they were coher-
ent in the conversation. His utterances are treated as utterances of a personal mind.
The aphasic speaker’s speech is regarded as if it had a point, not as mere non-
sense. It is treated as if it was meaningful. Meanings are fluid in themselves and
always dependent on the listener as well (Kohler Riessman, 1993, p.â•›13–15). Thus,
the speech therapist (co-participant, someone the aphasic person is communicat-
ing with) fulfils in her speech-acts the gaps of meaning and interprets the “non-
Finnish” words within a certain shared content. The speech is treated as if it re-
flected the speakers’ intentions in an intersubjectively understandable way. This
kind of an action is analogical to the ideas of mind-reading.
Concrete examples of mind-reading can be found in the data by juxtaposing it
with the idea of thought report (Palmer, 2005). Through thought report the narrator
can present a character’s consciousness of and connectedness to the surroundings.
Participants are the actors in a storyworld and their reasons, intentions, motives,
and so forth form an indispensable part of the characters’ embedded narratives
that can be recovered by readers from the discourse in the book (Palmer, 2004).
56 Tarja Aaltonen
Thought report has a linking function. It is by thought report and surface de-
scription of the storyworld that the narrator links the thought of the characters
to the existing social and physical context. By using thought report a narrator
presents the thoughts and consciousness of the characters in the narrative (for
example, “He wondered where he was.”) and connects it to its surroundings. The
mode of thought report is applicable for the presentation of a variety of mental
events, including mood and emotions. In certain cases thought report also con-
tains a sense of the broader social context. It can have a double-voiced nature that
on closer inspections turns out to be the expression of a consensus. (Palmer, 2004,
pp.â•›54–76, 80–85.)
In my example case I found similarities with these usages of the mode of
thought report in written texts. Participants, especially the speech therapist, use
utterances with the same kind of a linking function. The speech therapist refers to
consensual beliefs, experience and emotions. For me, these are the moments (I call
it thought reporting) when the act of mind-reading is concretised and captured
within the flow of interaction. Those are also the instances where shared narration
takes place. As mentioned above, the episode originated in the wife’s frustrated
opinion — “For some reason we have not been accepted into those courses” and it
continues:
Excerpt 1. Consensual belief
A = an aphasic man, W = his wife; S = the speech therapist,
K = the wife’s sister and H = the sister’s husband
1 →A: se on suattava se suart mä oo tää o se kun eren yl
it is xxxxxxxx it xxxxx I am this is it when xxxx xx
Reaches for the ballpoint pen.
2 (( rykii )) kuuskytäviis ↓voimat ni (.) se on (.)
((clears his throat)) sixty-five ↓forces yah (.) it is (.)
Writes something on the paper.
3 ↓vään.
↓xxxx
4 K: ai [↑ikäkö.
do you mean [↑age.
(.)
5 K: liian vanha?
too old?
6 A: ↑tässä on ↑tässä niin
↑here it is ↑here, yes
Nods
7 W: Looks at her sister.

8 → S: siin on semmonen [rajapyykki.
there is a sort of a [border mark.
9 [se on se [ei (°mitään°)
[it is it [no (°nothing°)
Gesticulating with his hands.
The speech therapist’s turn on line eight “there is a sort of a border mark” can be
interpreted as a double-voiced expression of consensus that Palmer considers to
be one possible version of thought report in novels. It is like a summary of opin-
ions just revealed in the previous turns of other discussants, the aphasic man and
his sister-in-law.
The aphasic man’s only understandable word “sixty-five” (line 2) is interpreted
by his sister-in-law as referring to age; specifically, to an age too high — being too
old (lines 4 & 5). In her mind, that may be the reason not to be accepted in the pre-
viously mentioned courses. The aphasic man’s turn on line six can be understood
to be an agreement to this; he is nodding while saying “here it is, here, yes”. And at
the end, according to my interpretation, the speech therapist concludes the notion
by referring to the age as a border mark of something. The aphasic man agrees “it
is it” (line 9) even before the speech therapist has ended her turn of speaking. The
consensus echoes the shared knowledge that older people are not taken care of or
rehabilitated as readily as younger ones. During the whole episode (not included
in the excerpt) the sister-in-law’s husband uses a term ‘prioritising’ by which he is
referring to the same phenomenon.
In the excerpt above, conversation flows quite smoothly and it is almost as if
the deficits of one of the interlocutors did not disturb the others at all. Nobody
even once notes that they do not understand what the aphasic man is referring to
or what he means. Research on strategies people use when communicating with
aphasic individuals have shown rather unanimously that communicative partners
attempt to support the smooth flow of conversation and try to resolve the prob-
lems created by aphasia (e.g., Milroy & Perkins, 1992; Goodwin, 1995). The fluen-
cy is supported by the speech therapist when she uses a strategy of thought report
in her concluding turn. By doing so, she strengthens the atmosphere of consensus.
In excerpt two, again analogous to thought reporting in a novel, the speech
therapist articulates the aphasic speaker’s experiences or mood aloud like a narra-
tor of a book. She is guiding the participants or the listeners of the tale to follow up
what is happening to the character; the aphasic man, and how he is experiencing
his life in the storyworld of rehabilitation.
58 Tarja Aaltonen
Excerpt 2. Experience
1 A: se on ihan (°kelvoton°)
it is quite (°useless°)
Gesticulating with his hands
2 S: se on esimerkiks [KELAn kanssa [sillä tavalla että
it is for example [with KELA6 [so that
3 A: [ni [niin on kaikki
[yes [yes it is everything
4 K: aivan.
absolutely.
5 → A: kaikki nää kaikki merekurk kaik nää kaikki jutut (0.5)
all these all xxxxxxxx all these all things (0.5)
Gesticulating with his both hands.
6 ↓antaa ja ↓perkele.
↓give and ↓hell.
7 → S: sulla on semmonen kokemus [nyt tässä syntynyt (.) joo:
such an experience has [emerged for you now (.) yes:
8 A: [on kyllä
[yes it has
In her turn, on line seven: “such an experience has emerged for you now” the speech
therapist describes the character’s frame of mind — he has realised something. The
mood is accompanied by spontaneous physiological events (Doležel, 1998, p.â•›68).
The mood is observable in the manner with which the teller is using his hands (line
5) and audible in the ways the aphasic speaker uses his voice. These are signs of
emotions connected to the experience. A referent to the word ‘perkele’ (hell, line 6)
is obvious, he is not happy with the situation. He uses intensifiers, such as gestures
and expressive phonology, to strengthen some aspects of the told story (Labov,
1972, p.â•›378). The aphasic man is decidedly telling about his own experiences and
experience is an essential feature of a narrative. Monica Fludernik (1996, p.â•›13)
considers experientiality, “the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience’â†œ”
to be the most important constituent of narrativity and narrative. In her model of
‘natural’ narratology there cannot be any narratives without a human experiencer.
The studied episode is emotionally laden and in that sense reflects the prototypi-
cal instances of narrative by representing what it has been like to live through the
events of stroke, aphasia and rehabilitation (Herman 2007, p.â•›9). Telling a story is
6.â•‡ KELA is the Social Insurance Institution of Finland.

an act of mind-making, and mind-reading plays a role in understanding a story.

This becomes nicely visible in the excerpt above.
Yet again, in line five in excerpt three, the speech therapist sums up what has
been meant according to her interpretation. She words the aphasic speaker’s previ-
ous turn as an indication of being insulted. Thought report is a common way of
conveying the feelings of another person (Mildorf, 2008). In emotion, our thought
can become public and shared (Palmer 2004, p.â•›115). That is exactly what happens
in the next example from the data.
Excerpt 3. Emotion.
1 A: mut ainaha ain haavimman veh kuh ko
but always xxx xxxxxxxxx xxx xxx xx
He mimes as if he was writing something.
2 H: [aina halvimman lääkkeen ottaa.
[always takes the cheapest medication.
3 A: [mutta sitten aina sijs ra ma ri ni sie ((sihahtaa))
[but then always xxxx xx xx xx xx xxx ((hisses))
4 kyllä (0.5) hulluje hullu.
yes (0.5) the craziest of all.
5 → S: jhoo se on hirveen loukkaavaa joo
yeah it is very insulting yes
6 → A: on (.) onon (0.5) MÄ OO MAKSANU VERISUONIA IHAN
it is (.) yes (0.5) I HAVE PAID BLOOD VESSELS (taxes) QUITE
He is very angry and uses his hands and voice to make it clear.
7 TARPEEKSI.
ENOUGH.
8 S: niin (0.5) joo.
I see (0.5) yes.
The mood of the situation is still the same; frustrated and negative. This time the
speech therapist calls something ‘insulting’ (line 5) and not merely experienced.
She is referring the aphasic speaker as being insulted; she uses a description of
an emotion behind which it is quite easy to imagine a conception. In a way the
speech therapist explains the speaker’s behaviour: the speaker is very upset be-
cause he is offended, and that is why he uses his voice and gestures the way he
does. That is also the reason why the understandable words are negatively loaded
words like ‘hell’. Presenting the explanation for behaviour is one of the most
important functions of contextual thought report (Palmer, 2004, p.â•›216; Mil-
dorf, 2008). The speech therapist is mediating the meaning between the speaker
60 Tarja Aaltonen
(the character) and the “audience”, which is also what the narrator can do by
thought reports. The mediation is required due to the speaker’s lack of words to
explain himself.
Reading the mind of the situation
As was already mentioned, here the term ‘mind’ refers not solely to an individual
but also to a social, shared, and intersubjective phenomenon. In her interpretation
process the speech therapist is filling in the gaps by combining the information she
gleans from both what the aphasic speaker says and the prosodic and nonverbal
communication, but she also draws from her knowledge of rehabilitation practices
in Finland. Interpretative hypotheses are made rapidly, “on-line”, and in parallel.
The speech therapist’s understanding of the other is not based solely on lan-
guage, but rather more reminiscent of Donald Davidson’s passing theory. For Da-
vidson (2005, pp.â•›101–104), passing theory is essentially what is needed for success
in communication. According to him, for example, passing theory considers every
deviation from the habitual use of a word a feature of what the word means on
that particular occasion, as long as this is agreed upon for the moment and the
participants have the ability to understand the speaker’s intentions even when he is
using words incorrectly or in a novel way. Davidson’s contribution to the debate on
the relationship between language and understanding emphasises the situatedness
of meanings and understanding, as well as language used as an idiolect instead of
being a universal syntactic and semantic system.
John Heritage also emphasises the situatedness of the meaning by noting that
“the meaning of the actor’s action is potentially accessible, but the observer’s un-
derstanding is not thus guaranteed to be correct but the co-actor must ‘take chanc-
es’ in responding on the basis of an interpretation of the other’s action which may
yet turn out to be incorrect because all the facts were not, at the point, available.”
(1984, pp.â•›60–61) In the excerpts the speech therapist takes a chance; she makes
guesses and uses her contextual and cultural knowledge, as well as her mind-read-
ing ability, in order to understand and to reformulate the aphasic man’s utterances
in such a way that she can offer interpretations to him in a propositional form to
accept or reject. She is reading both the individual mind as well as the social mind
of the situation and the meaning of the utterances is linked to both minds. When
we examine the way that we construct and understand meaning we are actually
studying the mind (Brockmeier, 2005, p.â•›443). In concrete utterance (i.e. in live us-
age of words) emotions, evaluation, and expression are born (Bakhtin, 2002, p.â•›87).
The meaning is crystallised in action and takes the form of an intermental thought
as Palmer (2004) would say.
Salient meanings of language offer some guidelines for mind-reading as well.

Our linguistic behaviour is shaped by socially shared salient meanings and senses
of words, as well as by fixed expressions in addition to contextual information
(Giora, 2003, p.â•›9). Language is always occupied with the meanings of its earlier
use and populated with intentions and expectations (Brockmeier, 2005, p.â•›438),
some of them being more salient than others. When we select words for an ut-
terance (a unit of speech communication), according to Bakhtin (2002, p.â•›87) we
usually take them from other utterances and adopt with them the meanings and
expressive tones of genres. There are authoritative utterances (cf. salient meanings)
we rely on and every unique speech experience is shaped and developed in con-
tinuous and constant interaction with other’s utterances (p.â•›89). The repertoire of
the salient meanings of words is also used when trying to guess what the aphasic
storyteller is referring to.
‘To pay blood vessels’ (Excerpt 3, line 6) is not an appropriate phrase in any
context; however, ‘to pay taxes’ is. In Finnish both words begin with the same
letters VER (verisuonet and verot) and the syllable ver is a sufficient clue to un-
derstand the salient meaning ‘to pay taxes’ that is also contextually appropriate,
albeit linguistically uttered by using incorrect words. In my example the meaning
was caught, even though incorrectly uttered by using wrong words, and it was
accepted as an appropriate turn in the conversation. A more peculiar connection
between the words ‘blood’ and ‘taxes’ can be found from our cultural vocabulary
in the form of “taxes drink the blood of the proletariat”.7 It would be an untenable
interpretation to argue that the aphasic man meant the political content and the
particular line of the song, The Internationale, by his utterance “to pay blood ves-
sels”. However, it is interesting that the sentiment of his utterance resembles that in
the song, namely exploitation and unfairness.
The storyworld is reconstructed not only on the basis of language or gestures
but also on the basis of contextual knowledge. Communication is made possible
by metacommunicative devices or contextualisation cues. Participants use such
cues to signal what sort of contextual knowledge should be drawn on to frame the
ongoing interaction. (Herman 1999, p.â•›237.) The aphasic man’s most intelligible
word ‘sixty-five’ (Excerpt 1, line 2) is such a contextualisation cue that it is enough
for the speech therapist (as well as for the other interlocutors) to understand what
he is referring to.
The most common age of retirement in Finland is 65, and this age is also seen
as a “borderline” (criterion) to gain access to the rehabilitation activities covered
7.â•‡ This is a line from the Finnish translation to ‘The Internationale’, original French lyrics by
Eugéne Pottier (1871). Retrieved April 6, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inter-
nationale
62 Tarja Aaltonen
by KELA (The Social Insurance Institution of Finland). After the age of 65 access-
ing rehabilitation services paid for by KELA can be much more difficult, if not
totally impossible. This is “a fact” contained in our encyclopedia8 or reservoir of
knowledge we possess and bring to the encounter in order to comprehend what
is actually said when KELA is referred to in an angry voice. Thus, this example of
interpretation concurs with Marcia Cavell’s (2005, p.â•›xvi) formulation that “the
birth of meaning takes place through interpersonal communication about shared,
public world, and depends in the fact that human creatures have shared needs and
interests.” Contextual frames are for supplementing any propositional informa-
tion with situation-based information (Emmott 1997, ref. Herman 2002, p.â•›270),
and in my example case the situation-based information can be argued to be even
primary information on which the interpretation is based.
How was the data read?
Herman (2002) states that the real target of narrative analysis is the process by
which interpreters reconstruct the storyworlds encoded in narratives. While read-
ing the data, I am reconstructing the storyworld of the encounter from my own
point of view. I claim that I am doing narrative analysis when trying to reconstruct
the process of understanding the broken narrative and narration of an aphasic
man. Particular emphasis is given to the interaction between the speech therapist
and the aphasic man. I read the process of the co-construction of the meaning
and the way the aphasic man’s utterances and non-verbal messages are interpreted
and made a coherent part of the storyworld. In the example case all the cues are
utilised in order to make sense of the narrative the aphasic man is telling, because
the propositional meanings of the words are not constantly available.
While analyzing the data I picked up those instances where, according to my
interpretation, mind-reading took place. The term ‘mind-reading’ is a description
of one step of my analysis, an analytical tool. As I was going through the data I
asked myself: “can I find sequences of action one can call mind-reading, i.e. mo-
ments in the flow of interaction where someone is explaining overt behaviour in
terms of underlying states of mind?” The chosen three excerpts that I introduced
were results of that reading and answers to the question.
In the analysed episode the mutual understanding was co-constructed, and in
the construction process the speech therapist had a pivotal position. Some of her
8.â•‡ Encyclopedia is defined as “shared communal knowledge that varies with cultures, social
groups, historical epochs, and for these reasons relativizes the recovery of implicit meaning”
(Doležel, 1998, p.â•›177).
speaking turns can be interpreted as analogous to the use of the mode of thought
report in a written text. With “thought reports” the speech therapist ascertains that
joint, intersubjective understanding of what the aphasic man is telling can emerge.
Lots of gaps are present in the analysed episode. Participants try to “read” the situ-
ation and the minds of others in order to explain what is going on and what is said
or argued either with words or without them.
Not everything is present for the participants to read (their knowledge is nec-
essarily incomplete), and therefore they use frames, scripts, and preference rules
(Palmer, 2004). They also rely on the salient meanings of the words or idiomatic
phrases in order to fill in the gaps. The messages are interpreted and the storyworld
is created. The storyworld provides the presuppositions that enable the reader or
the listener to construct a coherent understanding of the narrative that is told.
The man’s speech, his story, has a sufficient structure and contains enough words
and intensifiers for recipients to understand meanings, actions and entities of the
storyworld. We were able to recognise that he was telling us a story even without
knowing from time to time what that story meant.
Concluding remarks
I chose one very short example of only two and half minutes duration from my
data to work with while doing my experiment on how some cognitive narrato-
logical concepts operate in a real world episode of narrating in a clinical setting. I
asked if the concept of mind-reading can help me to add the ‘mind’ to my analysis
when using conversation analysis as a method and when reading the broken nar-
rative of the aphasic man. Mind-reading was concretised as thought reporting and
used as a mechanism to create joint understanding, or intermental thought, in a
face-to-face interaction. I have, in a way, read the mind of the speech therapist. I
claim that she reads the mind of the aphasic man and the mind of the whole situ-
ation, and reports her interpretations in the mode of thought report in situ. That
can be interpreted as a strategy for shared storytelling, and as such it illuminates
the co-authoring of a narrative from a new perspective.
While Palmer (1994) considers the reader’s means to access the storyworld of
a novel, I found a link with my own experiences as a researcher trying to access the
storyworld created by the participants in the rehabilitation encounter when one of
them had difficulties to speak. In the analysed episode the aphasic man invited us
to share his experiences and to co-construct a storyworld of the aphasia rehabilita-
tion encounter. This article is my response to that invitation.
64 Tarja Aaltonen
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Appendix
Transcription conventions:
[] Overlapping utterances
(0.0) Timed pause: silence measured in seconds and tents of seconds
(.) A pause of less than 0.2 second
. Period: falling intonation
? Question mark: rising intonation
↑ Rise in pitch
↓ Fall in pitch
xxx Underlining is indicating emphasis
°â•… ° A degree sign is used to indicate a passage of talk which is quieter than the surround-
ing talk
XXX Capital letters are used to indicate an utterance, that is spoken much louder that the
surrounding talk
x Letter X is used when the utterance is not Finnish
(( )) Double parentheses are used to enclose a description of some phenomenon like de-
tails of conversational scene or various characterisations of the talk.
( ) Single parentheses are used in doubt or guesses of transcriptionist
→ The left-hand marginal arrows are markers for the lines in the transcript where the
phenomenon of interest occurs
Chapter 5
Broken narratives, visual forces

Letters, paintings and the event
Maria Tamboukou
University of East London, UK
In this chapter I look into letters and paintings of Gwen John’s, an expatriate
Welsh artist who lived and worked in Paris in the first half of the twentieth
century. John’s epistolary narratives and paintings are placed within a conceptu-
alization of time as duration, a continuum where past, present and future coexist
and wherein sequential linearities are broken, nomadic subjectivities emerge and
forces of narratability are released. What I argue is that John’s letters and paint-
ing create a plane for broken narratives and visual forces to be explored as events
that form a different image of thought about the ethics and aesthetics of what
human communication entails.
Keywords: broken narratives, Deleuzian analytics, events, nomadic subjects,

visual forces
To me the writing of a letter is a very important event. I try to say what I mean
exactly. It is the only chance I have — for in talking, shyness and timidity dis-
tort the meaning of my words in people’s ears. That I think is one reason I am
such a waif. … I don’t pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows
to me and I am like a shadow.
(Lloyd-Morgan, 2004, p.â•›22).
In March 1902, Gwen John, a Welsh artist, who studied at the Slade School of Fine
Arts in London but mostly lived and worked in Paris was writing to her friend
Michel Salaman a letter expressing her thoughts about happiness, the momen-
tary pleasures of doing art, problems, misunderstandings and gaps in human re-
lations and particularly among friends. In John’s perception, the writing of a let-
ter was ‘an important event’ in that it allowed for her thoughts to be articulated
properly — something that she feared was often distorted when speaking. In this
chapter I make connections between this letter and a painting of Gwen John’s —
68 Maria Tamboukou
Figure 1.â•‡ Gwen John, ‘Self-portrait with a letter’, watercolour and pencil on paper,
(22.3â•›×â•›16.1) Rodin Museum, Paris, no. D.7210, photographed by Jean de Calan.
Autoportrait a la lettre [Figure 1]. In this self-portrait — the only finished water-

colour amongst her work — the artist paints herself vacillating between speaking
and letter-writing: she holds a letter in her hand, her mouth is slightly open and
her expression shows intense anticipation. This self-portrait was sent to Augus-
tus Rodin, with whom she had a passionate relationship for over ten years. What
I suggest is that both the letter and the self-portrait create a narrative plane, an
interface between the textual and the visual wherein John’s ambivalence towards
speech becomes a sign1 of her will to solitude and makes forceful connections with
an ethico/aesthetic practice of striving for human communication, while critically
problematizing it.
Gwen John’s auto/biographical archive2 reveals that there are different milieus
for her ‘will to solitude’ to be contextualized. In the four years preceding her move
to Paris (1888–1903), she was living in a series of gloomy London flats one of
1.â•‡ Signs in Deleuze’s analysis of Proust’s work (2000) are not perceived within the signifier-
signified relation, they are not something that we can recognize; they are rather encounters that
can only be sensed or felt through a form of violence that they exercise on our thought. Put
simply, signs forces us to think differently.
2.â•‡ The archive my research has drawn on includes two extended bodies of correspondence —
her letters to her life-long friend and fellow student at the Slade, Ursula Tyrwhitt (National
Library of Wales) and Augustus Rodin, (Rodin Museum Archives), a publication of selected
letters and notebooks (Lloyd-Morgan, 2004), two biographies, (Chitty, 1987; Roe, 2002), exhibi-
tion catalogues ( Langdale & Jenkins, 1985; Jenkins & Stephens, 2004) and other art publications
on her work (Taubman, 1985; Langdale, 1987; Foster 1999). I am indebted to the AHRC and the
University of East London for funding my work at the archives.
Chapter 5.â•‡ Broken narratives, visual forces 69
which has been described by her famous brother Augustus John3 as ‘a dungeon
… into which no ray of sunlight could ever penetrate’ (cited in Langdale, 1987,
p.â•›21). John’s obsession with literally living underground in the company of her
cat, puzzled and problematised the bohemian circles of London, who labelled her
as a recluse. This marginalization however, also worked as a force of deterrito-
rialization. As a young woman trying to pursue her artistic aspirations and live
independently, John left behind the suffocating spaces and places of London. Her
move to Paris however, was not to be an intermission of an artist’s life as it was the
case with many of her contemporaries.4 Paris and later Meudon, a nearby suburb
was to become her home for the rest of her life. As she was writing to Rodin: ‘I was
very troubled, since I had dreamt that I was in England and I could not come to
you in Paris. Before going to sleep I was thinking of my brother and how he was
making me miserable in England and how I was miserable in England’ (MGJ, B/
J5/undated letters with an address).
John went to Paris deterritorialized by her desire to become an artist, but her
lines of flight were soon to be reterritorialized on other regimes of fear, the striated
spaces of heterosexual love.5 Her fear of speech becomes a constant theme of her
many letters to Rodin, which appear to be filling the gaps of her silence:
3.â•‡ Augustus John (1878–1961), a British Camden Town Group Painter studied at the Slade
School of Art like his sister and was considered to be the most talented artist of his generation.
In 1894 he won the Slade prize and by 1914 he was the best-known artist in Britain, while by the
1920s he became Britain’s leading portrait painter. Some critics thought that his art ultimately
degenerated. To get an idea about his art, you can visit http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/
john_augustus.html.
4.â•‡ See Perry’s (1995) study of women artists in Paris in the early twentieth century.
5.â•‡ Deterritorialization, reterritorialization, lines of flight, striated spaces and smooth spaces are
central notions in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical writings, particularly elaborated in A
Thousand Plateaus (1988). A common aspect in all these notions is the importance of the rela-
tions we have with space in general and the earth in particular. We experience the world as a
continuum of striated and smooth spaces: ‘smooth space is constantly being translated, trans-
vered into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth
space. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p.â•›474) Striated spaces are hierarchical, rule-intensive, strictly
bounded and confining, whereas smooth spaces are open, dynamic and allow for transforma-
tions to occur. In this light, ‘all becoming occurs in smooth space’ (p.â•›486). As a matter of fact
we constantly move between deterritorialization — freeing ourselves from the restrictions and
boundaries of controlled, striated spaces — and reterritorialization — repositioning ourselves
within new regimes of striated spaces. As Deleuze and Guattari warn us: ‘You may make a rup-
ture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that
restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute
a subject.’ (p.â•›9) However in the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy, where we start
from or where we end up — beginnings and endings — are not so important. In their writings,
70 Maria Tamboukou
If it weren’t for my letters I would be a mute girl for you. Wouldn’t I? My letters
are my conversations. When you hold my body in your arms, remember that I also
have a spirit, otherwise you will find me very stupid — don’t forget that I have my
thoughts but I can’t talk about them. [my emphasis] (MGJ/B.J5, undated)
John has written repetitively and at length about the importance of letters in her
life in general and in her relation with Rodin, in particular. Letter writing was satu-
rating her daily life, creating multifarious effects on various levels. It was through
writing letters that she could express herself and grapple with existential difficul-
ties, reflect, remember and communicate. As clearly put in the extract that initi-
ated this chapter, the writing of a letter was for her ‘a very important event.’
But what is an event? Is it just something that happens? Or is it something
that makes new things happen disturbing the order of what we do, the certainty of
how we perceive the world and ourselves? Philosophers of the event have seen it
as a glimpse into the unreachable, the yet to come (Nietzsche, 1990); a transgres-
sion of the limitations of the possible (Foucault, 1987); a flash in the greyness of
the virtual worlds that surround us (Deleuze, 2001). As Deleuze has poetically put
it: ‘The event is not what occurs (an accident), it is rather inside what occurs, the
purely expressed. It signals and awaits us … it is what must be understood, willed
and represented in that which occurs’ (p.â•›170). Departing from good sense, the
event sticks out from the ordinary, marks historical discontinuities and opens up
the future to a series of differentiations.
In working with the concept of the event, Deleuze (2001, p.â•›7) has traced a
line of philosophical thinking that goes back to the Stoics and their distinction
between bodies and events — incorporeal effects of the interrelation of bodies. In
this light, the writing of a letter is an event, an effect of the interrelation of bod-
ies — the addresser, the addressee, the epistolary materiality. As an event however,
the writing of a letter is not simply what occurs, but rather ‘inside what occurs’,
John’s ‘purely expressed’ desire to reach the other. In writing letters she strives to
become worthy of what happens to her and thereby to be reborn as a friend, a lover,
an artist.6 Thus the letter-event transgresses the limitations of the space/time block
they have actually put forward: ‘other ways of moving and traveling: proceeding from the mid-
dle, through the middle, coming and going, rather than starting and finishing’ (p.â•›25). What is
critical in the experience of freedom is our movement in between, when we follow lines of flight
or escape, the intermezzo, the process of becoming other. In this light, Deleuze and Guattari
prioritize lines of flight to conflicts and battles which are so central in the Foucauldian concep-
tualization of power: ‘a social field’ they write, ‘is defined less by its conflicts and contradictions
than by the lines of flight running through it.’ (p.â•›90)
6.â•‡ Paraphrasing Deleuze who actually writes: ‘to become worthy of what happens to us […] and
thereby to be reborn’ (2001, p.â•›170)
within which it is actualized — John writing in the solitude of her room — and
opens up yet unrealized possibilities: communication to come, words to recapture
the meaning that speech could have distorted, the power of love to be discursively
expressed. Moreover the epistolary event initiates diverse series of events to come:
Some letters will be sent, received, read and maybe responded. Some will be cher-
ished, and kept, others will be lost, destroyed or given to archives to be analyzed
and rewritten by researchers like me. Or maybe the letter is ‘dead’ at the very mo-
ment of its writing — it never arrives anyway in a Derridean image of thought.7
Deleuze has argued however, that the event cannot be reached, ‘has no pres-
ent’ (2001, p.â•›73). The event is always elusive being the perpetual object of a double
question: ‘What is going to happen? What has just happened?’ (p.â•›73) In this sense,
narrative becomes a medium for the event to be expressed or rather leave its signs:
‘The pure event is tale and novella, never an actuality.’ (p.â•›73) Following Deleuze,
Gibson (1996) has therefore suggested that postmodern trends in narrative should
liberate narrative as an event and the event in narrative and in this context he has
explored narrative modes, which have allowed the event to emerge in novels and
films.
Taking up Gibson’s suggestion I have worked with John’s letters and paintings
raising a two-fold question: can letters and paintings function both as events and
as milieus within which events can be traced? It is exploring this question that the
discussion of the paper now turns.
Letters and paintings as events in time reconsidered
In his philosophical discussion of the concept of the event, Deleuze has drawn
on the Stoics’ two-fold conceptualization of time: (a) as Chronos and as (b) Aion:
‘Briefly there are two times, one of which is composed of interlocking presents; the
other is constantly decomposed into elongated pasts and futures.’ (2003, p.â•›73, em-
phasis in the text) Chronos delineates a cyclical succession of movements, marking
occurrences and their causal links: John is desperate or lonely, then she writes
letters. However the event can only be conceptualized within an image of time as
Aion, a continuum wherein past, present and future co-exist, an unfolding time,
wherein events — forces that effectuate changes — emerge. In Deleuze’s thought:
7.â•‡ Drawing on Derrida, Stanley has commented how all letters are ‘dead’ in the sense that ‘the
letter that was written and sent is rather different from the one that arrives and is read because
it has changed by its travels in time and space from the there and then of writing to the here and
now of reading’ (2004, p.â•›208)
72 Maria Tamboukou
‘Time itself unfolds (that is, apparently ceases to be a circle) instead of things un-
folding within it (following the overly simple circular figure). (2004, p.â•›111)
The writing of a letter is in this sense conceptualised as an event, with a limit-
less capacity in expressing forces of narratability, John’s desire to relate to others
through exposing her vulnerability and dependence.8 As put in one of her letters
to Rodin: ‘I have a great fear of despair … but I got out … once I was able to write
these letters, I gathered hope in writing them’ (MGJ, B.J3, undated). The whole
letter is a reflection on how difficult it is to identify the ‘reasons’ for writing letters,
trace the causality underpinning them: ‘This was not the reason that I wrote these
letters … I don’t know all the reasons. Fear was one. I have a great fear of despair
… but I got out … once I was able to write these letters, I gathered hope in writ-
ing them’ (MGJ, B.J3, undated). In this light, writing letters is an event opening up
striated regimes of fear, creating possibilities for hope — life can be different when
John writes a letter about her fears, acts upon them, faces her ghosts, exposes her
weaknesses. This is very different from placing the letter within the closed causal-
ity of the occurrence: John was afraid; this is why she wrote those letters.
What I further suggest is that John’s narratability, her desire for her story to be
expressed springs forcefully from her ‘Self-portrait with a letter’ [Figure 1] In cre-
ating an artistic image of her ambivalence between speaking — her mouth slightly
open — and writing — the letter in her hand — John releases visual forces of
her anxiety, invites her viewers to make connections with the ethical problem of
what human communication entails. Her self-portrait raises a series of questions:
Why is her mouth open? Is she saying something about the letter she is hold-
ing? Who is she talking/writing to? What is the connection between speaking and
letter-writing? As shown above, John had explicitly written that ‘my letters are my
conversations’, but then again, is it possible that fragmented sentences or phrases
from her letters can fix anything about the meaning of her paintings? Can we as-
sign any meaning at all to a work of art?
8.â•‡ The very act of narration is immanently political, relational and embodied, as Cavarero fol-
lowing Arendt has forcefully shown. To the Arendtian view that human beings as unique ex-
istents live together and are constitutively exposed to each other through the bodily senses,
Cavarero adds the narratability of the self. The self emerges as narratable in that it is constitutive
of the very desire of listening to her story being narrated. This desire is interwoven with what
Cavarero (2000, p.â•›35) conceives as ‘the unreflective knowledge of my sense-of-self through
[which] I know that I have a story and that I consist in this story’. Moreover, the narratable self
is not reducible to the contents of the story either as ‘a construction of the text or the effect of
the performative power of narration’; in this light, narratability is not about intelligibility, but
about familiarity with the ‘spontaneous narrating structure of memory’ (Cavarero 2000, pp.â•›35,
34). For a discussion of how John is constituted as a narratable subject, see Tamboukou, 2008.
Keeping the analysis of this paper within the anti-representational image of

though of Deleuze’s philosophy I have made connections with his suggestion of
seeing paintings as fields of forces rather than semiotic registers. The very task of
painting according to Deleuze is ‘the attempt to render visible forces that are not
themselves visible’ (2003, p.â•›56). What I therefore propose is that the Self-Portrait
with a letter creates a field where forces of narratability are rendered visible. Taken
as a field of forces, John’s self-portrait intensifies our ambivalence about what have
remained unsaid, blends the boundaries between oral and written communication.
What springs from the canvas is the force of the desire of the narratable subject for
her story to be told. The sitter of the self-portrait however, can never be reducible
to the content of her story or the figural image of the painting. Self-portraiture is
an autographic9 practice rather than an autobiographical one: an artistic interven-
tion on the experience of the self, a response to the self, not a representation of it.
What is further strikingly interesting about this self-portrait is that it was sent to
Rodin as a message, a sign of love transformed in a sign of art. Being invested with
strong epistolary elements — it was painted to be sent — the portrait becomes a
kind of a postcard, a Derridean envoy (1987, p.â•›22):
I have so much to tell you and it all will have to hold on snapshot postcards — and
immediately be divided among them. Letters in small pieces, torn in advance, cut
out, recut. So much to tell you but all and nothing, more than all, less than noth-
ing — to tell you is all and a postcard supports it well […]
To tell the other is all, but so much for John to say, and her letters and portrait/post-
card seem to support it well; they become events opening up her time, releasing
virtual forces of narratability, creating images of new worlds, anticipating limitless
future possibilities: friendship to come, love to be expressed, the artist to emerge:
I was so glad to get your letter. Your letters always give me a certain pleasure,
which I never find in anything else except painting. Whatever you talk about in
them it is the same, you belong to a part of my heart and mind — the same part
where my love of art is — which is undisturbed by the events and difficulties of
life. (NLW MS 21468D, ff.31–3)
In the letter above written to her friend Ursula Tyrwhitt on February 17, 1909,
John binds epistolary friendship with the pleasure of painting. Her correspon-
dence with Tyrwhitt was a source of artistic inspiration and emotional and practi-
cal support throughout her life in Paris. John’s friends in the UK and even her lover
in Paris were all artists. It was a propos of their art that they would often commu-
nicate, exchanging views about trends in art or sharing anxieties about the state of
9.â•‡ For a discussion of the autograph see Stanton (1987).

74 Maria Tamboukou
their own work: ‘Are you painting?’ was a constant question that John would ad-
dress to Tyrwhitt and other artist friends in the UK — both men and women. Art
was opening up windows of communication between friends and lovers:
I received your card my Master10 this evening on returning from my [modelling]
session. It gave me a great joy. My room is calm. I thought for a long time of the
letter that I am going to write to you I thought that in this calmness I can easily
talk to you about my passion and of all the little things that are born from this and
of the dreams that I had these last nights … you can judge from the insufficiency
of this letter that it is very difficult to write about a great love.
(MGJ/BJ3, undated letters without address or name)
As the above extract from a letter written to Rodin so passionately conveys, letters
cannot really express the immensity of love — they can only carry or emit signs
of it. What letters can do however is to contract the experience of the present
moment, disrupt the ceaseless linear continuity of time, become an event in the
experience of duration, allow time to be sensed as Aion. The following letter is a
contemplation of the moment of writing as an experience of the pure present:
I think of tomorrow when I will see him and I forget sometimes the infinite pres-
ent. This is neither intelligent, nor sage! No, but I live in the present when I write
to him and when I prepare to recite my poetry to him and when I look after my
health! And I am going to gradually learn not to forget the infinite present!
(MGJ/BJ4/Letters to Julie 1906–7)
John’s letters carry traces of how she experiments with love as force, disrupting the
order of the present, a process of living through what can only be experienced in
fractured moments of being — the moment of writing, as in the letter above.
John’s postcard-portrait and event-letters carry traces of virtual forces, narra-
tives of intensities and passions, messages for the yet to come; they do not repre-
sent ‘realities’ — they are pure events emitting signs and releasing forces. They thus
become vectors of deterritorialization, uprooting John from striated geographical,
cultural, emotional and gendered spaces, gearing the speediness of her becoming
a minoritarian figure of her social milieu: a solitary non-bohemian artist, a mad
Anglaise in Paris: ‘It is so cold in my room and I haven’t the energy to light the
fire so I’ve come here to write to you, there is a band here and a lot of startling
ladies amongst the men but I have books and writing paper all over the table so
they think me only a mad Anglaise. (John to Tywritt, 4-2-1910, NLW MS 21468D,
ff.38–40).
10.â•‡ Rodin was often addressed as ‘the master’ by his circle. Rilke for example who worked with
Rodin as his secretary would always address him as ‘My dear Master’, a salutation that John
would also use to open her letters to Rodin.
In writing letters John follows nomadic passages through different subject

positions and yet she cannot be pinned down to any of them. John is not reduc-
ible to the content of her letters and they cannot establish any causal relationship
between what she does, why she does what she does and who she is. This is the
point of taking letters as events: placing them outside the temporal causation of
Chronos, transferring them in a different register — the time of the immeasurable
Aion. Being conceived beyond the boundaries of sequentially structured narra-
tives, psychosocial states of mind and semiotic registers, John’s letters carry traces
of deterritorializations, lines of flight and eruptions; they become planes for the
emergence of the unconditioned, the unthought of; they compose a world of verbs
not of subjects — becomings not states of being. After all the question of who
writes or paints keeps evading, it is actually irrelevant in the philosophies of the
event, as I will further discuss.
Who writes or paints?
Gibson has noted that in classical narratology, events are always conceptualised in
relation to actors by whom ‘they are caused or experienced’ (Bal, cited in Gibson,
1996, p.â•›181) and who can further be detached from the event and become consis-
tent characters, carrying the sequential order of the narrative. As discussed above,
Chronos — a linear measurable conception of time — is the condition of possibil-
ity for the narratological conventions of sequence and character, but instead of
being recognised as just a variable it becomes naturalised, closing down possibili-
ties of open futurity and of subjects who cannot fit within any kind of temporal or
logical sequence.
Troubling the universality of a chronological conception of time, what I have
suggested is that instead of being sequentially ordered, John’s letters and paint-
ings — conceived as events — become assemblages of forces and affects within
an image of time as duration, the Stoic Aion. In this sense, subjects are dispersed,
sometimes even emerging in the text as pre-individual singularities rather than
coherent characters. As John wrote once in expressing the intensity of her passion
for Rodin: ‘I am nothing but a piece of suffering and desire’. (MGJ, B.J5, undated)
Seeing the self as ‘a piece of suffering and desire’, not as a person, initiates the
Nietzschean process of subjectification which is not about recognizing yourself
as a subject, but rather about depersonalizing yourself, dispersing existence in no-
madic passages around events, inventing new possibilities for life. As Deleuze has
put it: ‘Individuals find a real name for themselves,… only through the harshest
exercise in depersonalization, by opening themselves up to the multiplicities ev-
erywhere within them, to the intensities running through them. (1995, p.â•›6)
76 Maria Tamboukou
Opening up herself to the intensity of pain and passion, John finds a way to
the self through depersonalization. She does not recognize herself as ‘the new
woman’ she has been educated to become, but as an assemblage of multiple forces
traversing the immanence of her existence: nothing but a piece of suffering and
desire at least at the moment of writing a letter about it. When denoting herself
as ‘nothing but a piece of suffering and desire’, does she become a subject in bad
faith then, incapable of transcending her immanence — as an existentialist take on
consciousness would have it? For Deleuze, consciousness does not derive from a
unitary self; it rather emerges as a contraction of machinic11 repetitions, dispersed
and multiplied: ‘Underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate
and which render possible both the action and the active subject. We speak of
our “self ” only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate
within us: it is always a third party who says “me”. (2004, p.â•›96)
Among these thousands of little witnesses the subject is tentatively constituted
in the moment, through the event itself, as an effect of haecceity — the accidental
constitution of the moment, the intersection of the subject with the event (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1988, p.â•›296). John’s letters and paintings emit signs of non-subjecti-
fied affects and contingent encounters. Indeed, machinic consciousness nominally
emerges in her letters: ‘I don’t know what character I have when you leave me for
a long time; it seems to me that I have no character, I am a kind of machine, a
machine which suffers.’ (MGJ/BJ3/undated letters without name or address) How-
ever, being ‘nothing but a piece of suffering and desire’ or ‘a machine which suffers’
is an experience that does not become an attribute of what John is, does not cat-
egorise or enclose her within the box of patriarchy. Her letters and paintings both
establish and disperse the kind of uniformity expected by essentialist categories
of identity or even subjectivity attributes: a woman, an artist, a lover, a recluse.
John becomes a Spinozist subject by increasing her power to affect and be affected
11.â•‡ Unlike closed organisms and fixed identities, machines in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy
are assemblages without any organising centre, who can only function as they connect with
other machines in a constant process of becoming: ‘a machine may be defined as a system of
interruptions or breaks […] Every machine, in the first place, is related to a continual material
flow (hylè) that it cuts into.’ (1984, p.â•›36) The machine has no ground or foundation: ‘it is noth-
ing more than the connections and productions it makes; it is what it does; it therefore has no
home; it is a constant process of deterritorialization, or becoming other than itself.’ (Colebrook,
2002, p.â•›56) Colebrook further explains that ‘there is no aspect of life that is not machinic; all
life only works and is in so far as it connects with some other machine; […] so life is a prolifera-
tion of machinic connections.’ (p.â•›56) The concept of the machine allows for the possibility of
open configurations, continuous connections and intense relations, incessantly transforming
life: ‘everywhere there are breaks-flows out of which desire wells up, thereby constituting its
productivity and continually grafting the process of production onto the product.’ (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1984, p.â•›37)
through writing letters and painting pictures, amongst other practices. Taken as
events, her letters and paintings generate propositions that defy conventional no-
tions of space/time pinned identities: a new woman, a good artist, a woman in love.
Instead, John follows nomadic paths in between space/time positions. Her letters
carry traces of a divergent series of states, difficult to be enveloped in the sequen-
tial unity and structure of classical narratology: they become broken narratives of
nomadic distributions, while her paintings release forces of her narratability.
Through her letters and paintings — and mostly her self-portraits — John
emerges as a fascinating figure. She becomes able to depart from good sense, the
image of the artist which has been constructed in the process of measuring time
against unusual but still regular events: girl goes to the Slade, trains as an artist,
starts exhibiting, lives in the bohemian circles of London, gets married or not, goes
on working or gives it up to support her artist partner.12 John’s space/time blocks
— her chronotopes — are disrupted, her narratives and the narratives around her
have been irrevocably broken: she does not survive the freedom of the bohemian
circles in London and becomes a minoritarian subject even amongst the margins,
goes off travelling, ends up in Paris, has to work as a model to support herself
and her art, meets Rodin, falls in love, her lines of flight become reterritorialized
within Rodin’s circle, but once again she becomes a minoritarian figure within
the Parisian artists’ colony. John abandons common sense for visceral experiences
of unlimited passion and uncompromised solitude: she paints, writes letters to
her lover and friends and looks after her cat. In this light her life unfolds against
the rhythm of a specific set of occurrences structuring Woman’s time or even the
bohemian/artist’s time: she lives out of order and her letters and paintings carry
traces of disjointed space/time blocks.
Having displaced herself in space and time John paints portraits of women
who appear to do nothing more than reading a book or a letter, holding their cat
in their lap or just looking. These women seem to have abandoned conventional
tasks of their femininity: being busy within the world of domesticity, holding ba-
bies, being beautiful, offering themselves to the gaze of the other. What John paints
is the force of women’s space/time as momentarily undisturbed by the anxieties of
the earthy care for others; put simply, women who think. Indeed, these seemingly
motionless portraits release forces of pure thinking: the almost monochromatic
planes that John adopts in most of her paintings13 seem to absorb the figure, mak-
12.â•‡ Indeed, these were more or less the regular events structuring the life of many of her con-
temporaries as a series of studies on fin-de-siècle women artists has shown. See amongst others,
Chadwick, 1990; Perry, 1995.
13.â•‡ As an indicative list of John’s monochromatic paintings, see, Langdale, 1987, Young Woman
in a red Shawl (cat. no. 103, p.â•›99), Girl in a green dress, (cat. no. 99, p.â•›96), Girl holding a rose,
78 Maria Tamboukou
ing visible the forces of her ‘becoming imperceptible’ as the coded Woman of pa-
triarchal semiotic registers, while shedding light on the invisibility of the Deleuz-
ian moment of contemplation — the ecstatic time when the larval subject emerges
as an effect of pure intensities. John’s figures are like Virginia Woolf ’s characters:
‘Thus if you talk of a beautiful woman you mean only something flying fast which
for a second uses the eyes, lips or cheeks of Fanny Elmer, for example, to glow
through’ (Woolf, cited in Gibson, 1996, p.â•›204). In a parallel way, if you talk of a
thinking woman in John’s portraits, you mean only a gesture, a direction of the
gaze, a body posture, a turning of the head, or just a colour that enwraps the viewer
in the milieu of pure thinking.
In the same way that the novel becomes for Kundera, ‘the imaginary paradise
of the individual’ (cited in Gibson, 1996, p.â•›190), letters and paintings create an
imaginary world for John wherein she makes connections with the virtual forces
that surround her actualized space/time lived experiences. There are many and
different Johns and her character has both an actual and a virtual dimension. John
becomes an event in the sense that she is complicated, keeping all the selves that
compose her in a continuous state of intensity. Her letters hold differences togeth-
er, not as oppositions but as multiplicities: despair — and — hope, woman — and
— artist, inside — and — outside, solitude — and — communication. As Deleuze
has noted, ‘even if there are only two terms [woman and artist], there is an AND
between the two, which is neither the one nor the other, nor the one which be-
comes the other, but which constitutes the multiplicity’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002,
pp.â•›34–35). In this sense, dualisms can be dispersed working in the intermezzo be-
tween the two terms: what is happening in the middle, becomings between being a
woman and an artist, lines of flight between despair and hope, deterritorializations
between inside and outside, connections between solitude and communication.
This is where I have worked with John’s letters and paintings: in the intermezzo of
narrative sequences, in the gaps and interstices between broken narrative lines, in
milieus where the event emerges. It is further tracing signs of these events that the
discussion of the chapter now turns.
Tracing events in letters and paintings
In tracing events in John’s letters I will take up the question of ‘what modes of
narrative simulation of the event are possible’ (Gibson, 1996, p.â•›199). As already
(cat. no.83, p.â•›94) Young woman holding a piece of sewing, (cat. no. 79, p.â•›94), Young Woman
holding a Black cat (cat. no. 73, p.â•›92), Young woman in a Mulberry dress,( cat. no. 134, p.â•›90),
The Pilgrim, (cat. no. 107, p.â•›87), Girl in blue, (cat. no. 82, p.â•›78), Girl in rose (cat. no. 65, p.â•›74)
discussed, the event is always elusive and narratives can only carry traces of its
emergence or passage. Clearly, narratives can take many forms, but not all of them
can create conditions of possibility for the event to emerge. John was writing let-
ters regularly narrating her experiences of living and working in and around Paris.
She would further write letters about her paintings — the ways she worked, the
difficulties she had, the pleasures she took, her aspirations and plans. Her letters
open up trails for nomadic becomings, the ways she keeps constituting and recon-
stituting herself as an artist, a woman inhabiting public spaces, a woman in love, a
woman-who-loves-her-cat. In this sense John’s letters can be read in terms of how
they narrate events, albeit not wholly marked by them. What I suggest is that her
letters constitute a matrix, an assemblage of narratives of events and other narra-
tives, and it is on poetics of the event in her letters that I will now focus.
1. Accidental encounters, polyphonies and paradoxes: to laugh or to leave?

I have just returned from a café where I was drawing horses. A man dressed as a
dandy came near and started talking to me. I had gone there to draw and not to
talk to him, so I told him that I could not understand French. To my surprise in-
stead of going away on hearing that, he sat next to me, ordered a coffee and started
talking to me […] I could not understand what he was saying because I was focus-
ing on my drawing but I could follow some of his words. In the end, people would
stop and look at us and I was feeling very agitated and could not concentrate. I
could hear him saying that he was a journalist and that he was very annoyed with
the conductors who were staring and laughing at us. I was designing the ears of a
horse and he was saying that when I would design the conductors I should make
them with donkey ears […] I could not help laughing […] but still I was very an-
noyed and I left since so many people were staring … (MGJ, B.J4, undated)
John has frequently written about her frustration of being in public places as in
the letter above where she recounts her experiences of painting tram horses in a
Parisian café. There is nothing unusual with the situation: a single woman being
harassed while drawing in a café. What is interesting however in John’s narrative is
the ambiguous way that the story unfolds, different voices and perspectives merge
and the overall effect is finally becoming both funny and unbearable, stretched to
opposite directions in its logic of sense. Clearly John did not want to be distract-
ed. However, is it the journalist that mostly annoys her or the people staring and
laughing at them? And who is laughing at whom? Is it the conductors at John and
the journalist, is it the journalist at the conductors or is it John at the journalist?
John had been both annoyed and amused before taking the decision to leave. But
what is the overall feeling conveyed in this narrative? Is it irony, humour, indig-
nation or even signs of love emitted while evoking Rodin’s jealousy? The event
emerges as an occurrence at the point where common sense causalities have been
80 Maria Tamboukou
disrupted or broken and the logic of sense emerges within the affective milieu of
forces and intensities: Is John annoyed, amused or unbearably in love? And what
can this particular narrative of the café encounter convey about who she is and
how she feels?
The event emerges as a paradox according to Deleuze, in that it shakes com-
mon understandings, sequential orders and semiotic registers, creating a differ-
ent logic of sense: ‘Paradox is initially that which destroys good sense as the only
direction, but it is also that which destroys common sense as the assignation of
fixed identities’ (2001, p.â•›5). In this light, the letter about drawing tram horses in a
Parisian café is a narrative of the paradoxical events emerging in a woman’s lived
experiences of the urban spaces of modernity — being in the crowd but not of it.
It further carries signs of John’s nomadic passages: an artist in a café, a harassed
woman, a woman who laughs, a woman who loves. As an event itself, the letter
unveils the complex ways that John experiences space in terms of pure intensities
rather than prescribed movements in between gendered divided spheres. Indeed,
John has written extensively in her letters about her love of the Parisian quar-
ters, the city gardens and the grand boulevards. She has painted her room, but
also urban scenes seen from the Parisian cafés and restaurants where she used
to sit, draw, read books and write letters. She has equally expressed her love for
the countryside and the sea and has written about her walks in the woods and
her boat rides on the Seine. Her letters narrate events that chart a unique map of
real and imaginary spaces within which she keeps redistributing and consequently
reinventing herself; they narrate events of paradoxical experiences in surpassing
boundaries between the public and the private, the inside and the outside.14
2. Drafting the self
My dear Master, I am sad that I cannot write to you in a beautiful language. Some-
times I am like a poor spirit always being around and trying to be loved without
being able to speak — mute like the birds. I hope that one day I will find beautiful
and eloquent words that will attract your attention and then I will be able to stay
with you more often. But maybe I will never find them […]
(MR,MGJ,B.J3, undated)
As already discussed John’s letters and paintings create a plane of consistency for
human communication to be problematized. In the letter above, John cannot find
eloquent words to express her love. However it was not only the poetics of love
that she was worried about. There were basic grammar and syntax problems that
were preoccupying her. John never felt comfortable writing in French; copying her
letters and proof reading them would became part of her daily epistolary practices:
14.â•‡ For a discussion of John’s spatiality, see Tamboukou, 2007

‘I have copied a letter that I wrote yesterday but I didn’t give it to you, since I saw
that there were spelling mistakes and a fever came down to me which prevented
me from copying it yesterday’ (MR,MGJ,B.J3, undated). As a matter of fact, she
would often copy her letters ‘several times’ before sending them as revealed in a
postscript to an undated letter: ‘Sometimes I copy my letters several times because
of my bad writing.’ (MR,MGJ,B.J3).
If oral and written communication is boldly articulated as an issue in John’s
letters to Rodin in terms of her difficulties with the French language, her letters to
her friends in the UK and particularly her life-long correspondence to Tyrwhitt
equally express difficulties with choosing words in English: ‘No doubt all these
words are not chosen well. It is difficult to express oneself in words for painters,
isn’t it?’ (NLW MS 21468D, ff.31–3, 15/7/1927) Painters do not express themselves
well in words, is the idea here, a statement that it was impossible to be raised with
Rodin, since the subject position she was writing from, was that of the model/
lover/protégée, not that of the artist.
John’s letters were therefore always in a draft form. She was continuously draft-
ing them and even when they were sent there were always oscillations, ambivalenc-
es and regrets: ‘I have just read the letter that I wrote on Thursday morning […]
and after reading it I realized that this letter has not said anything that I have tried
to make it say. It says almost nothing.’ (MR,MGJ,B.J3). John considered her letters
to be irresolute and incomplete — there is no closure in her epistolary narratives.
However, her draft, inconclusive letters are a constant reminder of things that are
continuously excised from our communication with others, things that are left un-
said or incomplete, narratives that have broken but whose fragments remain hang-
ing in the virtualities that surround the actual moments of our communication.
3. Gaps, lacunae and broken narratives
My dear Master,
I have returned from a walk in the Boulogne Forest, the weather is so nice there
… I have a big desire to see the sea and the country, but I could only go there
with you, even if this perhaps will never happen. I see the sky and the stars from
my window, I know that we are on an island and that the sky is like the sea, all
around — I wonder why I am here, what to do and what is this world and where
we go after we die … It is very strange that you know the answer no more than I
do. All the people I see in the street seem so preoccupied with themselves and in
their own world my Master. Myself, I am a stranger not only in this country but in
the world; I don’t feel at home and I am always wondering why I am here … when
I am not with you, or writing to you or drawing my cat to show it to you, always
the same questions come to trouble me. Now I am going to lie in and read in bed.
(MGJ/BJ5/undated letters with a name of place)
82 Maria Tamboukou
Written on a Sunday night between 1906 and 1907, the letter above recounts a day
out in the countryside, raises metaphysical questions, exposes John’s existential
fears and expresses her love for Rodin. These themes recur in the many love letters
she wrote to him for over ten years and create an epistolary rhythm of seemingly
unmatched associations: a landscape and the beloved — the Boulogne Forest and
Rodin; unanswered questions — why am I here; gaps in communication that are
filled in with reading or sleep — now I am going to lie in and read in bed. John
was a painter, not a writer, but the poetics of her letters contain the complication
of multiplicities that Deleuze has identified in Proust’s narrative art: a rhythm of
gaps, interruptions and broken narratives, creating a plane of consistency without
forming a homogeneous unity: ‘By setting fragments into fragments, Proust finds
the means of making us contemplate them all, but without reference to a unity
which they might derive or which itself would derive from them’ (2000, p.â•›123).
John’s letters narrate unmatched events, ‘crammed together to the point of burst-
ing’ (122); they constantly evoke the gaps, misunderstanding and ruptures in the
way we communicate, the impaired ways we love, our ultimate failure to reach
the other. But the force with which events are narrated in her letters disrupt the
certainty of our perceptions about who she is and how she relates to the structures
and axes along which her world has been analysed: a patriarchal regime of private/
public dichotomies. John’s letters create an assemblage, a matrix of gaps and lacu-
nae wherein the meshwork of her/our social world can be unveiled; they project a
vision of life which is not attached to fixed subjects or segmented structures. The
blurring of pronouns, figures and subjects in her letters is a forceful sign of this
complexity, as I will further discuss.
4. Meddling with grammatical subjects, names and signatures
My dear sister,
When I think that it is to you that I write Julie, I am more daring than if I was told
that it is my Master who will see my letter. So, I will always imagine your little eyes
when I write my letter […] I fear that my Master will grow weary of my unifor-
mity […] However, I tell myself that perhaps in the garden a small tree straight
and strong has as much value as the bright flowers […] in my heart, not just in
my mind I find a force (and if I didn’t have anything that I would ever dare talk or
write to my Master, I sense in myself a force that I can talk about without vanity)
(MGJ/BJ4/Letters to Julie)
On a Monday night between October and November 1909, John was writing to
Julie, articulating her need and desire to create her as an imaginary addressee of
things that were hidden deep down in her heart and had to be expressed in the
narrative form of the epistolary novel. As revealed in one of her letters to Rodin,
the idea to create Julie as her imaginary confidante occurred to John after reading
Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’, a novel that made a great impression on her. John’s letters —
addressed to Julie, but written for Rodin — create a maze wherein the distinctions
of first, second and third persons are blurred. And this maze becomes even more
chaotic by the fact that Gwen John signed her letters to Rodin and Julie as Marie,
the middle name of Gwendolen Mary John, which had actually become her first
name for Rodin and his circle. Rodin knew John as Marie; he would even send her
wishes on her name day as their correspondence reveals. When writing to Rodin,
John recognized and signed herself as Marie, she even took joy in the idea of hav-
ing a name day: ‘You could not have imagined my Master anything more comfort-
ing and sweet and charming for me than to have greeted me for my name day. It
is so charming and exquisite! (I didn’t know I had a name day. You know, we don’t
have this in England) (MGJ/BJ5/15-8-1910)
Marie was then her name for Rodin and his circle and Mary the name she used
in her brief correspondence with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. At the same time
however, John would sign all her letters to friends and family in the UK as Gwen.
As Israel (1999) has commented: ‘a name denotes a subject in a story and masks
other names and narratives (p.â•›6). There is indeed a playful relation between nomi-
nation and narration in John’s letters creating a field of narrative forces, ‘I sense in
myself a force that I can talk about’, wherein many epistolary figures emerge and
move along different subject positions of the correspondence: Gwen the artist,
Marie as Rodin’s model and lover, and Marie as Julie’s sister, Rodin as her lover and
mentor and Rodin as the recipient of Julie’s letters. Rodin as the primary ‘you’ of
Marie’s letters becomes Julie, an imaginary ‘you’ for Marie but also a third person
for the writer and reader of the letters. Rodin as a third person ‘he’ in Julie’s letters,
is actually the ‘you’ of the addresser. Marie the sister, as the addresser of Julie’s let-
ters is also a third person ‘she’ for Gwen the artist. The order in the logic of sense of
John’s letters has been irrevocably shattered but it is losing or rather dispersing the
self in this maze of addressers and addresses that John comes closer to pure com-
munication. As put in the letter above: ‘When I think that it is to you that I write
Julie, I am more daring than if I was told that it is my Master who will see my letter.’
This might seem as a paradox: losing the self to reach the other. Multiplicities and
dispersions therefore create a third eye or maybe what Deleuze (2001) perceives as
a ‘fourth person singular’, ‘the always displaced aleatory point’ of the language of
the pure event (p.â•›160).
Broken narratives, visual forces
John lived in a world of fragmented debris: the unbearable exuberance of the bo-
hemian circles in London, the Slade influence and the imperative of becoming a
84 Maria Tamboukou
professional artist, the imaginary of the Parisian escape, the harsh reality of work-
ing as a model, the force and passion of unconditional love, the difficulties of being
an alien in language within a terra incognita. Her letters and paintings respond to
rather than represent these conditions; they refer to a life that passes through her
rather than a life that leaves a mark on her as a subject that she should be. It is for
this reason that John is not reducible to the contents of her letters and any biogra-
phy based on them is inherently fraught with difficulties. Her letters however can
be the expression of a life as an experiment, a becoming other. Their overall effect
is usually inconsistent, non-sequential, and irresolute. John’s letters and paintings
create an assemblage, a machine of broken narratives and visual forces, a plane for
the emission of signs and for encounters between words and images.
In this light, John’s archive becomes an event acting on several important
themes: nomadic existence as a challenge to identity, epistolary narratability as a
mode of expression of the will to solitude, art as a way of life, virtual forces inher-
ing in actual encounters, haecceities disrupting the flow of linear time. Conceived
as events, John’s letters and paintings respond to the Leibnizian problem of how
the sealed monads that have neither door nor window’ can possibly communi-
cate. (Deleuze, 2000, p.â•›163) It is — in Deleuze’s commentary — by enveloping
the whole world and unfolding their own viewpoints that monads ‘set up among
their solitudes a spontaneous correspondence.’ (p.â•›164) John’s letters and paintings
express her world and it is through the unfolding of broken narratives and visual
forces that lines of communication among solitudes are being created, then and
now. What is interesting in tracing these lines is not accessing any kind of truth
around the subject but rather the possibility of working within their narrative ma-
chine, exploring its modes of operation, tracing signs of events, entering a new
image of thought about reaching the other, doing art, becoming a woman.
Archival sources
National Library of Wales, Archives, Gwen John’s papers (NLW MS)

Rodin Museum, Marie Gwendolen John’s boxes (MR\MGJ)
References
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Chadwick, W. (1990). Women, art and society. London: Thames and Hudson.
Chitty, S. (1987). Gwen John. New York: Franklin Watts.
Colebrook, C. (2002). Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge.
Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations (M. Joughin, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University
Press. (Original work published 1990).
Deleuze, G. (2000). Proust and the signs (R. Howard, Trans.). Minneapolis MN: University of
Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1964).
Deleuze, G. (2001). The logic of sense (M. Lester, Trans.). London: Continuum. (Original work
published, 1969).
Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2002). Dialogues II (H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, Trans.). Lon-
don: Continuum. (Original work published 1977).
Deleuze, G. (2003). Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation (D.W. Smith, Trans.). London: Con-
tinuum. (Original work published 1981).
Deleuze, G. (2004). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). London: Continuum. (Original
work published 1968).
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1984). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M.
Seem, & H.R.R. Lane, Trans.). London: Athlone Press. (Original work published 1972).
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sumi, Trans.). London: Athlone Press. (Original work published 1980).
Derrida, J. (1987). The postcard: From Socrates to Freud and beyond (A. Bass, Trans.). Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1980).
Foster, A. (1999). Gwen John. London: Tate Gallery Publishing.
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ory, practice: Selective essays and interviews (pp.â•›29–52). Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.
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sity Press.
Jenkins, D.F., & Stephens, C. (Eds.). (2004). Gwen John and Augustus John. London: Tate Gallery
Publishing.
Langdale, C. (1987). Gwen John: With a catalogue raisonné of the paintings and a selection of the
drawings. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Langdale, C., & Jenkins, D. (1985). Gwen John: An interior life. New York, NY: Rizzoli.
Lloyd Morgan, C. (2004). Gwen John: Letters and notebooks. London: Tate Gallery Publishing in
association with the National Library of Wales.
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(R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). London: Penguin. (Original work published 1895).
Perry, G. (1995). Women artists and the Parisian avant-garde. Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press.
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(pp.â•›186–204). Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.
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Taubman, M. (1985). Gwen John: The artist and her work. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Chapter 6
Artists-in-progress
Narrative identity of the self as another
Linda Sandino
Camberwell College of Arts, Victoria & Albert Museum
Following Paul Ricoeur’s formulation of narrative identity as the dialectic of

sameness (idem-) and change (ipse-)identity, this chapter explores the trope of
incompleteness in extracts from two artists’ life stories to suggest that the syn-
thesizing totality of the life history is continually interrupted, or broken, by ac-
counts of new creative directions and the search for symbolic expression which
mark the ipse-identity of the artist’s selfhood. A coherent identity does not just
refer to the singularity of that self but must also contend with the ascription of
‘artist’, the historical and cultural contingency of which is made manifest in the
testimony of the life stories. Rather than seeing narrative emplotment leading
towards a culmination or conclusion [“I became an artist”], narrative consti-
tutes the means whereby the ‘discordant concordance’ of the temporal aporia
of becoming and being an artist is enabled via the reflective ipseity that marks
narrative identity’s fractures and disruptions.
Keywords: artists, narrative identity, affinity, Ricoeur
Introduction
This chapter draws on life stories of applied artists undertaken as part of an oral
history project,1 focusing in particular on two ceramicists: one who works within
a functional tradition, and another whose work is abstract. The project provides
1.â•‡ VIVA [Voices in the Visual Arts] oral history project is the author’s on-going research project
based at the University of the Arts London, following on from life history recordings held at The
British Library National Sound Archive http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/nlsc.html
for Artists’ Lives, Architects’ Lives, An Oral History of British Fashion, and Craft Lives. VIVA
consists of life history interviews with a small number of practitioners in the visual arts whose
professional practices includes painting, graphic design and branding, publishing, ceramics, cu-
ratorial practice, art writing and criticism. For more information see http://www.vivavoices.org.
88 Linda Sandino
the occasion for the artists to reflect on their past, and like all historical narra-
tives, “Rethinking has to be a way of annulling temporal distance” (Ricoeur, 1988,
p.â•›146), a means of closing the gap between the self-that-was, the speaking, current
self, and the projected self. Life stories occupy a position between autobiography
and biography in that they are assisted narratives, the product of an interaction
between interviewer and interviewee who engage in a quasi-conversation where
one tries to understand the other. From the very outset, the adventure is shaped
as a quest in search of a totality (the life), which the dialogic structure subverts by
questions, observations, comments. To record life stories means to engage with
others, and “an abandonment of the self in a quest to enter the world of anoth-
er” (Andrews, 2007, p.â•›15). A text that is created from this encounter, supposedly
the life of the artist’s self becomes nevertheless an account of encounters with the
world (people, objects, artworks) that show how identity created in narrative (nar-
rative identity) is always in process and incomplete.
The two examples below provide an opportunity for seeing narrative at work
in artists’ life histories as the means whereby narratives about their objects are,
for artists, narratives of identity; to talk about the work is to talk about the self.
The two accounts are not presented as privileged representations of the authorial
voice, nor am I endorsing “the core assumptions of the interview society” which,
as has been argued, assumes that personal narratives provide “uniquely privileged
means of access to biographically grounded experiences and meaning” (Atkinson
& Silverman, 1997, p.â•›304). My aim is rather to show how the presumed coherent
identity of artists is subject to breaks and re-fraction in stories about encounters
with others. Rather than the autonomous, creative individual, these extracts show
how artists are situated in a network of relationships with things and people that
configure the stories they are able to tell about themselves as artists, as selves that
are relational, in terms of others, and in terms of themselves as other in narrative
(Ricoeur, 1992). Although the figure of Artist can be said to provide the overall
plot which brings the narrative together, the artist-self is never complete and it is
in encounters with others in and through their works that the project of becoming
an artist is achieved, but not completed.
Fits and Starts
In his account of an artist’s inability to progress meaningfully in his life story, Mark
Freeman (2004) has proposed the concept of ‘narrative foreclosure’. As a mature
artist, Freeman’s subject has so internalized cultural scripts about ageing and what
Chapter 6.â•‡ Artists-in-progress 89
it means to be an artist that he cannot continue as before.2 Echoing Ricoeur’s em-

plotment as synthesis, Freeman’s study is extremely helpful in thinking about art-
ists’ life narratives ‘fit’, ‘understood as that measure of consonance which derives
from the retrospective ordering of a life and its ability to be figured into a ‘plot’
(p.â•›81). Art History also provides a plot with ‘canonical characters’ (Bruner, 1986,
p.â•›66) which, for Freeman’s subject (‘Samuel’) has been disrupted by postmodern-
ism’s challenge to the linear development of modernist art production. Added to
the fact of his ageing, Samuel’s story is “stuck”. However, this narrative of an artist
unable to move forward is a familiar one throughout artists’ lives and not unique
to older artists. Making art is a constant project, and there is no conclusion or sig-
nificant ending except in the finishing of actual works, ready to be exhibited, and
sometimes not even then.3 Samuel’s history, according to Freeman, is “less charac-
terized by a series of meaningful episodes than be a series of fits and starts” (p.â•›87).
This, I would argue, is the danger of adhering to the sense of an ending; fictions
may have endings but in life histories plots can more fruitfully be thought of in
terms of plotting, points in the journey of becoming. The spatiality of the mapping
metaphor might also provide a way for understanding points of reference in a less
linear way, while not abandoning the overall sense of meeting points, junctures,
cross roads, which mark out life histories’ encounters (to be developed elsewhere).
The theoretical focus of this paper aims, however, to explore the dialectic of idem
and ipse identity, of sameness disrupted by the ‘fits and starts’ of the otherness of
the other, by drawing on some aspects of the work of Paul Ricoeur.
Narrative Identity
As noted, all life narratives contain stories not just about the self but also about
other people and things. By showing how when speaking about and referring to
the self, different pronouns are used, Ricoeur proposes the concept of narrative
identity, created in a dialectic between a constant self articulated as ‘I’, and a self
capable of change (Dauenhauer, 2005; Reagan, 1996; Ricoeur, 1988, 1992). The re-
flective self is constructed in narrative, through
2.â•‡ ‘Samuel’ was one of the artists who were part of a large research project at The School of the
Art Institute of Chicago. Freeman explored these case studies in Finding the Muse: A Sociopsy-
chological Inquiry the Conditions of Artistic Creativity, New York and Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1993.
3.â•‡ Artworks are also often ‘incomplete’ despite being exhibited, as for instance in the work Brit-
ish Pop Artist, Peter Blake. See my life history recording with him Tape 8 F13771A, The British
Library National Sound Archive http://cadensa.bl.uk/uhtbin/cgisirsi/vFMs6fn8Gd/32140042/9.
90 Linda Sandino
the interconnection of events constituted by emplotment [that] allows us to in-

tegrate with permanence in time what seems to be its contrary in the domain
of sameness-identity, namely diversity, variability, discontinuity, and instability.
(1992, p.â•›140)
Life history narratives, therefore, provide the occasion for an account in which the
‘I’ of the narrator is constant but in which events and encounters are the occasions
for actions which initiate and articulate change in the narrator’s self and his/her
work which stands for the artist’s self but is recounted as a reflexive disassocia-
tion in which the ‘I’ is othered as the self. Significant others, or the characters that
appear in the emplotment, or I would prefer, plotting or mapping of the life his-
tory function to reinforce the narrator’s ‘I’, but also to signal both transformations,
and reinforcements of identity: “Recognizing oneself in contributes to recognizing
oneself by’â†œ”(1992, p.â•›121).
Ricoeur’s conception of the dialectic of idem- and ipse-identity as set out in
Oneself as Another (1992) is especially useful in understanding artists’ life histo-
ries.4 Artists are consistently identified through their work; it is common to talk
of them being ‘known’ for a particular body of work. Damien Hirst, we might say
is ‘known’ for his shark in formaldehyde (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the
Mind of Someone Living, 1991). Conversely, when referring to the artwork, people
typically name the artist instead of the work, as in “Did you see the Hirst?” This is
not just a shorthand reference but evidence of how artists and their artworks are
combined, fused together; they signify each other. In 2007 Hirst created For the
Love of God, a diamond encrusted platinum cast of an 18th century skull. “Have
you seen Hirst’s skull?” was then the question people asked each other. Satisfying
the demand for continual, outrageous, and dramatic reinvention, the synecdoche
of a Hirst and the Hirst conflate person, artist, and work, a totality that narrative is
able to break apart and ‘bridge’ (a metaphor Ricoeur uses frequently).
Ricoeur’s definition of character is also helpful in unpacking the problematic of
artists’ selfhood since it is “the set of lasting dispositions by which a person is rec-
ognized” (1992, p.â•›121). These dispositions are two-fold: one is habit, which “gives
a history to a character… a history in which sedimentation tends to cover over the
innovation which preceded it”. The other is trait, “a distinctive sign by which a per-
son is recognized, reidentified as the same” (p.â•›121). How does this contribute to
understanding artists’ identity? If habit is history, then one could argue that it con-
tributes to the consistency of the attribution of ‘artist’ while trait identifies the signs
by which we recognize the artist’s work and person. However, Ricoeur goes on to
4.â•‡ The term ‘artist’ is used here to denote practitioners in the graphic and plastic arts. Although
the paper focuses on ceramic artists, Ricoeur’s thesis can be applied equally to creative practi-
tioners across the arts.
propose that character can nevertheless be subject to reinterpretation through “ac-

quired dispositions”, such as “values, norms, ideals, models, and heroes, in which
the person … recognizes” him/herself and which become traits by which the per-
son can be recognized by (p.â•›121). The identifying reference with heroic figures, he
suggests, is therefore also identifying with a set of values that lead to loyalty to a
“cause” (Art) and this fidelity leads towards “maintaining the self ”. For Ricoeur this
is an important congruence or concordance between ipse and idem identity, the
moment at which trait and habit meet. However, he is not clear at what points in
a life history narrative this occurs, and I would like to suggest that the acquisition
of traits are not always moments of coherence in narrative, that stories of affinities
can be about affirmation but can also resist narrative coherence.
Ricoeur proposes that narrative emplotment is “the synthesis of heteroge-
neous elements” that is able to bring together and make sense of the “discordant
concordance” of temporality, of a life’s experiences, and turn it into a comprehen-
sible story (Ricoeur, 1988, 1991); both the creation of the narrative, and reading or
hearing it are sense-making, explanatory activities. As Ricoeur neatly summarizes
it: “To explain why something happened and to explain what happened coincide.
A narrative that fails to explain is less than a narrative. Narrative that does explain
is pure, plain narrative” (1985, p.â•›148). Explanation provides meaning and, there-
fore, coherence, but as I demonstrate below, the emplotment of the character of
the artist is made up of ‘fits and starts’ rather than describing a coherent, stable
selfhood.
Artists Stories of Self and Others
The convention of the Artist’s Statement is a well-established genre. Such docu-

ments usually begin with the phrase “My work is about…”. In no other profession
is there such constant demand for a declaration that, in effect, conjoins subject
and object. Moreover, the increasing pressure to communicate with the public,
to make the visual arts accessible and meaningful is becoming an ever more im-
portant skill for artists to acquire and as such it forms part of their training with
inevitable consequences for artists’ narratives as they constantly articulate self as
another, person/subject and artist/object. Artists, therefore, are acutely conscious
of themselves in the third person of their work. To paraphrase the statement: “My
work is me; it signifies my self ”. In artists’ life narrarives, the making and mean-
ing of work often provide the plots along which much of the adult life stories are
mapped.
Ricoeur’s proposition of the three-fold mimesis of narrative: prefiguration,
configuration and refiguration (Ricoeur, 1985) is helpful in unpacking the function
92 Linda Sandino
of life stories. Briefly, prefiguration is the competence we bring to a narrative that

enables us to understand it as a story and to know what the appropriate ques-
tions are such as: Who, What, How, Why? Refiguration is “the intersection of the
world of the text and the world of the reader or hearer” (Ricoeur quoted in Simms,
2003, p.â•›85), and makes the narrative meaningful for the reader/listener. In be-
tween these two figurations lies configuration, or emplotment that synthesises the
“heterogeneous elements” into a totality — most easily grasped in terms of the
novel, more problematic when addressing ‘real’ life histories. In life history work,
the narrator must grapple with all three mimetic registers at once: the knowledge
of elements which might constitute a life story and an artist’s life story, the ability
to gather together, to remember the “heterogeneous elements” of the life, and to
make sense at the point of refiguration, rather than at the point of configuration
which in the told life story is more a matter of bricolage. Consequently, in life nar-
ratives the subject “appears both as a reader and the writer of its own life” (Ricoeur,
1988, p.â•›246).
The theory can also be extended, to encompass the layers of arts production
and reception, not just the artwork-as-artist synthesis of narrative identity. All art-
works embody the hidden narratives of their conception and making (which these
interviews below draw out). Looking at, or rather ‘reading’ other’s artworks, is
the refiguration that drives the creation of artworks as well as the re-creation and
re-reading of artworks over time. Making an artwork is a process of configuration
through the prefigured knowledge of arts practices, but its meaning (refiguration)
is never stable but always alive to reinterpretation especially in the life stories.
Furthermore, refiguration is also the process which leads to the conception and
production of other, new, different objects/stories.5 These new objects neverthe-
less bear the characteristics of their makers but not their totality, which the stories
either reinforce, or break up. As the following sections below suggest, narratives
of affinities may be used to reinforce identity (of the work and the self), but they
can also function to resist narrative completeness and to uphold the cultural dis-
tinction between words and things. Both artists work in the same medium (clay),
and were fellow students at Camberwell College of Arts in the mid-1970s, a school
with a distinguished history in the field of ceramic art but which also produced
some notable ‘potters’ whose work does not claim the status of ‘art’ but leans to-
wards the aesthetics of use most clearly propounded in Oriental ceramics seen
as outdated, even reactionary, by the majority of the emerging generation of the
1970s and 1980s. However, as the first example below demonstrates not all stu-
dents were prepared to reject functionalism. Complementing each other in time
and place (and gender, though this is not my focus here) these two life histories
5.â•‡ I am grateful to Matti Hyvärinen for suggesting this line of inquiry.

shed light on how the symbiosis of the artist/self and work as art/pottery/ceramic
is unpacked in narrative.6
Towards Completeness
The first extract is a segment within a life history, a turning point for the artist, Ju-
lian Stair7 as a student at the Royal College of Art in London who had been strug-
gling to locate his position as a functional potter in opposition to the dominant
abstract forms of expression not only of his fellow students, but of the ceramic art
world in general (Harrod, 1999; Sandino, 2007). The story concerns a visit in the
mid-1970s to the studio of an important figure in the world of ceramic art. The
visit was, he says “really interesting”, a “great chance to meet Lucie Rie for the first
time, to see her studio, to hear her talking about her pots”. These comments are
the standard evaluation of such student trips. However, he goes on to describe “a
kind of epiphany”, or “very strong insight” on seeing the work of another ceramic
artist who was very much a figurehead to the abstractionists, a point emphasized
in the story. Moving from the abstract of the story, and its orientation, Stair pro-
vides an evaluation of Hans Coper: “[He] broke with the notion of potmaking,
and introduced the whole idea of collage and sculptural forms”; he was “a mentor
behind all the RCA [Royal College of Art] graduates … who were in full swing at
the time”, “but I realized that that wasn’t necessarily a simple kind of case as it was
being portrayed” (JS Track 14/2006). The resolution of the story, is the description
of seeing Coper’s work in Rie’s studio full of red tulips:
In many ways it was an absolute reinforcement of the pot not just as a vessel, as a
container, in a theoretical or abstract sense but literally as a practical container for
flowers …
You had wonderfully interesting forms which were incredibly, kind of reso-
nant, and made references through to, to all, you know, to history, and to the be-
ginnings of European art with the Cycladic forms in particular. But were terribly
6.â•‡ ‘Artist’ is used here to include all arts practice especially since both Radstone and Stair both
attended art college, the principal means by which professional status is initially instituted. Oth-
er terms used can specify material specialisms e.g. ceramicisit, ceramic artist. Although there
are other current terms such as ‘maker’ and ‘practitioner’, the interviewees refer to themselves as
artists and only very occasionally as ceramcists, or ceramic artist, rarely if at all as practitioners
or makers. This will be the subject of another paper.
7.â•‡ Julian Stair is a British ceramicist whose work is in many public collections. See http://www.
julianstair.com As a former student of ceramics at Camberwell College of Arts, he has taken part
in the viva oral history project http://www.vivavoices.org, at the University of the Arts London,
Camberwell College of Art. All the interviews have been conducted by the author.
94 Linda Sandino
modern and were still pots but were also formally incredibly interesting. So that
was, was a mini-epiphany, if you like, to show that pots can actually have, can
combine, if you like, all the kind of, the classic virtues but transposed into a mod-
ern and contemporary interpretation and still work in the domestic environment.
So that, that was something that really has stayed with me ever since. (JS/Track
14/2006) (Emphasis added)
This emphatic account is an example of the refiguration that can occur for artists
on seeing significant works which make a lasting impression but whose meaning
is made manifest through configuration since the narrator is both author and
interpreter. Despite the story’s resolution focusing on the meaning of the pot,
for Stair Coper is reconfigured, or re-identified, able to “combine” “classic” and
modern “virtues”. No longer outside the “full swing” of the time, the story func-
tions to connect Stair to one of the key figures of ceramic history in which the
distinction and hierarchy between the functional and domestic potter, and the
art and abstractionist ceramic artist is critical. The conflicting dualism of func-
tion versus abstraction is resolved but more importantly the significance of the
resolution is made manifest through refiguration without which it would have
remained simply a mental image or memory. Narrative subverts the opposition
between image and word, but not simply as an illustration or caption, but as the
intersection where meaning is produced, here through the reconfiguration of the
pot as both artwork and domestic object, and the ‘I’ as both functional potter and
conceptual artist.
As a young practitioner, unable to fully identify with the dominant ideology,
yet aware of its cultural power, Stair uses this story of a “kind of epiphany” to mark
the point that is able to bridge two seemingly opposing art historical categories, or,
in Ricoeur’s terms, traits, which up until that point had functioned to threaten the
artist’s identity as a maker of significant, contemporary work. The studio visit story
presents the artist with an image (artwork as vase) that resolves the incomplete
identity of a maker working in a traditional ceramic idiom but who felt himself to
be part of the new, contemporary world of ceramic art practice. It may also be of
some significance that at the time, its most successful, emerging practitioners were
women. The impact of the visit as something that has “stayed with me ever since”
becomes a defining trait of this artist’s work.
Epiphanies, as Norman K. Denzin has noted, are “connected to moments of
breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration or schism” ( 2001, p.â•›39). This studio visit
story seems to fit in Denzin’s terms a “minor epiphany, which symbolically rep-
resents a major, problematic moment… in a person’s life” (1989, p.â•›71) which for
Stair was about how to resolve the duality of art and utility. Denzin suggests that a
major epiphany is one, which “which touches every fabric of a person’s life” (p.â•›71),
and common sense might dictate that this studio visit cannot fit this description.
However, at the end of the story, Stair states that the image of this resolution was
“something that has stayed with me ever since”. Given the synthesis of self and
work, it could be argued that this is, indeed, a major event, which has enabled the
artist to conjoin an incomplete narrative identity of the object, into a coherent,
anti-dualism where utility and art can meet. The studio visit story, therefore, is one
example of how an incomplete narrative identity is refigured through an epiphanic
encounter with an object and its maker. This story is particularly important in un-
derstanding how narrative identity is deployed by an artist to create coherence, in
the face of the art world’s consistency in maintaining its binary oppositions.
Towards Incompleteness
The second account by the ceramic artist Sara Radstone8 who is of the same gen-
eration as Stair, reinforces the concept of interactional refiguration, which inter-
mingles the self, the other’s self, and the work. I draw here on more than one
episode in the life story interview to demonstrate further how objects and the lives
of other artists can confront and disrupt the narrative flow of artists’ sameness-
identity. While the minor epiphany story above functioned to heal the schism, the
transformational moments recounted below demonstrate the resistance to coher-
ence in artists’ talk and yet shows how it is nevertheless revealed in narrative. If
Stair’s story is evidence of the artist’s search for the coherent expression over time
of idem-identity, Radstone’s account below demonstrates the tentative reflection
of a narrative identity-in-process in which the narrative itself remains incomplete
and partial as different ‘canonical characters’ appear in Radstone’s stories.
The extract is from a section of the recording focusing on what drew her to
the work of Eva Hesse, a question she counters by saying she will find it “hard to
articulate precisely” but then continues by situating it historically, in the past, at a
moment when she was “going through a phase of finding my work quite difficult”
during the mid to late 1980s. The artist describes being “introduced” to Hesse’s
work by a sculptor who suggested: “â†œ‘… you ought to look at this work’ and lent me
a book, and I immediately felt quite sort of overwhelmingly drawn to the work that
I could see, and reading a bit about her” (SR Track 19/2006). Hesse was therefore
encountered through multiple sites through the work and her life in the text.
8.â•‡ Sara Radstone is a ceramic artist whose work is also represented in many public collections.
See http://www.stubbs24.fsnet.co.uk/ She was a contemporary of Julian Stair at Camberwell
College of Arts, and a contributor to the vivia oral history project http://www.vivavoices.org, at
the University of the Arts London, Camberwell College of Art.
96 Linda Sandino
In relation to the interpretation of reading literary texts, Ricoeur proposes

three dimensions: referentiality, which is the mediation between the individual
and the world, communicability as that between individuals, and self-understand-
ing as that between an individual and him/herself (1991, p.â•›27). Ricoeur is ada-
mant in his commitment to narrative as emplotment, or configuration, but artists’
accounts show how the reception of artworks and their producers are also subject
to these three dimensions. As noted above, refiguration, the point at which the
reader’s, or viewer’s world is brought to bear on the understanding of the text/
work, is embedded in these stories about Hesse and her works. Reading or viewing
these is transformed “into a guide for reading, with its zones of indeterminacy, its
latent wealth of interpretation, its power of being reinterpreted in new ways in new
historical contexts” (p.â•›27).
Continuing with her reflection as to what it was about Hesse’s work that en-
gaged her so, the artist continues:
I think, I think it’s slightly to do with a sense of still being tentative. That there was
something about a lot of the work that she made that had evidence of struggling to
get at something rather than any sense of “Right. This is resolved”. That was a very
personal interpretation which may be completely wrong but the wonderful sense
of the absurdity, in a way, of the objects, seemed to bring me back to questioning
what, in a sense, I was trying to do in my work and what it was all about, I guess.
(SR Track 19/2006). (Emphasis added)
The character of Hesse provides a plot with which Radstone is able to identify and
to tell her own story. Although this is more commonly simply described as empa-
thy, this term shuts down narrativity by focusing only on the emotion of empathy,
rather than its narrative. Rather Hesse provides the artist with the opportunity to
reconfigure her difficulties as an abstract artist, to move on from work that was at
the time “a bit tight and contrived” (Track 19).
More than just looking at Hesse’s work, and reading her writings, Radstone
remembers being struck by
…a particular sentence about trying to achieve a kind of non-form which struck
a chord with me incredibly deeply even though on the surface it sounds like the op-
posite of what I’ve been trying to do, because my work was all about form and trying
to get it right but it made me realize that actually there was something beyond that I
was trying to do that I wanted to achieve which was about being right on the edge,
and getting to something that was only just something, which I felt was what she
was trying to do. And, about dipping into an imaginative and interior world that
you can only do by really getting around the edge of things and being suggestive and
not overt and work that’s very sort of physical and provokes a certain kind of, how
can I describe it? A sort of very physical response, I suppose, in a particular way.
(SR Track 19/2006) (Emphasis added)
The reference to form is particularly important here because it marks the begin-
ning of narrative incompleteness in that it begins to make manifest Radstone’s
wish to escape the definitive, the categorical conclusiveness of form, the wish to
get “something that was only just something”. It is also a compelling example of
encountering sameness in difference: “the opposite of what I’ve been trying to do”,
and the continual project that is art production. As a story of interaction of the
world of the text with the world of the reader, this extract articulates how words
and images mediate between art-as-thinking and art-as-practice. Out of this en-
counter, Radstone is able to pursue a visual and imaginative dialogue “lived in the
mode of the imaginary” as Ricoeur so aptly describes it (1991, p.â•›27). The artist’s
interest in Hesse is always in a position of creative interaction; it is not fixed and
finite. Just as this interaction is maintained over time, the artist’s inter-subjective
identification with Hesse as a female artist also continues over time. Reading
Hesse’s autobiographical writings prompted this observation:
And there might have been something about reading her writings a bit as well and
knowing her troughs of insecurity that she went through, and it was reassuring to
see the work and that sort of tremendous incredible ideas that were coming out
of that lack of confidence very often as much as that sort of sureness I could see
around in a lot of other artists… (SR Track 19/2006).
Although such “troughs of insecurity” are evident in male artist life histories
(Freeman, 1993a; Mishler, 1999), in this story it becomes contrasted specifically
with an aesthetic “of sureness” associated with the later work of Catalan artist An-
tonio Tapiès (which forms part of the earlier section in the recording describing
the space of one of her studios). On being pressed to explain why her interest in
Tapiès’ work had diminished, and despite not wanting to disparage him/his work,
Radstone searches for the reason:
I think I find his work a bit too studied, and a bit contrived now. I think its….oh,
it’s hard to explain. Something about it that jars with me these days whenever I see
it. I don’t feel it’s quite as true as I used to think it was, or… oh, it just seems… It’s
hard to put into words, that feeling. I feel it’s a little bit mass-produced [laughs].
Not quite true to what it was… (SR Track 14/2006).
Interestingly what Ricoeur refers to as ‘aiming at the “good life” with and for others,
in just institutions’ (1992, p.â•›172) is extended here into the arts not in terms of be-
ing avant-garde and original but as evidence of work that maintains its meaning-
fulness as art by not being mass-produced when that has not been Tapiès method,
(unlike say, Andy Warhol whose tools and concepts drew on the means and mean-
ings of mass-production and popular culture). The hackneyed phrase in life and
art of the injunction to be ‘true to myself ’ is evidence of the intersection of idem-
identity and ipse-identity since it articulates the moment at which the possibility
98 Linda Sandino
of self as another or as the constant ‘I’ is pronounced. Hesse functions to articulate

a becoming self, whereas Tapiès works are used to show the problem of an inau-
thentic artistic production.
Resisting Completeness
As noted above it was the “incredible ideas” coming out of insecurity that was
noteworthy, which led to the attempt to translate things into words by focusing
on the impact of one particular work by Hesse titled ‘Hang Up’, described by Rad-
stone as “one of the most incredible pieces of art I think that’s ever been made
really. It’s just absolutely staggering… Through its incredible simplicity, it makes
me feel that it sums up so much of what abstract art practice is about” (SR Track
19/2006). However, as she reiterates throughout this section: “It’s very hard to
put into words”. Towards the end of the recording, in which the discussion about
Hesse has turned briefly to the interest in archaeological books also kept in the
studio, Radstone sums up the importance of seeing objects which “seem to have
a profound meaning and reason for being” and remind her “that there’s a point
to what I’m doing” (SR Track 19/2006). So, of course I ask “What is the point?”, a
question which invites an examination of the ‘who’ Radstone is an artist, and what
it means to make work with these particular traits (form-less abstraction). After
some laughter, her reply is:
Terrible question! I shouldn’t have said that. Oh. Well. I think what it always comes
back to is trying to express things that don’t have a language, a spoken language, re-
ally. So really it can’t be put into words but trying to express a sense of existence, or
a feeling, or just raise a question in an object. I’m always trying to make something
that would just have a [pause] possibly make someone walking past it then stop
and minute and look again, and think ‘What on earth is that?’ Or, enframe a little
bit of space and give it a substance it didn’t have before. But it’s all too kind of tenu-
ous to really put into words, somehow. But that point somehow keeps me going (SR
Track 19/2006). (Emphasis added)
I think it’s about trying to express a sense of a combination of extreme [pause] fra-
gility, tentativeness, and yet a kind of, [pause] sort of stoic structure and strength
at the same time. So the feeling that there’s a sort of element of existence that’s
[pause] about, sort of around that somehow. [pause] A little, a little, there’s a little
bit of space that’s surviving. Sounds mad. I mean whenever I try to put these
things into words, it sounds completely bonkers (SR Track 19/2006). (Emphases
added)
Phrases like “kind of ” or “sort of ” resurface continually in her description of her

artworks. They signify the resistance to narrative completeness, paralleled by
artwork that aims to just be, “to enframe a little bit of space”. Rather than deleting
these terms of approximation, they are integral to the narrative in its articula-
tion of an aesthetic of tentativeness. The fact that the artist sees this articulation
as “mad” and “bonkers” sustains the division. In reflecting on the work as a text
for self-understanding, coherence is resisted. This incompleteness is not, howev-
er, simply a desire to uphold the distinction between words and things, or that
artworks resist language altogether. There is no hesitation or tentativeness in the
description (the referential communicability) of ‘Hang Up’: it is composed of “a
frame with a big bit of wire coming out of the frame looping down almost to the
floor and then going back to the frame again”.
The device of the frame as enframing is key in that it works as a form of visual
configuration:
I love the fact that it’s, the work is the frame, which is something that fascinates
me. It fascinates me in terms of what ceramics is as well because you get, you
know, you make a hollow ceramic object, it’s as if the object is the frame, in a
strange sort of way, and the subject is inside and you can’t see it. I’ve always sort of
had this feeling about it. So she’s made this frame, which is kind of wrapped. So in
itself it’s a very kind of seductive object. There’s nothing as such inside it so it’s just
framing space and calling into question the whole nature of art. And then by put-
ting this eccentric wire thing coming out, it pushes that idea so much further be-
cause it makes the whole sculpture into that, you know, that frame is the sculpture.
And it’s looping out into the room saying “Come on”, come into it, and bringing
the whole space of the gallery, or wherever it is, around into it (SR Track 19/2006).
This above description is linked to actually seeing it for the first time at an exhibi-
tion rather than in a catalogue. As such it returns the artist to the experience of
being there emphasized by the use of the historic present tense. However, it also
indicates how artworks are constant even though their meanings may change.
Narrative identity, it is argued, is the sense-making capacity of life histories
(Eakin, 1999; Freeman, 1993b; McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2006; Plummer,
2001; Ricoeur, 1990, 1991) but as Radstone’s reflections on her work demonstrate,
her sense-making is to resist it. While remembering other artists’ works, coher-
ence is not avoided as she explains un-problematically her affinity with Hesse,
and the diminished relevance of Tapiès. The narrative identity produced here at
the intersection of idem and ipse-identity is one that adheres to an incomplete-
ness through narrative, the constancy of sameness achieved by narrative break-
down. The story of the encounter with the work and personhood of Eva Hesse
can be seen as enabling narrative; in talking about one (or several artists), who
have appeared as characters in her life, Radstone produces a narrative identity of
sameness and change. The Hesse story also functions as a relational story of narra-
tive identity. It recounts the narrator’s sense of a consistent ‘good’ artistic identity
100 Linda Sandino
demonstrating the conflation between self and work in which the self-as-artist is
articulated as the self-as-other.
Towards a Conclusion
Life stories, as the studio visit story demonstrates, are used to open up the con-
genital silence of objects in order to make sense of their meanings, not just to lis-
teners but also to the artist-narrator. Makers of functional work can use language
to expand the aesthetic dimension of their objects and resolve a conflicted identity.
As they appear in the life stories, other artists/works perform an important work
of referentiality whereby narrators are able to make sense of their place and their
work by reference to another’s, achieved within the context of the life story where
sense is made of the self and his/her actions through the configuration of episodic
narratives which enable a form of temporal reflexivity absent from the Artist’s
Statement or manifesto.
Another outcome of these stories is that they provide a way of unpacking the
linear projection of the idea of ‘influence’. Stories about others provide a commu-
nicative referentiality that situates the individual artist within a community that
makes certain stories possible, one of which is about what it means to be an Artist
and identified as such: it is not enough to ‘be’ one but to be recognized as one. De-
spite the historical and temporal gap between the narrators’ former selfhood and
others, the latter are used to articulate a relatively fixed ‘folk’ concept of the artist as
individualist. Folk psychology, as Bruner has argued is significant because it “me-
diates between the canonical world of culture and the more idiosyncratic world of
beliefs, desires, and hopes” (1990, p.â•›52). This is the psychologist’s perspective on
the changeable/unchangeable dialectic of ipse/idem identity.
In talking about other artists, narrators demonstrate the interactivity of char-
acters in their stories since, “Every character in a story of any complextity both acts
and is acted upon” (Dauenhauer, 2005, p.â•›12). This differs slightly from explaining
artists as part of their historical contexts, in that it focuses on how artists narrate
interaction with artworks and artists to make sense of themselves and their work.
Nor is it tantamount to reading the work through the causality of biographical
incidents. Narrative is the means by which the works ‘live’ in stories (to appropri-
ate Mallarmé) through the constitution of the artist’s ipse-identity, their narrative
identity. These stories of encounters with others document the changes effected
over time in self and artworks but are also stories of the I as ‘the same’ and the art-
ist’s self experienced through, in, and as other. Ricoeur suggests that this dialectic,
achieved in narrative, is how the self is ‘made’ through stories but it must be kept
in mind that identity narratives are always subject to re-tellings, and re-visions
thereby ensuring that identity narratives, like on-going life histories narratives are
never final but ever, like art, in process.
The trope of incompleteness is a fruitful addition to thinking through nar-
rative identity in relation to the problematic of life history interviews, which can
never be complete. They can only ‘stop’ or ‘pause’. Nor are the stories told within
the overall history totally realized or final: “the story of a life continues to be re-
figured by all the truthful or fictive stories a subject tells about him or herself ”
(Ricoeur, 1988, p.â•›246). Artists’ lives, bound up as they are with the lives of the
work they produce, are situated in a network of other works, other artists, recount-
ing a narrative identity where work and person are enmeshed with one another.
Ricoeur’s thesis of the dual aspect of identity made up of constancy and change
provides a way to unpack the ‘who?’ of artists’ life stories, the intersection of ipse
and idem identity as it is recounted in the interview. The prefigured character of
Artist is configured in the life story but is continually reconfigured through events,
actions, and encounters with others and objects.
Initially, my interest was in how stories about others functioned in artists’ life
narratives as tales of identity. As Bruner, in another context has noted: ‘Achieving
joint reference is achieving a kind of solidarity with someone’ (1986, p.â•›63). How
these allegiances are narrated, I realized, was a function of the two-fold character
of narrative identity, the dialectic of sameness and change proposed by Ricoeur.
However, emplotment can never ‘complete’ narratives of the self which are broken
up into the ‘fits and starts’ of description and reflection. The first example (Stair)
confirmed a moment of coherence experienced in the minor epiphany of seeing
another artist’s work. The second example (Radstone) demonstrated a resistance
to completeness that in some sense can be seen as maintaining the distinction
between art and language, but this only occurred in talk about her own work, not
that of others. This, as I have proposed, is because the project of being an artist is
always a work-in-progress.
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Chapter 7
Breaking of self-narrative as a means

of reorientation?
Vilma Hänninen and Anja Koski-Jännes

University of Kuopio, Finland / University of Tampere, Finland
Autobiographical texts written by “ordinary people” usually relate the life of the
author in a more or less linear, chronological order. In narrative psychology, a
coherent self-narrative is often celebrated as psychologically “good”. We suggest
that sometimes incoherence may be functional. The chapter focuses on a short
autobiographical text written by a middle-aged female artist “Anna” about her at-
tempts to quit drinking and smoking. Anna’s text does not proceed chronologi-
cally but mostly making loops backwards in time. No links of cause and effect
are narratively constructed. The flow of narration is repeatedly broken by ironic
remarks questioning the narrator’s ability to see her real motives. We suggest
that the author’s intent is to create an anti-narrative which would help her find
a personally convincing new self-narrative. Breaking the conventional narrative
structure serves as a psychological means to leave the past behind and yet to
avoid premature commitment to a new self-narrative.
Keywords: narrative, autobiography, coherence, chronology, addiction, recovery
Introduction
In the tradition of narrative psychology (e.g. Bruner, 1987; Crossley, 2000; Sar-
bin, 1986) it is customary to think that people have a natural or at least culturally
pervasive tendency to mentally organize their life by construing it as a linear, tem-
porally unfolding story in which they, as relatively unitary subjects, act as protago-
nists. By creating such a story of their life they also create their identity, thus this
story can be called the self-narrative (see e.g. Bruner, 1987; Polkinghorne, 1988,
pp.â•›105–107). The typical form of autobiography, a chronological rendition of the
author-narrator-protagonist’s life can be seen as an expression of this tendency
(e.g. Eakin, 1999, pp.â•›99–101). In recent years the idea that a temporal organiza-
tion of experience is psychologically or ethically superior has, however, been ques-
tioned (Strawson, 2004), evoking lively discussion about the matter (Phelan, 2005;
104 Vilma Hänninen and Anja Koski-Jännes
Battersby, 2006; Eakin 2006). The far ends of the debate are Eakin’s (1999, p.â•›124)
suggestion that “narrative disorders and identity disorders go hand in hand” and
Strawson’s (2004) “guess” that “the Narrative tendency to look for story or narra-
tive coherence in one’s life is, in general, a gross hindrance to self-understanding”.
While Strawson’s critique of narrative psychology can be seen as rather simplified,
it should in our view be taken as a serious reminder that the unstoried forms of
writing about one’s life deserve as full attention and respect as the storied ones.
In the tradition of literary autobiography, the conventional form of chronolog-
ical and linearly progressing rendition of one’s life has prevailed at least since the
appearance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions in the 18th century (see Ko-
sonen, 2000). Since the 1970s, however, some post-modernist authors have sought
to break these conventions (e.g. Barthes, 1975; Kosonen, 2000). However, as Jens
Brockmeier (2001) has noted, the “everyday forms of life accounts … are gener-
ally characterized by closed plots, a standardized repertoire of genres, and other
common narrative structures.” This assertion corresponds to our experiences of
reading autobiographical texts produced for research purposes.
Researchers who want to study life narratives of “ordinary people” tend to
seek relatively well-formed narratives as their data: they may select published au-
tobiographical narratives, they may send out a writing request asking people to
“write their story”, or ask their interviewees to tell the “story of their life”. And this
is more or less what they usually obtain — at least in our experience. Sometimes
it happens, however, that a research participant tells or writes about her life in a
non-canonical form. A researcher who has set out to find well-formed narratives
from the data is tempted to relegate a non-chronological text to the margins in
presenting her results. When she, however, starts to analyze an autobiography that
deviates from the typical characteristics of the genre she can, depending on her
level of commitment to the canons of narrative psychology, either see it as indicat-
ing some kind of abnormality or as a reminder that it can, after all, be quite normal
not to write, indeed not even to grasp one’s life, according to traditional narrative
conventions.
In narrative psychology, the self-narrative is seen as both a form of self-repre-
sentation and an instrument of self-understanding (to use the expression of Eakin,
2006).
According to our view, while the story a person tells about her life to others
(the told narrative) usually more or less reflects the way in which she mentally or-
ganizes it for herself (the ‘inner’ or private narrative), these two ‘sides of the coin’
are, nevertheless, different (see Hänninen, 2004). The concept of inner narrative
is adapted from Lev S. Vygotsky’s (Vygotsky, 1962, pp.â•›149–153) notion of ‘inner
speech’ which he sees as developing on the basis of outer speech but still differing
from it in terms of it’s mode of existence and its functions. Thus it is possible that a
Chapter 7.â•‡ Breaking of self-narrative as a means of reorientation? 105
person with a fully coherent inner narrative may write about her life in an experi-
menting fashion, or a person with just a hazy idea about how her life has come to
the current point may be able to tell about it in a superficially conventional way.
So there’s no one-to-one relation between the narrative text to the author’s inner
life (as e.g. Eakin, 1999, seems to suggest). In times of crisis and life change people
often undergo narrative reorientation (e.g. Frank, 1995; Hänninen 2004). Writing
about one’s life can be seen as an attempt to raise this process to a more conscious
and controlled level. Incoherence of the written text at this point may reflect both
the turmoil of the author’s inner life and her deliberate attempt to break the old
narrative in order to make space for a new one.
In this chapter we analyze an autobiographical text written in the context of
alcohol treatment. The text under scrutiny deviates in many ways from the typical
form of (lay) autobiographical text. Our aim is to understand the psychological
functions of this deviation in the context of addiction and recovery.
The background of our reflections in this chapter is our long-standing inter-
est in problems related to addiction and recovery, and the role of narratives in
the recovery process. Some years ago we studied the recovery stories of 51 me-
dia recruited people who had managed to quit their addictive behaviors and to
maintain the change at least three years. In their (mostly written) accounts we dis-
cerned five more or less consistent story types: ‘AA story’, ‘personal growth story’,
‘love story’, ‘codependence story’ and ‘mastery story’. (Hänninen & Koski-Jännes,
1999.)1 Since their authors had maintained sobriety on the average for about ten
years their stories reflected the solidified nature of their recovery. Typically they
described events that had taken place before, during and after the addiction in the
chronological order. A few stories deviated from this pattern, but these deviations
were mostly stylistic. We concluded that forming a coherent story which explained
the addiction and showed the way out could be seen as an essential part of the re-
covery process. This raised our interest in how these stories actually develop in the
course of desistance from addiction and what is their role in the change process.
In our next study we, therefore, tried to recruit people who had recently
sought help for their dependence problems and who had maintained the change
for less than six months (Hänninen & Koski-Jännes, 2004). The idea was to study
how these still unfolding stories would differ from the finished ones we had stud-
ied previously. Writing requests were delivered in treatment units for addictive
behaviors. Similarly to the previous study, the target persons were asked to write in
the third person about their addiction and attempts to recover. During the fifteen
months’ recruitment period we received only ten stories. This was in stark contrast
1.â•‡ About one fifth of the texts could not be fitted under any of these common story types and
only a couple of them did not have any narrative structure, being just lists or short statements.
to the previous study in which the volunteer participants’ response was immedi-
ate and enthusiastic. The difficulty of getting stories from people who were still in
the initial phase of change seems to display the difficulty of writing a story that is
under way and unfinished.
The ten stories we got could be divided into two groups. In the ‘resolved
stories’ the protagonist appeared as having found some kind of key to recovery,
whereas the ‘unresolved stories’ were more incoherent and contradictory, without
a clear plot or a sense of anticipated closure. The text we chose for closer scrutiny
in this chapter is an extreme example of the latter group. The writer of this text was
given the pseudonym Anna.
As the focus of our interest mainly lies in the clinical uses of narratives we tend
to read Anna’s essay not purely as a text but as an expression of a living person
sitting somewhere at her desk trying to grasp her life. This means that we read
the text intentionally (Abbott, 2002, pp.â•›95–97), trying to understand the actual
person behind the textual “Anna”.
The author and her text
Anna is a middle-aged female artist. She lives alone and has no children, but she
has an intimate relationship with a man who lives elsewhere. Anna has suffered
from both mental and physical illnesses and has had problems with both drinking
and smoking. Two weeks prior to writing her story, she had sought help for her
problems from an outpatient clinic for alcoholics. We’ll give Anna the opportunity
to introduce herself and her style of writing by quoting the passage in which she
mentions the social categories by which she can be described:
She is an intellectual or what is she. Unemployed, an artist or rather an amateur,
or perhaps a half-professional, or a jack-of all-trades in this field. Sick. Yes, and an
alcoholic, a nicotinist, a slave… (Lines 26–28).
Anna’s text consists of fourteen tightly filled pages (670 lines). Although it includes
references to events from her childhood up to the present, it is not a full life story
but rather an autobiographical essay.
The text consists of five types of passage. In addition to narration of events and
descriptions of Anna’s immediate surroundings, there are commentaries on many
levels, internal dialogues as well as reflections about her mental and physical state,
work, and social relations in different phases of her life. Moreover, depictions of
dreams and images take a considerable share of the text. The references to events
cover only about 40% of the text. The narrative is fragmented by mixing different
passage types as well as by continuously moving back and forth between different
points of time. There seems to be neither a clear beginning nor a clear end to the
story. The text remains ambivalent about the problems it set out to tackle with,
while at the same time it leaves the reader with a sense of surprise and admiration
due to its many astute observations about the author and the world around.
From a purely literary point of view Anna’s essay reveals remarkable talent in
verbal expression. It is full of poetic metaphors, intelligent comments about social
life and evocative descriptions of her mental states. Thus its unconventionality is
definitely not a result of the authors’ incompetence as a writer. However, the text
does not display high ambition in essay writing either. In between the gems of
thought the author describes her difficulties in writing and leaves the new starts
visible. Punctuation marks or paragraph divisions are often neglected. The text
gives the impression of not having been edited.
Anna also wrote another, shorter text on our request two years later than the
first one. We concentrate, however, on the main text.
Specific features of Anna’s writing
In the following, we analyse the ways in which Anna’s text was unusual as a piece
of autobiographical writing.
Transparency. The first thing to be noted about Anna’s text is its transparency
of writing process. Instead of leaving the frames of writing invisible, which is usual
in lay autobiographies, Anna writes about them explicitly. She depicts the physical
surroundings (her home) and the historical context (around 9/11, 2003) of her
writing. She is also explicit about her idea of the addressees and the purposes of
her writing. She tells that she’s writing to us as researchers, on our request, but also
for herself, for the purpose of her own self-understanding. She asks herself what
she wants “to tell the researchers who try to find ways to alleviate addiction, who
want to find the essence of dependence?” (lines 174–175). Later on she tells that
she “tries to find the plot of her life, the events that have shaped her to be what she
is now” (lines 642–643) and notes that writing makes her realize things she hasn’t
understood before.
Multiple positions. One of the characteristic features of Anna’s text is that she
moves between varying positions in relation to her life and to the text: between
the hierarchical positions of a protagonist, a narrator and an author, between the
immediacy of narration and distanced reflection, and between multiple same-level
perspectives to her problems.
By definition, in an autobiography the protagonist, the narrator and the author
inhabit the same person (e.g. Eakin, 1999, p.â•›3). These modes form a hierarchy
in the sense that the narrator is above the protagonist by being able to see the
protagonist’s life from the point of view of the present; the author in turn is above
the narrator. In Anna’s text these hierarchical positions are made explicitly visible:
the text tells (in the third person) about Anna-the-protagonist as well as about
Anna-the-narrator. Above those layers there is also a third layer, which Anna calls
that of the “outside observer”. It could be seen as the position of the author. This
third layer can be discerned, e.g., in the next two excerpts, in which Anna assumes
the position from which she can criticize and evaluate what the narrator is saying.
Let’s give Anna the opportunity to tell her story and let’s forgive her hesitation and
untruthfulness. (lines 4–5)
Anna, says the outside observer, how does this pertain to your dependence prob-
lem? You try to hide your problem in world encompassing musings… So, you are
evading and playing pious! (lines 373–376)
In several passages Anna also tries to look at her problems from a distance by
taking the role of a philosopher or a scientist and analyzing, for instance, the phe-
nomenon of dependence:
Dependence. To depend. To hang on… To be disconnected. To take hold of air. Is
it rootlessness… I hang on alcohol. I take hold of something to avoid drowning,
disappearing, being carried away by the winds. (177–183)
The diversity of different positions suggests that Anna wants to approach her life
and dependencies from as many different angles as possible. We suggest that in
this way she can keep her options open and avoid premature commitment to one
interpretation of her life. This accords with the tradition of modernist autobiogra-
phy, which “does not have as its goal an unbroken continuous story but an account
in which the memories and anecdotes are left loose, without the seal of ultimate
meaning and truth” (Kosonen 2000, 20.)
Dialogue between inner voices. In addition to the multiple layers of Anna’s text,
it is also at times populated by different same-level voices addressing, condemning
and even haunting each other (Bakhtin, 1981; Bahtin, 1991). This is marked by her
moving from the third person position to the first and second person positions.
The dialogue is particularly apparent in the passage describing an episode after a
drinking bout:
Soon a week has passed. She has lain in bed and drunk cider. How much? Her
eyes register the collection of bottles and astonishment roams in Anna’s eyes. She
packs the bottles in a bag, lifts them to the corridor, away from her eyes. Pictures
in the television glide without touching her awareness and pity, the overcoat of
depression, jeers triumphantly:
– “Was this really my life, did I end up here, in this room in loneliness no-one is
my friend I don’t have anybody. My attempts have failed, I am a misfit why did
mother kill herself why didn’t I take care of my father when he asked for it, I was
selfish I kept to my unrealistic dream and wish yet I didn’t do anything even then.”
– “You were not able to choose right things you did not keep your promises you
failed your dream.”
– “But I did try and I have done I have reached”.
“You are no good, you will be nothing, look how the others do and strive, you are
not able to do anything your pictures are nothing you pretend to be an artist yet
you are nothing but a dilettante…” (Lines 60–74)
These conflicting voices of self-accusation and self-defense are a familiar feature of

withdrawal symptoms. After a period of sobriety, however, Anna is able to stand
back and assume a more analytic perspective on her dependence. Here she writes
in the third person again:
And Anna realizes that she always returns to these no good things to cling to, she
returns to them when the frames of her life and security falter, when change ap-
pears as inevitable or if something more or less catastrophic happens in life. It’s
her refuge. Her pause in thinking. (lines 190–193)
Distrust of language. During the last decades, social constructionist thinking in

human sciences has emphasised the power of language to construct social reality.
Although Anna does not mention being familiar with such discussions, she seems
to be well aware of the constructive nature of words. She admits the usefulness of
language by telling that “organizing her experience with the help of words” is a
part of her recovery process. However, she also realizes that words and concepts
are not innocent organizers of experience, but carry differing connotations and are
valued differently. Anna is not happy with just any linguistic meanings imposed on
non-linguistic reality. She emphasises the importance of the reality behind words
that she sees as demanding authentic expression without escape to euphemisms.
Words, concepts. What kind of images do they provoke? … Words are dead, roles,
role costumes. (Lines 336–343)
…it was better to talk about ‘suicide’, not about killing oneself… Killing and
murder are equal to violence, but ‘suicide’ is English, it generates in mind some
learned meaning, not an emotion-laden image of the event, it is clinical, neat.
(Lines 326–332)
This is her life. She lives and breathes regardless of concepts. Her life at this mo-
ment is sitting in this room and writing. (Lines 351–352)
Anna also criticizes the use of empty words, declarative speech that has no con-
nection with actual deeds:
Anna, Anna, you sat in pubs talking and talking. You wove a web of words around
you, an imago for yourself. Those were your deeds, big words that flew in the air.
(Lines 76–77)
Anna is well aware of the rhetorical and strategic uses of language; for example,
she knows that she can use telling about her mother’s suicide as a means to elicit
sympathy, interest or irritation:
Sometimes she told about it in order to shock her acquaintances who lived in a
rosy bourgeois dream …. She used it as her alibi, to gain sympathy. (Lines 326–
329)
At several points Anna criticizes the silencing of important and compelling issues
that has taken place in her social milieu. Thus she also reminds the reader that in
an autobiography there may also be significant gaps; consequently the most pain-
ful experiences may escape being told.
Understanding the discrepancy between life as told and life as lived seems to
make Anna suspicious: how can she know that the words she uses to tell about her
life are accurate and honest, not misleading and deceptive? It is as if Anna wants
to remind both the readers and herself that her life could also be told in a different
way, and the meaning would then be different.
Lack of chronology. The most prominent feature of the text is its lack of chro-
nology; it does not proceed neatly from past to present, as most other stories we
received. On the contrary, its event structure is totally broken. In spite of position-
ing herself in the physical and social world, the major part of her story dwells
in the “timeless” internal universe of crisscrossing thoughts and memories. Why
did she choose to write like this? Is it because of her conscious decision to write
a “postmodern” text to us researchers, or was it rather an intuitive choice that re-
flects her relationship to her current life problems?
To explore this issue we will lean on the distinction developed by Russian for-
malists between the material (Fabula) of the story and its form or plot (Suzhet). The
material is what is readily available for the writer, such as the characters, the events
and the relationships between people, whereas the form reflects the arrangement
of this material with the laws of artistic construction. So when focusing on what
happened we deal with the material of the story and when paying attention to how
the story was told we focus on its form. The material relates to the form as colors
to a painting, or notes to a melody. Lev S. Vygotsky (1971, pp.â•›145–146) used this
distinction in analyzing Ivan Bunin’s short story “The Gentle Breath”. Later, the
same distinction has been drawn between “story” and “narrative discourse” (Chat-
man, 1990; see also Brockmeier, 2001; Hyvärinen, 2008).
In order to get a picture of what has happened to Anna during her life course
in relation to how she tells about it, we follow Vygotsky’s example by juxtaposing
the sequence of events (disposition scheme) with the order or form into which
she organized this material in the text (composition scheme). Some of the scenes
and events in Anna’s narrative are described at length; some are only mentioned in
passing, as the line numbers in Table 1 show.
Tableâ•¯1.â•‡ Disposition and composition schemes of Anna’s text

Disposition Scheme (Fabula/Story) Composition Scheme (Shuzet/Discourse)
1.â•‡childhood: parental discord, father’s drink- 22.â•‡current situation (lines 7–22)
ing 9.â•‡life in the corner pub (lines 40–52)
2.â•‡mother’s suicide 20.â•‡entering alcohol treatment (lines 98–99)
3.â•‡abortion, separation from boyfriend 16.â•‡physical illness (lines 99–108)
4.â•‡unsuccessful attempts to get into art 11.â•‡1st abstinence (lines 113–123)
schools 20.â•‡entering alcohol treatment (lines
5.â•‡successful studies in an art school 125–129)
6.â•‡rape 21.â•‡3rd abstinence (lines 125–129)
7.â•‡father’s death 17.â•‡2nd abstinence (lines 196–199)
8.â•‡moving to the current neighborhood 18.â•‡gradual increase of drinking (lines
9.â•‡life in the corner pub, drinking 199–205)
10.â•‡destructive relationship 19.â•‡growing dissatisfaction, disengagement
11.â•‡1st abstinence (lines 246–256)
12.â•‡psychosis 20.â•‡entering alcohol treatment (lines 258)
13.â•‡separation from destr. relationship 11.â•‡1st abstinence (lines 270–275)
14.â•‡two suicide attempts 12.â•‡psychosis (lines 271–274)
15.â•‡new male partner 5.â•‡successful studies in an art school (lines
16.â•‡physical illness 275–276)
17.â•‡2nd abstinence 2.â•‡mother’s suicide (lines 314–335)
18.â•‡gradual increase of drinking 16.â•‡physical illness (lines 362–371)
19.â•‡growing dissatisfaction, disengagement 8.â•‡moving to the current neighborhood (lines
20.â•‡entering alcohol treatment 420–427)
21.â•‡3rd abstinence 9.â•‡life in the corner pub (lines 420–427)
22.â•‡current situation 7.â•‡father’s death (lines 430)
4.â•‡unsuccessful attempts to get into art
schools (lines 431)
6.â•‡rape (lines 431)
12.â•‡psychosis (lines 443–510)
10.â•‡destructive relationship (lines 512–529)
13.â•‡ending this relationship (lines 530–543)
14.â•‡two suicide attempts (lines 545–549)
15.â•‡new male partner (lines 595–603)
1.â•‡childhood: father’s drinking, parental
discord (lines 607–620)
2.â•‡mother’s suicide (lines 625–630)
3.â•‡abortion, separation from boyfriend (lines
636–640)
It was no easy task to reconstruct the order of Anna’s life events from her essay
and we do not claim to have completely succeeded. This is not, however, essential.
Even this level of precision is enough to illustrate certain features of her text.
As can be seen from Table 1, the composition of Anna’s text is far from chron-
ological. In fact, most of the events of her youth and childhood are told at the end
of the text, while the beginning deals mostly with recent events. The composi-
tion does not, however, display a strictly reversed time order either. Her writing
is highly elliptical, that is, many themes are taken up time and time after again.
Telling of events is often cut by reflections and descriptions of the present moment
(all of which are not shown in the table). What we have, then, is a text that starts
from the present and then makes loops to earlier times. As the text proceeds, the
loops reach ever more distant time points, as if the narrator were digging deeper
and deeper into the past.
In his analysis of Bunin’s short story, Vygotsky (1971, Chapter 7) claims that in
a work of art the function of breaking the chronological order lies in the aesthetic
effect achieved: while the essence of Bunin’s short story deals with “life’s troubles,
or its turbid waters” and the events themselves are gloomy, due to the reversal of
time the story leaves the reader with a totally different feeling of “liberation, light-
ness, the crystal transparency of life” — “a gentle breath” (pp.â•›153–54).
In the same way we could say that Anna’s text tells mostly about sad and ad-
verse, even severely traumatic events, but owing to the breakdown of chronologi-
cal order and to the “resting places” provided by reflective passages, it does not feel
as depressing as it might. Instead, it presents the events from a dreamlike distance.
Maybe some of these devastating events are made bearable also for the author by
this kind of distancing.
Breaking the chronological order also means that the causal connections be-
tween events are not presented as fixed or known. In an ordinary narrative causal
links are established just by telling that one event was followed by another (Abbot,
2002, pp.â•›37–40). In Anna’s text, the transitions between points of time are made
by association, one memory bringing to mind another. Thus no strong connec-
tions of cause and effect are narratively constructed in her story. Instead, Anna
openly ponders on the possible causes of, e.g., her falling into psychosis. This kind
of explicit reflection does not make hidden causal claims in the way narrative im-
plication does. The result is that in addition to finding it difficult to identify the
exact order of events we also found it impossible to identify a plot in the presented
sequence of events.
Still another interpretation for the lack of chronology can be found if we look
at the nature of events that are mentioned. The texts proceeds from more familiar
and ordinary themes towards more sensitive, dramatic, and discriminating issues
and events. Some of the most painful events, e.g. the death of Anna’s mother and
being raped, which have taken place in Anna’s youth, are dealt with at the end of
the text. In her second text she actually deals with her sexual trauma at length. It
seems that writing her story has been to her like an expedition to the past, dur-
ing which she has gathered courage to tackle ever more daunting memories. The
reason she has started such an expedition is probably the psychodynamic idea that
in order to get rid of her addictions she has to become aware of the basic problems
from which the addiction has stemmed. As Anna had just started therapy before
the writing process, this may reflect either the mode of her therapy or the way
Anna expects it to proceed.
Priority of inner over external reality. Jerome Bruner, referring to Greimas,
makes the distinction between two essential elements of narrative: the landscape
of action and landscape of consciousness (1987). Greimas has noted that in mod-
ern novels the landscape of consciousness has become more prominent; modern
literature thus becomes “less ontological and more epistemological”. This means
that the “hard-core reality” gives way to subjective perceptions, and the omni-
scient narrator disappears.
All this is evident in Anna’s text. A major part of it does not tell about exter-
nal life events but presents her reflections and observations of herself. The actual
events are displayed almost as if they were only the background of her internal
life, which is presented as far more essential. Anna’s inner reality is often depicted
by making a metaphorical association between her mental life and her immediate
material surroundings. The studio where she works is an important mirror of her
self. It is full of unfinished paintings and drawings and sometimes also of empty
bottles. In the beginning of the text it is told that Anna has just burnt a piece of
decoration designed to welcome friends, because there’s no use for it anymore.
Throughout the text Anna refers to her mental enemy, the “black devil”, which
raises her anxiety, tortures her with accusations and ridicule, and tempts her to
succumb to her unhealthy desires. This mental enemy is one among the central
actants in the story.
During this summer she realized that these two dependencies were one and the
same thing. They were reflections of the same unknown devil, that which moves
around and changes its form like a chameleon… (Lines 32–34)
Anna considers her conscious thoughts as unreliable. Instead, she regards her
mental images and dreams as a solid ground for inner truth. They form the reality
in which she trusts without hesitation or irony. She gives several vivid examples of
how “her decisions have often been made by the help of a vision or a dream” (lines
438–439). For instance, just before seeking help for her problem drinking she saw
a dream about a dark haired young man in a black racing car that came to take her
with him — a modern version of “the ferry of Kharon” in her interpretation. In the
car there was no room for her belongings — this made her realize that she had to
leave her past behind.
Moreover, Anna tells that in her current attempt to quit drinking she has been
helped by her therapist’s advice to form herself a mental image of an empower-
ing color which would help maintain her resolution to change. So, the important
mental events are acts of intuition and imagery rather than conscious reasoning.
The core contradiction: relationality vs. autonomy. The main themes of Anna’s
text are her relations to other people and her relation to herself, and the tensions
between these two poles.
Anna’s social identity, sense of belonging to a well-established social catego-
ry, is far from solid (see the first quote), and her relations with other people are
ambivalent. The relational themes of the text include Anna’s relationships with
her father and her previous and present male partner as well as with her circle of
friends in the corner pub. She describes the relationship with her previous partner
as destructive. Her new partner is depicted as loving and understanding, but also
as keen on spending time in pubs rather than with Anna alone. Anna’s relation-
ship to the pub life is increasingly ambivalent. For quite a while she was “fascinated
with its open sociality (line 421)” and “felt at home with people like her, those
ragged, excluded, good, and passionate people who can laugh and sing, and who
struggle bravely for the diversity of their existence (lines 415–417)”. More recently,
however, the discussions in the pub have started to feel empty and the solidarity
as illusory. Previously she used to be an active participant in the discussions, but
nowadays she feels like an outsider at the pub table. The main problem with the
community is that it is difficult to participate in its activities without drinking. The
problem is aggravated by the fact that Anna’s relation with her partner is tied with
her relation to the pub community because going to the pub is one of the main
common activities with him (lines 223–224).
As to the self-related themes, there seems to be a mixture of confusion and
resoluteness. While Anna depicts herself as torn by inner contradictions and even
enigmatic forces of her psyche (like the “devil” described above), she also seems
to be able to feel solid ground below her feet in her strong personal identity as a
person who wants to create art. The need to create is something that gives her joy
and resolution: “Anna’s strength came from her desire to draw, desire for a picture,
that activity which she started in her thirties.” (Lines 260–261) Every time Anna
mentions a dream or image as a guide for decision-making, these encourage her
to follow her own autonomous way.
The text seems to orbit around two goals or values: being related to others and
being true to oneself. In Anna’s text these two goals seem to be mutually exclu-
sive. By remaining in the drinking-based community life Anna feels she would
risk her artistic creativity and even her physical health. On the other hand, by
striving for a self-sufficient sober life she would risk her social self. Maybe also
her mental health would be at risk since her psychosis started after a previous
lengthy abstinence.
Discussion
To sum up, it seems that Anna is ambivalent about describing her life in a storied
form. She clearly states as her goal to “find the thread, find the shape of her path”.
However, the text she actually writes is not a story with a clear shape or a path,
but a series of expeditions into her current situation, her memories and her finely
tuned inner life. She is obviously wary and hesitant about putting her life into
words and to force it into the form of a conventional ‘beginning, middle and end’
type of narrative.
Anna’s text shows the pieces of a puzzle but does not assemble them as a pic-
ture. The reader is left to wonder whether all the essential pieces are on the table.
Using Brockmeier’s (2001) terminology, Anna seems to have started to collect the
“autobiographeme”, or the elements from which the life story could be built, but as
yet she has not even started to construct a story out of them. It is as if she refused
to say anything like “that is the way my addictions developed and this is the way I
could leave them behind”.
Why did Anna choose to approach her life in this way? The possible interpre-
tations can be roughly divided into those in which the peculiarity is seen to reside
solely on the level of the told narrative (narrative text) and those which see the
roots of its nonconformity to be on the level of Anna’s inner narrative.
On the level of the told narrative, one possible interpretation of the unconven-
tional features in Anna’s text is that she wanted to write in an artistic way, imitating
the style of (post)modernist autobiography. However, as the context and purpose
of writing was not literary but research- and therapy-related, we don’t believe that
purely literary purposes would have directed her style of writing to this extent.
Moreover, she does not refer to literary ambitions or even to reading literature.
Thus we find this interpretation rather implausible. Another possibility is that she
did not want to settle with easy solutions and conventions in her self-expression
but wanted to convey to us the exactly apt expression of her lived experience.
On the other hand, the characteristics of Anna’s text can be seen to reflect her
striving towards a more authentic inner narrative. The search for self-understand-
ing seems indeed to be the most prominent motive in Anna’s story. It is displayed
by the emphasis on the inner experience rather than the external events of her life.
However, not just any self-understanding seems to do for Anna: she seems to want
to find a solid and authentic understanding which she could rely on. She does not
make it easy for herself. This can be seen in how she constantly criticizes and ques-
tions her own ability to see or convey her real motives.
In what follows, we will discuss different views about the psychological mean-
ing of the incoherence and unconventional structure of Anna’s text and how it can
be related to her inner narrative.
From the position emphasizing the psychological necessity of a well-formed
self-narrative, Anna’s story is simply deficient and reflects her disordered state of
mind or the incoherence of her inner narrative. Indeed, taking into account that
Anna had gone through a bout of psychosis some years ago, it can be that she gen-
erally doesn’t have a very stable sense of self. On the basis of this interpretation, it
would seem advisable to help her to form a coherent and continuous story of her
life and addictions. This view is supported by Anna’s explicit wish to find a story
for herself.
A second, opposite position can be derived from the thoughts of Galen Straw-
son (2004), who contends that not all people are inclined to think about their life
in narrative terms, and that some people just are episodic in their thinking about
their life. Thus they only have a collection of separate memories but not a linear
narrative that connects them into a whole. Could this be true of Anna? Such an
interpretation is indeed plausible, because Anna’s text shows that her memory op-
erates on the basis of vivid images rather than on verbal storylines. According to
“Strawsonian” interpretation, rendering her life in a story form would not help
Anna. Rather on the contrary. What would help her more — and as she tells, has
already done so — is externalizing her experiences by painting.
According to a third, mediating point of view, the incoherence functions as a
transitory phase which makes it possible to form a personally convincing story in
a situation in which a profound reorientation is necessary. This kind of shuffling
of one’s memories may serve as a necessary step in creating a fresh and authentic
interpretation of the past and in avoiding premature consolidation of a new story.
It could be claimed that even if the text does not tell a story, it can be seen to
contain elements of at least three potential or rudimentary storylines, if ‘story’ is
defined as a plot structure which connects a set of events in relation to a specific
valued endpoint. These stories are the ‘relational story’, the ‘autonomy story’ and
the ‘psychodynamic story’. All of them imply their own valued endpoints and their
own, contradicting means for attaining them. The relational story sees connec-
tion with other people as the primary goal, which in Anna’s case means being im-
mersed in the pub life. The autonomy story, on the other hand, sees artistic self-ac-
tualization as the ultimate goal, which Anna can only reach by disengaging herself
from the drinking community. The third potential story line, the psychodynamic
story, can be seen in Anna’s idea that to get rid of her dependencies she has to face
the traumatic events of her past. This is what she is working on particularly in the
last part of her initial text, and it is even more evident in her second shorter writ-
ing in which she dealt in more detail with her childhood sexual trauma. Which
of these potential storylines, if any, eventually will be enacted, remains to be seen.
Brockmeier (2001) has noted that the plot of a life story can only be construct-
ed retrospectively, from the point of view of its already visible telos. We would say
that sometimes it suffices to have an anticipatory idea of what the telos could be
like (e.g. the key to recovery). From the vantage point of the anticipated telos, the
preceding events can be selected and connected as a story. But as long as there are
rival endpoints, the construction of a story is not possible. From this perspective,
the incoherence of the text may partly reflect the ongoing struggle between these
different potential stories. Adopting the autonomy story would provide the most
probable way out of addiction, whereas the relational story would maintain the
status quo. From this perspective the psychodynamic idea that the traumas of the
past should be faced before recovery is possible could be seen either as a defen-
sive strategy against the demands of resolution or as a long term treatment plan.
NeverÂ�theless, it postpones the decision till unknown future.
Whatever the author’s reasons for the choices made in writing her essay, it
seems to reflect her ambivalence about changing her use of psychoactive substanc-
es, which is highly typical of addictive behaviors (Orford, 2001): the person wants
to get rid of the addictive habit and at the same time she wants to continue it.
Research on addiction suggests that stable desistance cannot be reached until this
motivational dilemma has been resolved (Miller & Rollnick, 2002).
At this point we are reluctant to take a definite stance as regards whether a
coherent and chronological understanding of one’s life is in general superior to a
incoherent and fragmentary one. It may well be that many people can live their life
without ever running into deep emotional contradictions that demand explanation
and integration. Instead of arguing that a well-formed self-narrative is a psycholog-
ical or moral necessity, we would like to argue for the pragmatic uses of such a self-
narrative in shattered or dissonant life situations which a person tries to resolve.
On the grounds of our previous research and that of others we regard the
recovery from severe substance dependence as a process which usually presup-
poses a change of values and adoption of convincing ideas of how recovery can
be attained (Koski-Jännes, Jussila & Hänninen, 1998, pp.â•›159–162; McIntosh &
McKeganey, 2000; Jakobson, 2001; Blomqvist, 2002). Leaving the past with addic-
tion behind often involves coming to grips with the guilt and remorse associated
with the former life style. These requirements can be met with a solid and coherent
story that welds together the discrepant parts of one’s life. This does not mean that
the story could not be revised when times change. On the contrary, the merit of
the narrative perspective on identity is its openness to change and development
along with the unfolding life.
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Chapter 8
“There is no fear in my lexicon” vs.

“You are not normal if you won’t be scared”
A qualitative semiotic analysis of the ‘broken’ discourse
of Israeli bus drivers who experienced terror attacks
Alison Stern Perez, Yishai Tobin and Shifra Sagy

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, Israel
Bus drivers in Israel have coped with decades of stress, fear, and the constant
threat of terror. This paper summarizes a qualitative analysis of the form and
content of narratives told by Israeli bus drivers who directly experienced a terror
attack. A preliminary discourse and semiotic analysis of a case study is presented
here as representative of a ‘broken’ narrative, as reflected in what initially appear
as internal contradictions in both form and content. The non-random distribu-
tion of personal pronouns is analyzed, and hypotheses are postulated regarding
the meaning of the interviewee’s communicative strategies in telling his narrative
and coping with his lived experience. In particular, the interviewee makes openly
conflicted statements regarding his sense of fear and willingness to admit being
scared, while using the first-person and both gendered second-person pronouns
in a uniquely patterned manner that also reflects this ambivalence. A careful
analysis of these seeming contradictions, inconsistencies, and ‘broken’ narra-
tive patterns leads to the ultimate suggestion that certain messages in individual
discourse can reveal the narrator’s feelings and attitudes about the surround-
ing hegemonic social discourse. In the case of Israeli bus drivers, this discourse
facilitates a collective sense of obligation to act and cope resiliently, and discour-
ages ‘less acceptable’ reactions.
Introduction
Throughout recent decades, bus drivers in Israel have been exposed to a great deal
of stress, primarily in the form of the constant threat of terror attack. This research
explores the form and content of the discourse of Israeli bus drivers who directly
experienced a terror attack while on duty, through qualitative analysis of in-depth
interviews. The central research question investigates the nature and manifestation
122 Alison Stern Perez, Yishai Tobin and Shifra Sagy
of the communicative strategies revealed in these narratives, as well as what these

strategies reflect, represent, and suggest about both the individual experiential and
larger social worlds of the interviewees. A single case study is presented here, and
a number of exemplar texts are explored through the use of discourse analysis
techniques from within a larger semiotic linguistic approach.
This particular case was chosen because it exemplifies many of the discourse
phenomena that emerged throughout the study and across participants. Each in-
terviewee brought his own unique story and perspective, but this individual’s nar-
ratives seemed to reveal many of the phenomena often simultaneously, in what
initially appeared as ambiguous and inconsistent discourse. As the issues were
explored in more depth, we began to view this case as representative of a ‘broken’
narrative, reflected in a number of apparent internal contradictions in both form
and content. In particular, the interviewee’s use of personal pronouns through-
out the narrative — while initially seemingly arbitrary and ‘illogical’ — emerged
through deeper analysis as not only following a pattern of non-random distribu-
tion, but also representative of specific, systematic communicative strategies. This
paper discusses these strategies as the participant’s means of coping with the terror
attack he experienced, and of making sense of his experiences, on both an indi-
vidual and societal scale.
The research rests on the fundamental assumption that language is not used
randomly, and that narrative and communicative strategies can be analyzed to il-
luminate a number of facets of the narrator’s experience. In the present case, the
conjunction of the systematic use of pronouns with certain narrative patterns may
suggest a relationship between the narrator’s language use, his lived experience,
and his perceptions of the larger hegemonic discourse surrounding him. Essen-
tially, in this paper we present a ‘broken’ narrative and attempt to explore what
makes it broken, the nature and manifestation of any patterns of ‘brokenness’, and
the narrator’s attempt to cope with and perhaps repair the breaks in his narrative
and perception of his experiences.
This article will begin by introducing the participants and the interview
method, followed by a glimpse into the context within which the research takes
place; that is, the security situation in Israel, and where and how bus drivers ex-
ist in and cope with this daily reality. There will then be a brief discussion of the
Modern Hebrew pronoun system, in order to allow a more comprehensive under-
standing of the linguistic phenomena explored in the narratives. This analytical
framework will then be supplemented by a discussion of the particular qualita-
tive discursive methodologies utilized in this analysis, and then the case study
itself will be presented. There will be a short description of the interviewee and his
background, followed by presentations of exemplar text sections within categories
of the discursive patterns that emerged from the texts. Finally, we will discuss the
Chapter 8.â•‡ “There is no fear in my lexicon” vs. “You are not normal if you won’t be scared” 123
relationship between the individual’s communicative strategies, coping processes,

and attitudes about his experience, suggesting the possibility of both a shaping
and reflection of the surrounding societal discourse and hegemonic narratives,
particularly in relation to resilience and heroism.
The interviewees and the interview methodology
Eight Israeli bus drivers who had experienced a terror attack were interviewed. All
are male, Jewish, between the ages of 25 and 65, and of various marital statuses.
All but one of the participants were recruited through the head psychologist and
social worker at Egged Bus Company1 in Jerusalem. Participation in the study was
voluntary and without compensation. The interviews took place between August
2005 and March 2007, which was a relatively calm period in Israel vis-à-vis bus-
related terror attacks.
In-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with each
participant by the first author of this paper. The initial interview guide was in-
formed by a number of ‘fact-finding’ meetings with Egged personnel, and includ-
ed fourteen open-ended questions relating to the general topics under investiga-
tion (namely, identity, worldview, systems of meaning-making, cultural norms,
and overall belief structures). The interviews began with a request for a brief life
story (“Please tell me about yourself and your background”), included a request
for a narrative of the terror attack(s) experienced, and involved additional probing
depending on the level of depth of the main narrative. Interviews were conducted
at the participants’ homes and were recorded using both cassette tape and MP3
recorders. Interviewees were requested to sign a consent form at the beginning
of the interview, and then to fill out a short biographical questionnaire. All inter-
views were conducted, transcribed, and analyzed in Hebrew.
The context: Coping with terror attacks in Israel
Terrorism, in one form or another, has been a pervasive component of society

in both modern and pre-state Israel for over a century. The past two decades in
particular, encompassing the first and second Intifadas (1987–1993 and 2000–
1.â•‡ This is the national bus carrier in Israel, and by far the most well known and prolific. While
there is a very small number of other intracity and intercity carriers, Egged is the only company
whose bus lines traverse the entire country. ‘Egged’ is considered to be essentially synonymous
with bus travel in Israel.
2004/5, respectively), have had a significant effect on the Israeli populace (Baum,
2004). The volume and scale of bombings2 have created a daily situation fraught
with anxiety, and Israeli citizens’ stress levels have been found to be relatively high
(Bleich, Gelkopf, & Solomon, 2003). Ongoing and unpredictable terror attacks,
particularly those levelled at civilian populations, cause an all-encompassing sense
of threat to individuals and to the society (Zeidner, 2005). Ayalon (2004) writes,
“When airplanes, buses, and trains are targeted and when shops and restaurants
are exploding, daily mobility can no longer be taken for granted. The threat is
contagious — there is a lurking danger that any train or bus can become a death
trap” (p.â•›176). Terror in Israel has been referred to as not only a personal chal-
lenge but a national and societal trauma, as it is experienced in a shared manner
by many facets of the population (Nuttman-Shwartz, Lauer, & Offir, 2002). The
demographic makeup and small size of the country also serve to create a sense of
personal vulnerability with regard to terror attacks, even in the absence of “direct”
involvement (Brody & Baum, 2007).
For quite some time, therefore, Israeli civilians have been thrust into a posi-
tion of having to cope with highly stressful events and their effects and literally
build (or at least accept) this into the daily structure of their lives (Baum, 2004;
Nuttman-Shwartz et al., 2002). As Baum (2004) has noted, “Despite the repeated
deadly attacks on the civilian population, Israelis have gone on with their daily
lives and routines with a determined, somewhat fatalistic, business-as-usual ap-
proach and no large scale panic” (pp.â•›395–396). Existing research suggests that
even under this tremendous stress, the Israeli population as a whole is function-
ing well and coping fairly resiliently (Sharlin, Moin, & Yahav, 2006; Somer, Ruvio,
Soref, & Sever, 2005; Zeidner, 2005). Indeed, the Israeli case provides a unique
opportunity for the study of resilience and coping in the face of significant stress,
and an examination of the forces within the society that help or hinder the efforts
of its populace to be resilient (Sagy, 2002).
The context: Bus drivers in Israel
Bus drivers occupy a particularly interesting position in Israeli society and in the
context of this study. For one, most have generally served their compulsory three-
year period of military service, in addition to an average of 10–30 days per year
on reserve duty. That most of the interviewees have served (in combat units) in
2.â•‡ The data varies widely, but a general consensus seems to indicate that there were 132 suicide
bombings between October 2000 and April 2004, 85 which occurred within Israel “proper” be-
tween 2001 and 2003 (Kaplan, Mintz, Mishal, & Samban, 2005; Shalev, Tuval, Frenkiel-Fishman,
Hadar, & Eth, 2006; Sharlin, Moin, & Yahav, 2006).
the army during (multiple) war times is an important variable to be kept in mind,
particularly given the “centrality of military matters” in Israel (Lomsky-Feder &
Ben-Ari, 1999) and potentially lasting impact of these experiences. Bus drivers
in Israel have also existed on the ‘front lines’ of both Intifadas. According to data
from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 58 of a total of 165 (35%) suicide and other
bombing attacks between 1994 and 2007 were on or directly involved buses, as op-
posed to 21 (13%) in restaurants and cafés.3 The participants appear acutely aware
that buses seem to be associated in the public view with bombings, and that even
the nearly complete decline in bus bombings in the past three years has not man-
aged to obliterate this public perception.
These two sides of the coin seem to present a dilemma for these bus drivers.4
While their job description officially refers only to safely transporting passengers
to their destination, unofficially, bus drivers tend to feel a much greater degree of
responsibility with regard to their jobs and their clientele. Because they spend the
majority of their workday on their bus, and because many of them drive on the
same routes for years and become familiar and even friendly with their ‘regular’
passengers, they come to view their bus as their home or as a personal possession;
indeed, as an extension of their identity and their selves (Hyvärinen, personal
communication, June 2007). Many also refer to a sense of personal responsibility,
stemming from their perception of their bus also as their ‘territory’, which must be
protected against all threat. This translates into a high level of alertness with regard
to security, as well as personal decisions to add unofficial duties that are decidedly
not part of their job description. Indeed, the bus drivers who were interviewed
expressed that they often found themselves acting in multiple roles at once: driver,
security guard, policeman, and even army commander.
The structure and meanings of the pronoun system in Modern Hebrew
In addition to the discourse analysis techniques to be delineated below, the ana-

lytical framework of this research is the semiotic or sign-oriented linguistic ap-
3.â•‡ From “Suicide and other bombing attacks in Israel since the Declaration of Principles
(Sept 1993)” [Electronic version]. Retrieved May 2007 from http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Ter-
rorism-%20Obstacle%20to%20Peace/Palestinian%20terror%20since%202000/Suicide%20
and%20Other%20Bombing%20Attacks%20in%20Israel%20Since.
4.â•‡ Because little is written or theorized about this specific population in Israel, it should be not-
ed that much of this discussion comes from statements made by key personnel (both managerial
and social service-oriented) within the Egged Bus Company organization, with whom I have
conducted repeated ‘fact-finding’ interviews, as well as from the interviewed drivers themselves.
proach (de Saussure, 1916/1983). The Modern Hebrew pronoun system can be
understood in terms of its invariant meanings from within this approach: encoder
(first-person), decoder (second-person), and other or outsider (third-person).
While the first-person pronominal forms (‘I’ and ‘we’) are gender-neutral, the sec-
ond- and third-person forms are inflected for both gender (masculine/feminine)
and number (singular/plural). The masculine pronouns are the unmarked forms,
as they can refer to either male or female objects, and are generally characterized
by the base form, while feminine forms require additional suffixes. In addition to
nouns and adjectives having gender and number morphology, all verbs are con-
jugated for person, number, and gender. As Tobin (2001) contends, “structurally
speaking, gender (biological and grammatical) is almost always present at all lev-
els of word and utterance formation in Modern Hebrew” (p.â•›192). This linguistic
centrality of gender makes it crucial to pay attention to the structure and nature
of pronoun use in spontaneous discourse — particularly if it emerges as unusual
or unconventional, predominantly consistent or inconsistent, or apparently emo-
tionally motivated in some manner.
The first-person singular pronoun (‘ani’ in Hebrew; ‘I’ in English) signifies
speaker/writer (generally, ‘encoder’), referring to ‘the one who speaks here and
now’, and can be considered the most proximate and personal pronoun, as it is ego-
centred. It is unmarked for (that is, neutral to) gender, and is the most specific or
‘known’ pronoun, as its use leaves little ambiguity as to the identity or nature of the
speaker. This form is used to relate to personalized events, actions, or states, and
cannot represent a relation to anything or anyone but the encoder. As Pennebaker
(2002) notes, “The use of 1st person singular (I, me, my)…provides insight into
people’s social identity and ‘ownership’ of their speaking or writing topic” (p.â•›8).
The second-person masculine singular (MS) pronoun (‘atah’ in Hebrew; ‘you’
in English) signifies the audience/listener/reader (generally, ‘decoder’), and is one
of the most general and neutral pronouns. It has two functions in Modern He-
brew: 1) the traditional usage to address specific male decoders; and 2) a more ge-
neric, general, and impersonal usage corresponding roughly to the non-gendered,
non-numbered ‘you’ in English.5 In the latter case, it functions as the unmarked
form, customarily used in non-gendered discourse or relation to a non-specific
subject (similar to, “When one works…” or “When you wake up…”). However, in
Hebrew the MS ‘you’ is also used in discourse that does not necessarily call for the
unmarked form. Indeed, feminists have reported on cases of two women using the
5.â•‡ In English, the second-person ‘you’ is unmarked for both number and gender (i.e., there is no
difference between the masculine singular, feminine singular, masculine plural, and feminine
plural forms), while in Hebrew, there are four distinct forms for the second-person ‘you’, each
marked for both gender and number.
MS ‘you’ with each other, even in such obviously gendered cases as, “When you
(MS) are pregnant…” (Tobin, personal communication). Based on this type of us-
age, one might therefore hypothesize that the use of the MS ‘you’ serves to create
a depersonalized or universalized sense of meaning, as the unmarked pronoun
allows or creates a relation to ‘one’ or ‘everyperson’.
The second-person feminine singular (FS) pronoun (‘at’ in Hebrew; ‘you’ in
English) also signifies the decoder, and also has two functions: 1) to address spe-
cific female decoders; and 2) a generic and/or general manner of usage between
two females or in all-female groups and specific or generic gendered (female) situ-
ations and contexts (i.e., one might hear “When you (FS) are pregnant…” only in
this context). Because it is marked for gender and number, this form is customarily
utilized only in person- or gender-specific discursive situations, and therefore the
choice to use the FS ‘you’ (rather than the standard unmarked MS form) may cre-
ate a sense of greater proximity and less neutrality toward the female addressee.
In this sense, a male who uses the FS ‘you’ in speaking to a female about his own
experiences may be showing a particular communicative strategy that may have
certain implications with regard to his attitude toward what he is describing and/
or toward the particular female decoder. Only the most feminist-minded men and
women in recent generations have begun a revolution of sorts, consciously utiliz-
ing the marked feminine plural rather than the unmarked masculine plural pro-
nominal form in mixed groups with only a majority of women (rather than the
conventional use, which is called for only in all-female groups) (Tobin, 2001).6
The gendered nature and frequent use of the Hebrew pronominal system
requires constant choices with regard to gender and number in relation to both
encoder and decoder. These choices are not random, and the meanings of and
relationship between the pronouns may function as analytical ‘flags’, thus allow-
ing a deeper analysis of the social discourse surrounding an individual or event.
Certain patterns of pronoun choice may also reflect apparent contradictions, in-
consistency, or ‘brokenness’ in the narrator’s discourse and/or narrative. Viewed
from within a linguistic and discursive analytical perspective, the non-random
distribution of pronouns within the texts exemplified here will be employed as
both the source and the empirical support for the hypotheses offered.
6.â•‡ Tobin (personal communication) notes that this extreme ‘politicized’ and ideological use
has not spread to the general Hebrew-speaking population and remains unusual and strange-
sounding to native (non-feminist) speakers.
Central qualitative analytical questions
The analytical approaches used here are largely abductive — that is, the hypotheses
emerge from the data and the ‘field’ rather than from a pre-determined theory or
perspective — and cluster around the basic idea that when individuals present
their narratives to others, they do so for specific and internally ‘logical’ reasons.
We tell what we tell, how we tell it, as a result of a complex interplay of personal,
interactional, and contextual factors, and an understanding of these factors is criti-
cal to a comprehension of the phenomena in this study.
This analysis relies heavily on Rosenthal’s (1993) key approach of constantly
forming and testing hypotheses with regard to the texts, and guiding these hy-
potheses through the use of the following questions. First, is the biographer gen-
erating a narrative or is he being carried along by a narrative flow in his story-
telling? Second, why is the autobiographer using this specific sort of text to present
his experience or theme? And, third, in which details are the single experiences or
themes presented and why? In essence, the purpose of this method is to continu-
ally question and analyse the content, form, manner, length, sequence, and even
absences within the narrative being told throughout the interview.
Keeping these fundamental analytical ‘building blocks’ in mind, the primary
analytical dichotomy within the current analysis is that of ‘content versus form’,
and thus the central questions regard what the interviewee says vs. how he says it.
The basic analytical questions regarding content are the following: (1) How is the
terror attack narrated by the interviewee?; (2) How does the interviewee describe
his strategies of coping with daily fear and stress?; and (3) When, how, and why do
certain societal issues emerge manifestly in the interviewee’s discourse, and what
is the attendant meaning of these issues? The basic analytical questions regarding
form are the following: (1) How is the narrative of the terror attack constructed
(e.g., what is there vs. what is missing; is the narrative ordered chronologically vs.
thematically; what is described in detail vs. what is absent)?; (2) Which grammati-
cal or discursive patterns repeat throughout the interview, and what is the atten-
dant meaning of these patterns?; and (3) How do central themes or issues express
themselves ‘under the surface’ (i.e., how are they expressed latently in discourse
form vs. as manifest content)?
On the micro-level of the present analysis, the following five questions were
considered at all stages throughout: (1) Why is this word or phrase used here, and
not in other places?; (2) What is the meaning, both in this sentence and in the larg-
er picture, of the usage of this word or phrase here?; (3) How else could this sen-
tence be phrased, and how would the meaning change?; (4) Are there any patterns
of usage of certain words or phrases?; and (5) What do these discursive techniques
say about this individual, and about his perception of the society in which he lives?
All of these analytical techniques and questions were used throughout the analy-
sis, although some were relied upon more or less heavily at different junctures.
The case study: Description and analysis
‘Dani’, a native-born Israeli, was 29 years old and single at the time of the interview.
He had served in the border patrol during his compulsory army service, and had
been working as a bus driver in Jerusalem for six years. He experienced three sepa-
rate terror attacks during this time: once when a man approached his bus while it
was stationary and opened fire with an automatic weapon, wounding a number of
passengers; once when he witnessed a bus in front of him explode from a bomb-
ing; and once when a single bullet was fired at his bus as he was driving. He also
was involved in a traffic accident while he was on duty, which he described as the
most traumatic of all of these incidents. He was working as a bus driver at the time
of the interview, and proudly reported that he had never taken more than two days
off from work. His interview lasted approximately two hours and was conducted
in two parts, about a month apart.
Depersonalization and universalization

All of the interviewees showed a tendency to depersonalize, generalize, universal-
ize, and/or neutralize their statements at times, and did so by using the unmarked,
second-person masculine singular (MS) pronoun ‘you’. Dani showed a particular
propensity for making more generic statements, rather than those that could be
tied uniquely to himself and his own experiences. For instance, when Dani was
asked to compare the terror attacks he experienced with the traffic accident in
which he was involved, he responded:
1 “Because it [a traffic accident] is something that you (MS), that is up to you
(MS).
2 Here [in a terror attack], it isn’t up to you (MS). You (FS) understand? If you
(MS) can
3 prevent it, so of course you (MS), you (MS) will have a little something on
[your]
4 conscience. Understand (FS)? As long as it isn’t up to you (MS), so okay,
what? What
5 can I do? It is fate. I didn’t kill the people on my bus. It is the terrorist killed
them, not
6 me. Understand (FS)?” (3:1445–1452)7,8
Rather than personalizing his statements (i.e., “If I could have prevented it, so
of course I would have had a little something on my conscience”), Dani used the
unmarked MS ‘you’, giving a sense of collectivity to his assertions, as if it is some-
thing that ‘we all’ would grapple with. Interestingly, he did shift to using ‘I’ in line
5 above, although he could have continued using the generic or generalizing lan-
guage (i.e., “You (MS) didn’t kill the people on your (MS) bus”). It appears here that
there are statements of which Dani is willing (and able) to claim ownership, while
there are others of which he is not. Indeed, it may be easier for Dani to personalize
statements related to his obvious lack of culpability for the terror attack, while it
may be difficult for him to use personalized language regarding his own role in the
traffic accident he was unable to prevent. It may thus be more comfortable for him
to universalize the experience and bring his audience into it with him, through his
language.
When Dani discussed the terror attack and his perceptions of fear, he showed
an even greater tendency to alternate between statements utilizing first- and sec-
ond-person pronouns, as seen in this text section:
1 “I was afraid, I was afraid. But when it is/was9 over, you (MS) kind of say
‘My God,
2 what a,’ like, if it had been possible, I would have wanted to go back and do
things
3 better, maybe to kill him too. You (FS) understand? I was afraid, and I won’t
say that I
4 wasn’t afraid, I was sh-, shaking. There isn’t, I don’t have, what is it? A pers-,
a
7.â•‡ The second-person masculine singular pronoun will be denoted here as ‘you (MS)’ and the
second-person feminine singular pronoun will be denoted here as ‘you (FS)’. In addition, nouns,
adjectives, verbs, and certain prepositions are inflected for number and gender in Hebrew, and
will be indicated here accordingly.
8.â•‡ All italics are mine, and have been added to the texts to emphasize the noted linguistic phe-
nomena. All other indications in the texts follow conventional transcribing rules: underlined
text signifies that the interviewee was speaking in a louder voice relative to the rest of his in-
terview; boldface signifies relatively emphatic speech; (numbers within parentheses) signify
the amount of seconds that a particular pause in speech lasted; (notes within parentheses) are
extra-linguistic or contextual clues; and [notes within brackets] are explanations for the reader
with regard to potentially unclear phrases in the interviewee’s discourse. Use of English words is
denoted by CAPITAL LETTERS.
9.â•‡ It is not possible to ascertain here whether Dani was using the past or present tense form of
this verb.
5 terrorist is shooting at you (MS) from four meters away, you (MS) won’t be
scared? You
6 (MS) are not normal if you (MS) won’t be scared. I screamed ‘Mama!’ and
everything.”
7 (3:84–87)
His discourse here seems to expose confusion between the personalized and gen-
eralized experiences, as Dani’s phrase, “I was afraid”, is a clear reference to his own
lived experience of the attack, after which he referred again to the unmarked, uni-
versal subject (“you (MS) kind of say…”). Directly after this, he returned to talking
about what he would have liked to have done — a method he utilized repeat-
edly throughout his interview; namely, retreating to the ‘safety’ of assertions about
what he could have done, after making ‘scary’ statements about what he did not do.
Dani also qualified his statements about his own fear with a reference to the sup-
posedly universal experience of fear in this type of situation, suggesting that the
generic ‘you (MS)’ must be scared in this context (lines 5–6 above). Indeed, Dani
demonstrated a great deal of ambivalence with regard to his own fear reactions.
Overall, a number of hypotheses could be suggested for the grammatical and
discursive methods used in the sections above, which, we contend, serve to create
a depersonalized or universalized sense of meaning. One hypothesis regards the
use of the masculine form of the ‘you’ pronoun as a generalizing or collectivizing
technique. It may be Dani’s way of encouraging, helping, or even requesting his
listeners to relate to him and his experiences. A second hypothesis is that Dani’s
manner of explaining his attitudes and behaviour may reflect an attempt at nor-
malization and legitimization; that is, to assert that what he did or did not do
was normal and acceptable within his society. A final hypothesis suggests that the
unmarked pronouns are utilized from within a rejection of ‘I’ statements, as a way
to distance the meaning, and perhaps the experience itself, from the speaker. Dani
may have been showing a desire to remove himself from his narratives, the situa-
tions within the narratives, or even the memories themselves.
Two degrees of separation

Perhaps one of the most prominent linguistic tendencies exhibited by the inter-
viewees was their patterned use of the second-person feminine singular (FS) pro-
noun. As previously mentioned, the FS form of this pronoun is customarily em-
ployed when directly addressing a female encoder (such as the interviewer) and/
or when making generalized statements usually reserved for contexts in which
two females are talking to each other — and even then, it is widely socially accept-
able and conventional to use the unmarked MS ‘you’ instead or interchangeably.
Thus, it is all the more notable that the majority of the individuals interviewed —
all men, most over the age of 40, and none having made a declaration of being a
feminist — would make such frequent use of the FS ‘you’ to express many of their
personal experiences in terror attacks.
Interestingly, Dani did this much less than the other interviewees, but when he
did, it was in sentences that were strikingly similar to those made by the others. In
fact, across interviews, this form was most often utilized in statements involving
the five senses. For instance, as Dani talked about the passengers on his bus who
had been wounded, he said, “Because one of them took two bullets in his foot, and
so much blood, God help us, you (FS) see the blood, you (FS) know the steps of the
bus, trickle drip drip drip, like some kind of, stream, of water, of blood” (3:93–95).
Later, Dani described his experience of witnessing a bus bombing, stating, “A sec-
ond later you (FS) see his roof go up in flames in a boom, something like you (FS)
never heard in your (FS) life” (3:233–234). Later in his interview, Dani told about
going back to pick up his bag, which had been taken into the bus company’s cus-
tody when Dani was taken to the hospital:
1 “You (FS) see the bus, after I went to the [bus company] branch, because my
bag was
2 still there, everything, they took my bag. Two weeks later, I, for no particular
reason, am
3 getting my things organized, I see tons of glass [shards] inside the bag. Tons
of glass. (4)
4 In the end, and you (FS) see the bus, God help us, it is full of holes, I am
telling you,
5 God, I, really, I ow-, owe God my life. You (FS) understand? (3) A huge
miracle, let’s
6 say that. A big miracle happened here, in my case, that I wasn’t hurt. There
are some
7 who you (FS) know, were killed, PLEASE …” (3:115–119)
Here again appears the phrase, “you (FS) see,” twice in the exact same formula-
tions (lines 1 and 4 above). Dani was willing to use an ‘I’ statement to describe see-
ing glass shards inside his bag (line 3 above), in addition to declaring that he, and
no one else, owes God his life (line 5 above). But perhaps it is too painful for Dani
to even utter the words describing his experience of seeing his bus after the attack.
Indeed, there is a qualitative difference between the sentences, “You (FS) see the
bus”, and “I see/saw the bus”. At the time of the interviews, I (the first author of this
paper and the interviewer) actually felt that those who used this linguistic tech-
nique were attempting to pull me into their story, using any means at their disposal
to make their statements more personal for me and thus, easier for me to connect
with. It is also possible that this technique may signify the speakers’ attempt to
educate me (their audience) about the experience, and/or share the experience
with me, perhaps for the simple sake of connecting or perhaps as a way of helping
me to better understand or identify with the speaker or situation.
It is still unclear whether these discursive choices may be the interviewees’
way of educating me in a very personal way about their experience, or possibly
an attempt to bring me into the experience with them. Their choice to use the
marked second-person FS pronoun, personalized for me, does indeed stand as a
stark contrast to the conventional pronoun use in this context. A likely hypothesis,
therefore, is that the use of the FS ‘you’ here provides a second level of distanc-
ing between the encoder and decoder; in fact, a type of grammatical projection
from the former onto the latter. It is also possible that the interviewees’ pronoun
choice is in some way related to the activity or personal role they describe in their
discourse. Generally speaking, they demonstrated much more difficulty in dis-
cussing the more passive experiences, such as looking, seeing, being (e.g., afraid
or not afraid), hearing, and feeling, from their own personalized perspective. The
prominent presence of the FS ‘you’ pronoun in many of the interviewees’ sensory
or emotional statements seems to indicate the likelihood of an unconscious at-
tachment of some special meaning to either the audience or the experience. This
hypothesis will now be further explored by contrasting some of these statements
with the appearance of the ‘I’ pronoun in the interviewees’ discourse and the at-
tendant circumstances.
Ownership of the active or heroic role

Another pattern throughout the interviewees’ discourse was their highly consis-
tent tendency to use ‘I’ statements at points in their narratives at which they were
particularly active or perhaps even ‘heroic’. Rarely were either the masculine or
feminine forms of the second-person singular pronoun used on these occasions,
and because of this degree of consistency we would suggest that there is an under-
lying message connected to the usage of the first-person singular pronoun, per-
haps indicating the existence of a larger social discourse revolving around this
message.
Dani provided a particularly interesting case for the analysis of the use of the
‘I’ pronoun, as much of both the form and content of his discourse seemed preoc-
cupied with his role in both the terror attacks and the traffic accident in which
he was involved. Below is his narrative of the terror attack he experienced most
directly, in which he describes in detail his own actions before and while the ter-
rorist was shooting at his bus:
1 “I am driving, line 22, it was winter, February, rain. (1) Approach the bus
stop, take on the
2 passengers, take, you (FS) know, [bus] passes, money (in Hebrew), MONEY.
3 Suddenly I see someone come to a standstill in front of the bus. (1) I do to
him like ‘Go
4 past.’ (2) Because I want to put on the blinker and leave the bus stop. And
then he winks,
5 winks his eye at me, does like this (winks at me), I do to him like ‘What?’,
[he] takes out
6 the zipper, coat, takes out a rifle and ‘Brrrrrrrrr’ (sound of automatic weapon
firing in
7 succession). And I, am I dreaming (in Hebrew)? I DREAM? What? What?
8 Straight away, like [they] taught me in the army, I bent down underneath the
steering
9 wheel, I am small. The bullets passed me over my head, he fired in a burst, in
automatic,
10 not single shots, ONE ONE, in a burst. I went down underneath, with the
11 steering wheel, and I started to drive. I wanted to run him over, but he got
away. Now I
12 look, I see him pump full of bullets the, the people who were at the bus stop.
(2) What did
13 I do, I got out of there, I went to the right towards [name of hospital], there
was a hospital
14 nearby, I went off the route, my people were wounded,10 tons of blood on the
bus. I said
15 ‘I have to get the bus out, otherwise he is tearing us apart,’ understand (FS)?”
(3:66–75)
This entire narrative is told with only ‘I’ statements, and not a single use of second-
person pronouns of either gender (save for direct dialogue with me). Dani placed
himself here as the central character, the actor within his narrative, thus creating
a sense that he was present and active in this experience. He drives, puts on his
blinker, bends and goes down, looks, sees, gets out, and goes off (the route) — all
verbs that require one to be alive, conscious, and able to use his wits and strength.
In addition to the form, the content of Dani’s narrative also contributes a great
deal to the impression here of him as the ‘heroic’ actor of the story. Indeed, amidst
all the chaos, he is able to think quickly enough to not only save his own life, but
also to spring into action, extricate the bus and its passengers from the scene, and
10.â•‡ This phrase is particularly difficult to translate, as the construction in Hebrew is highly
personalized, protective, and perhaps even military in nature — something that an army com-
mander might say in reference to his unit, or a school teacher about his or her students.
bring them to safety and to critical medical attention. The image presented here
is of Dani as the hero and saviour of those in his charge. There is only a hint of
remorse in Dani’s discourse, in his statement about what he had wanted to do (line
11 above), which notably also makes use of the ‘I’ pronoun.
A combination of all three of the discourse phenomena discussed in this paper
is apparent if we return to the larger narrative context of two of the quotations
presented earlier from Dani’s interview, within his narrative of the terror attack
that he witnessed:
1 “Again I am telling you (FS), luck. He, went through the traffic light which
was turning
2 yellow, went left, like passed through the intersection, and I, God said to me,
‘Stay there.
3 Don’t need to take it [the light]. For what? So two more minutes, what is
wrong with
4 that?’ A second later you (FS) see his roof rise up in the air in a boom, like
you (FS)
5 never heard in your (FS) life. Immediately I understood that it is a bombing, I
made a U-
6 turn, I escaped from that place. I escaped. You (FS) know what kind of a smell
[there
7 was]? God help us. From the roof smoke was coming out. The roof of the
back section
8 [of the accordion-style double bus] totally split into two. So you (FS) say
luck? I believe
9 in luck, I believe in luck, I be-, no doubt about it. Luck is a separate part of
me. 11 You
10 (MS) say that if I had stayed close to him, I also would have gone. Because that
bombing
11 demolished his whole back section, that huge bus” (3:231–238).
Here, Dani made an immediate switch between the second-person FS and first-
person pronouns when the action and actor in the sentences shifted from rela-
tively passive to active. This can be seen particularly prominently in lines 4–5,
when the FS ‘you’ is used with the actions of seeing and hearing the effects of the
bombing, giving a connotation of being acted upon or passively being exposed
to these experiences. This contrasts with the subsequent two sentences, in which
11.â•‡ From the context of this statement, it seems likely that Dani may have said or meant “insepa-
rable” or “integral” rather than “separate” here. Although the transcript reflects what was heard
on the tape to the best ability of the transcriber, the original recording may not have been of a
good enough quality to permit a correct hearing of this phrase.
Dani utilized the ‘I’ pronoun in conjunction with understanding that a bombing
had taken place, making the bus turn around, and escaping from the scene of the
attack — all initiatives performed consciously and actively by Dani himself.
We suggest that the interviewee’s use of the first-person singular pronoun may
signify a willingness and capability to claim the subject of the statement as his
own, which in turn may signify some level of acceptance of the described events
and perhaps a belief that his audience would agree with this appraisal. Indeed, the
majority of the interviewees appeared more comfortable claiming ownership (dis-
cursively) of an experience if it involved them playing an active role, or perform-
ing their duties in a manner perceived as heroic. Contrarily, more passive activi-
ties, such as sensory events (e.g., seeing, hearing, smelling) and the experiencing
of the stressor, seemed to require a distancing from themselves or projection onto
someone else in order to be made sense of or be accepted into their narrative at all.
It is possible that these linguistic patterns reflect a message sent by the hegemonic
discourse of Israeli society; namely, that it is not ‘acceptable’ to be affected by an
event. Rather, perhaps one must actively affect the event itself — only then can the
narrator/actor be proud of his actions, and be given the social opportunity or right
to claim the experience as his own, both experientially and linguistically.
A return to the text to explore dual messages in both form and content
The above analysis emerged directly from the interview transcript, as these discur-
sive phenomena simply commanded attention, almost screaming that ‘something
interesting’ was happening within and surrounding them. It took a great deal of
time, however, to find the ‘missing link’ that would tie these various linguistic
signs and discursive forms into a cohesive story explaining the larger picture. It
was only after conducting a thorough analysis of the content of the following text
section that we were able to understand the central message underlying Dani’s en-
tire narrative, and perhaps those of the other interviewees. Although portions of it
have been displayed and analysed above (with regard to the form of the texts), we
present here the complete section directly from the transcript, as the interaction
and the process of his story-telling (with regard to the content of the texts) is par-
ticularly relevant. The section began as Dani described some of his (self-defined
“dangerous”) army experiences, after which I asked him how this period was for
him, to which he responded:
1 D: Fine, challenging. A challenge. I like the dangers. I like them. You (FS) know.
2 They say that, masochist kind of, masochism, you (FS) know? I am like that.
Like
3 to put myself in danger, I, don’t know. In the attack that I had (2), OK we will
get
4 back to the attack, I believe, so, uhh, I will just tell you (FS). If I had had a
gun, I
5 would have gotten off [the bus]. And I wanted to get off, I wanted, like, when I
got
6 the bus away from the shooting, from the gunfire, from the danger, I wanted to go
7 back to, to that place, because he kept shooting.
8 A: So —
9 D: I understood, and I was not afraid.
10 A: OK. Tell me about the first [terror attack], tell me from the beginning.
11 D: Whi-, from which attack? From the shooting attack, let’s (FS) put it like this.
I am
12 driving, line 22, it was winter, February, rain. (1) Approach the bus stop, take
on the
13 passengers, take, you (FS) know, [bus] passes, money (in Hebrew), MONEY.
14 Suddenly I see someone come to a standstill in front of the bus. (1) I do
15 to him like ‘Go past.’ (2) Because I want to put on the blinker and leave the
bus
16 stop. And then he winks, winks his eye at me, does like this (winks at me), I do
17 to him like ‘What?’, [he] takes out the zipper, coat, takes out a rifle and
‘Brrrrrrrrr’
18 (sound of automatic weapon firing in succession). And I, am I dreaming (in
19 Hebrew)? I DREAM? What? What? Straight away, like [they] taught
20 me in the army, I bent down underneath the steering wheel, I am small. The
bullets
21 passed me over my head, he fired in a burst, in automatic, not single shots,
ONE ONE,
22 in a burst. I went down underneath, with the steering wheel, and I
23 started to drive. I wanted to run him over, but he got away. Now I look, I see
him
24 pump full of bullets the, the people who were at the bus stop. (2) What did I
do, I
25 got out of there, I went to the right towards [name of hospital], there was a
hospital
26 nearby, I went off the route, my people were wounded, tons of blood on the
bus. I
27 said ‘I have to get the bus out, otherwise he is tearing us apart,’ understand
(FS)?
28 And so, actually, I wanted to go back, like, that’s it, I saved the bus, now I want
to
29 go back to that place, like, how do they say? To see what is the condition of
the
30 terrorist, to see if they killed him, didn’t kill him, what he is doing, maybe it
is
31 possible to bring him under control. You (FS) understand? There is no fear in
me,
32 I am not afraid. I didn’t go into shock, no nothing. You can ask [name of the
33 psychologist at the bus company]. They came, something like thirty
reporters,
34 (she) says to me ‘Are you able to talk?’, I told her ‘Yes.’ And two days later I
35 went back to work. There is no fear in me, there is no fear in my lexicon, I
don’t
36 have it. (2)
37 A: OK.
38 D: I am not afraid, I don’t know why, maybe I am not normal.
39 A: Really, in, during the [actual moment] —
40 D: I was afraid, I was afraid. But when it is/was over, you (MS) kind of say ‘My
41 God, what a,’ like, if it had been possible, I would have wanted to go back and
do
42 things better, maybe to kill him too. You (FS) understand?
43 A: Um-hmm.
44 D: I was afraid, and I won’t say that I wasn’t afraid, I was sh-, shaking. There is
no,
45 I don’t have, what is it? A pers-, a terrorist is shooting at you (MS) from four
46 meters away, you (MS) won’t be scared? You (MS) are not normal if you (MS)
47 won’t be scared. I screamed ‘Mama!’ and everything. But, (2) that’s it, how do
48 they say? God tests us. (3:57–88)
Dani began by referring to his enjoyment of the dangers and challenges of his army
role, and his narrative was peppered with four separate declarations that he is and/
or was not afraid and that he has no fear, neither in himself nor in his “lexicon”
(lines 9, 31–32, 35–36, and 38). At first, these assertions were emphatic, appearing
to reflect a sense of pride in what Dani seems to view as a notable accomplishment.
In lines 32–33, for instance, he elaborated that he experienced no traumatic effects
as a result of the attack, and even assured me that I will receive a corroborating
report if I check his statements with another source. In line 38, however, we see
his ‘façade’ break slightly, as he questioned why he has/had no fear, and expressed
uncertainty with regard to his normality. I scarcely said three words in response
before he interjected, suddenly admitting readily that he was indeed afraid at the
time (line 40).
Immediately after this, however, Dani distanced himself discursively from

what may have seemed a powerful and ‘scary’ statement to make, and then contin-
ued to alternate between statements about what he would have wanted to do (lines
41–42), and his actual feelings of fear and even the physiological manifestation of
this reaction at the time (line 44). Interestingly, in lines 44–45, Dani appeared to
make an attempt to repeat his contention that “there is no fear in me…I don’t have
it” (lines 35–36), but was unable or unwilling to complete this statement. He fol-
lowed this by once again retreating to the unmarked, universal and generic discur-
sive technique (lines 45–47), finally imparting what we suggest is his summation
statement: “You are not normal if you won’t be scared” (lines 46–47).
There is clearly an emotionally charged and highly ambivalent ‘play’ with
words and meanings in Dani’s discourse, particularly surrounding the issues of
fear and normality. While at one juncture, he stated categorically that fear does
not exist in his lexicon, only seconds later, he asserted not only that he was afraid,
but that he “won’t say that [he] wasn’t afraid”. Meanwhile, he questioned whether
he is normal because of his lack of fear, then admitted that he is afraid, and finally
agreed that the universal ‘you’ is indeed not normal if [he] is not afraid. He ap-
pears to directly contradict statements he made mere sentences beforehand; and
yet, there may indeed be an internal logic to Dani’s discourse. Perhaps what may
appear to be contradictions are actually the signs of Dani attempting to make sense
of his ambivalence and his own realizations that some of his statements may seem
to be paradoxical. Indeed, there may be a process at work within the discourse — a
gradual shift from unwillingness/inability to willingness/ability to admit to his fear
reactions, and an attempt to accept his behaviour, particularly through the com-
municative strategies that may encourage collectivization and universalization.
Indeed, returning to the initial section of the above text, we see a stark split
between Dani’s earlier assertions and his summation statement. Before I had even
mentioned the topic of terror attacks, and even coupled with an admission of
his understanding that we will “get back” to this issue, he was unable to contain
himself and thus presented the opening statement of his narrative of the attack:
“If I had had a gun, I would have gotten off [the bus]” (read: to take care of the
situation; lines 4–5). We suggest that this sentence is essentially the title of Dani’s
narrative of this event, and his placement of it at this juncture may be his way of
clarifying that this is, in his eyes, the most important facet of his story. Indeed, in
this single unbroken section of text, Dani expressed in five different places and
ways his feelings about what he wanted to do, wished he had done, and would have
wanted to do if the circumstances had been different (lines 4–7, 23, 28–29, 30–31,
and 41–42); notably, Dani’s ‘title sentence’ is followed by the most elaborated ex-
pression of this. It seems crucial for him to make his point unequivocally and early
on in — or even as a prelude to — the narrative.
It is actually Dani who seems unable to accept or make peace with his ac-
tions, and perceived lack thereof, during this event. This is particularly visible in
lines 28–29, when his use of “that’s it” sends a stark message as to what he and/or
his society expected of him in this context, and his sense that he did not live up
to these expectations (i.e., ‘save the bus — done; kill the terrorist — not done’). In
fact, all the interviewees made statements of this nature, revealing expressions of
doubt, regret, guilt, and responsibility. Much of their discourse was peppered with
the interjections, “I should have…”; “I would have…”; “I wanted to…”; or “I wish I
had…”, as if they were apologizing for not being ‘heroic’ enough, or ‘man’ enough,
or ‘Israeli’ enough. The drivers seem to feel a need to prove themselves as power-
ful, honourable, and ‘acceptable’ members of their society. We suggest that these
feelings spill over into their work, as their discourse showed an almost overactive
sense of obligation to protect and/or save their clientele, even under impossible
circumstances.
Discussion
This research has illuminated a number of findings with regard to the manners in
which these bus drivers narrated their experiences, in particular, and in which the
larger social discourse can influence the individual discourse of its members, in
general. We have proposed here that the discursive choices — reflected in the form
perhaps even more succinctly than in the manifest content — made by Dani in his
narratives serve to express his feelings about himself, his bus and work, his society,
and his sense of responsibility in relation to the terror events he experienced.
Of course, one could suggest that the linguistic and discursive techniques
highlighted in this paper are just common, ‘normal’, or simply ‘how people talk’,
particularly in the context of narratives of stressful life events. This may or may not
be the case; nonetheless, we contend that these discursive choices are not random
and certainly not meaningless. Embedded within the moments and positions in
which certain linguistic signs are used, there is a meaning, a message, a systematic
nature, and a significance to both this usage and the surrounding context. With
few exceptions, the discursive patterns that emerged throughout these interviews
are the following:
1. The second-person masculine singular decoder (‘you’ (MS)) is frequently the
subject of the sentence when:
a. the experience described is distanced emotionally from the speaker, or the
speaker is attempting to distance the experience from himself; and/or
b. the speaker is describing an experience in which he was passive and/or

being acted upon (particularly by the perpetrator of the terror attack).
2. The second-person feminine singular decoder (‘you’ (FS)) is frequently the
subject of the sentence when:
a. the speaker is describing something involving difficult/stressful sensory
experiences (particularly relating to the effects or after-effects of the terror
attack); and/or
b. the speaker is describing something that he feels is particularly important
for the (female) interviewer to know, understand, and/or experience.
3. The singular encoder (‘I’) is frequently the subject of the sentence when the
speaker is describing an experience in which he was performing in an active
and/or ‘heroic’ manner.
In addition, if we go one step further and connect the linguistic patterns to the
stated personal feelings and attitudes of the interviewees about their experiences
and surrounding society, it may be possible to offer an explanation as to why the
choices made and strategies utilized in the discourses occurred. We would there-
fore offer the following interpretive hypotheses:
1. The second-person masculine singular decoder (‘you’ (MS)) is frequently the
subject of the sentence when the speaker is making an attempt to universalize,
collectivize, and/or normalize the experience he is describing.
2. The second-person feminine singular decoder (‘you’ (FS)) is frequently the
subject of the sentence when the speaker is making an attempt to connect
personally with the (female) interviewer, in order to bring her into the experi-
ence (i.e., to learn about it, to understand and/or experience it with him, or to
project it onto her and away from himself).
3. The gender-neutral singular encoder (‘I’) is frequently the subject of the sen-
tence when the speaker feels comfortable with or even proud of some aspect of
the experience described (particularly with regard to his behaviour), and/or is
confident that the surrounding society would find his descriptions and actions
‘acceptable’.
So what does all this mean? Why does this pattern emerge so consistently across
multiple individuals, interviews, and contexts? What messages do these linguistic
signs send, and what meanings are the interviewees attempting to impart through
their discursive choices?
According to a manuscript currently in process of publication by Gabriela
Spector-Mersel, a type of narrative discourse entitled the narrative identity card
offers the “representative version” of the given narrator’s self — an externalized,
ideal identity created out of an attempt to self-represent according to social norms
of acceptability and belongingness. This type of narrative is characterized by a high

degree of “cultural sensitivity”, reflecting close attention paid to the teller’s percep-
tion of what is allowed and what is frowned upon within his society and its hege-
monic discourse. ‘Acceptable’ topics and themes, and manners of discussing them,
are key ingredients of the narrative identity card, while ‘unacceptable’ issues are
notable in their absence and surrounding silence. Spector-Mersel suggests that it
is this type of narrative that presents the “key cultural plot or storyline”, and a deep
analysis of these narratives can expose the greatest amount of information about
the culture surrounding the interviewee. In this sense, Dani’s ‘broken’ narratives —
filled with ambivalence and seeming contradictions — can be seen as a reflection
of his feelings and attitudes about the hegemonic cultural discourse (particularly
in relation to coping, heroism, and resilience) that surrounds him, and the conflict
between these attitudes and his own individual feelings and resulting discourse.
Viewed through this lens, Dani’s patterns of pronoun use fit with the hypoth-
eses suggested here. He was barely willing to speak of the emotional effects of the
terror attack, and spent most of his interview attempting to deny their existence.
His use of the FS ‘you’ is relatively low, as he had no need or opportunity to attempt
to bring me into his emotional or sensory experiences — as they simply do not ex-
ist (or so he wanted his audience to believe). Dani made a number of ‘I’ statements
with regard to the actions he did perform, and indeed, although he also mentioned
not being able to prevent the attack, he did think and act quickly during it, possibly
preventing much greater injury to his passengers by evacuating the bus immedi-
ately to a nearby hospital. And yet, he repeatedly stated that he wished he could
have done more, and would have done more if circumstances had permitted.
Predictably, therefore, it is the unmarked MS ‘you’ that receives the most fre-
quent usage in Dani’s discourse, which can be seen as a reflection of Dani’s efforts
to ‘fit in’ with his society, to universalize his actions and the experience itself, and
to present the argument that he is no better or worse than ‘the next guy’, who is
“not normal if he [isn’t] afraid”. His ambivalence, however, lies in his desire to
indeed be better than ‘the next guy’ — he wishes he had behaved more heroically,
and he wishes he hadn’t been afraid. Indeed, the consistent message of his inter-
view appears to be a presentation of his perception of ‘the ideal Israeli man’, and his
attempts to prove that he fits the description. When I asked Dani how he defines
the ‘Israeli man’, he responded:
1 “Israeli man? It is a person who copes. A person who experienced things,
and needs
2 to give, needs to cope with them, things that are not nice, things, (1) difficult
things,
3 let’s (FS) say army, and that, uhh, people don’t know. A man who needs to
cope
4 with dangers and needs to give them solutions, let’s (FS) say it like that.
Always
5 need to be vigilant/ready” (3:1315–1317).
He then expanded on these comments, discussing his country and its societal ex-
pectations:
1 “…One needs to be masculine in, in this country, in my opinion. Because it
(FS) is a
2 country, it (MS) is a country, how will I explain this to you (FS)? (4) It (MS)
is a
3 country that is like, inside in, don’t get offended (FS), I, men, courage, people
that
4 are not afraid, people that are built, that their heart is strong, let’s (FS) say it
like
5 that. Because if not, then it is difficult to live in this (FS) country, with
everything
6 that happens” (3:1324–1329).
When I then asked him how Israeli society relates to someone who does not live
up to these standards, after a brief pause he replied, “The society, pities him in
my opinion” (3:1333). Herein lies the crux of the dilemma for Dani. He tries to
admit that he wasn’t afraid, but must ultimately admit that he was, and then at-
tempts to justify his own fear by protesting that everyone would react in the same
way. But his deeply-held belief is the exact opposite: that a real Israeli man copes
no matter what; deals with dangers by finding solutions and not by falling apart;
is masculine, courageous, and unafraid. A real Israeli man’s heart is strong, and
he is built to withstand all the difficulties involved with living in Israel. Anything
less deserves pity, and is not worthy of any sense of pride or personal ownership.
Indeed, we would hypothesize that if Dani had gone back to the scene of the terror
attack and managed to kill the shooter, he would have felt more justified claiming
ownership (as would be demonstrated in greater usage of the first-person singular
pronoun) of more, if not all, of his experiences during and after the attack. Even if
he had been emotionally affected by it, he might have been more willing to admit
this because he would have already established himself as worthy of social praise.
Conclusion
The present research highlights the intersection at which the discursive data from
the texts shown above meet the larger societal discourse that informs, influences,
and interacts with them. Indeed, we have attempted to demonstrate and explore
the triangular interplay between the individual, the event he experienced, and his
surrounding society, and how all three factors can affect and be affected by resil-
ience within this context. Indeed, it must be asked: Does Israeli society support the
individual in a crisis, or is it the other way around? Can societal expectations and
demands encourage, or even force, the individual’s particular response to stress,
and if so, how? The hegemonic social discourse surrounding these bus drivers is
one that applauds heroism and (at best) disapproves of (and at worst, silences)
anything less. Does Israeli society permit its members to be fearful, or upset, or
anything other than warriors and heroes? Perhaps this is why these interviewees
were so concerned with not having done ‘enough’ — that is, whether they acted
heroically enough to be ‘allowed’ to take pride in their actions.
What emerges, therefore, is an attestation to more than simply personal or
individual resilience; rather, there appears to be a type of societal or collective re-
silience as well. For better or worse, these individuals feel compelled by their com-
munity and society to be strong, and the results of this pressure emerge through
the ‘broken’ discourse of the interviewees, in the form of ambivalence and ‘word
play’. They are able to claim experiences as their own only when they are or were
acting ‘heroically’, and seem compelled to distance themselves from or project
onto others statements about passive experiences such as fear and negative effects
of stress. Indeed, it could be hypothesized that resilience in this societal context is
uniquely collective; as if the passive experience of being ‘traumatized’ or ‘wound-
ed’ cannot be taken on alone in this society, and must be connected in some way
to another person, or to the collective.
The constant attempts made by the interviewees to make their experiences
sound universal, commonplace, and generic — essentially, the experiences of ‘ev-
eryperson’ — indeed seem to suggest a need to connect to their collective in some
way. It could be possible that living through a terror attack such as a bombing is
much more of a solitary experience than many other types of violent events or
stressors (such as war or traffic accidents). Indeed, many of the individuals who
were interviewed expressed a type of solitude and an isolation within their expe-
riences, often manifested in statements such as, “You cannot imagine what it is”,
“It is impossible to describe”, and “I cannot even begin to tell you…”. It may be
this very isolation that leads these individuals to attempt to share and universal-
ize their experiences, utilizing any methods available to them. Indeed, it is this
constant interplay between the individual, the event, and the surrounding societal
discourse that may be the essential ingredient in a particular type of resilience at

work in this context, which allows these individuals — and this society — to cope
well with a tremendous amount of fear, stress, and pain.
Acknowledgments
I (the primary author, ASP) would like to thank my advisors, Professor Dan Bar-On (z”l), Pro-
fessor Shifra Sagy, and Professor Yishai Tobin, for their dedicated, thoughtful, and tireless efforts
to guide me through the doctoral research process. I would also like to express my gratitude to
the bus drivers who agreed to be interviewed for this project, and to Yael Dover and Yael Ayalon,
the psychologist and social worker (respectively) at Egged Bus Company in Jerusalem, for their
professional support and cooperation in the participant recruitment process. Finally, I would
like to thank the Kreitman Fellowship Foundation at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, since
my acceptance as a Kreitman scholarship fellow is partly responsible for allowing this article to
come to fruition.
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Chapter 9
Beyond narrative
The shape of traumatic testimony
Molly Andrews
University of East London, UK
This chapter will explore the limits and possibilities of narratives in which indi-
viduals turn to language to communicate the inexpressibility of experiences they
have endured. The central dilemma for many survivors of trauma is that they
must tell their stories, and yet their stories cannot be told. Traumatic experiences
often defy understanding. Testimony of those who have survived can be marked
by what is not there: coherence, structure, meaning, comprehensibility. The
actual emplotment of trauma testimony into conventional narrative configura-
tions — contained in time- transforms them into something which they are not:
experiences which are endowed with a particular wholeness, which occurred in
the past, and which have now ended. The paper concludes with a discussion of
the relationship between language and silence in traumatic testimony.
Abraham Lewin’s diary, posthumously published as Cups of Tears, documents daily

life in the Warsaw Ghetto. In these pages, he reflects on both the impossibility and
the necessity of expressing his thoughts and feelings. For instance, he describes the
day his wife, along with many others, was taken away to Treblinka: ‘Eclipse of the
sun, universal blackness. My Luba was taken away.’ He is a committed diarist who,
nonetheless, doubts what is to be gained by capturing in words the horror which
surrounds him.
But perhaps because the disaster is so great there is nothing to be gained by ex-
pressing in words everything that we feel. Only if we were capable of tearing out
by the force of our pent-up anguish the greatest of all mountains, a Mount Everest,
and with all our hatred and strength hurling it down on the heads of the German
murderers of our young and old — this would be the only fitting reaction on our
part. Words are beyond us now.
Our hearts are empty and made of stone.
(Cited in Wieviorka, 1994, pp.â•›24–25).
148 Molly Andrews
Commenting on this passage, Annette Wieviorka writes: ‘The victims are certainly
beyond words, and yet, dispossessed of everything, words are all they have left.
Words which will be the sole trace of an existence conceived not as that of an indi-
vidual but as that of a people.’ (Wierviorka, 1994, p.â•›25). This article concerns itself
generally with trauma testimony and the narrative challenges it poses, as individu-
als like Lewin turn to language to communicate the inexpressibility of experiences
they have endured. However, it is important to note that each trauma — while
sharing some characteristics with other trauma events — is unique, both in terms
of the ways in which individuals experience them, but also, critically, as historical
events. In using examples from the Holocaust, South Africa, the Naxalbari move-
ment in Bengal, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in this paper, I wish to highlight
certain features of traumatic testimonies, while at the same time respecting the
important differences between these ‘limit events.’
Geoffrey Hartman speaks of the injunction felt by many survivors of trauma,
sometimes following decades of silence: ‘Thou shalt tell.’ (1996, p.â•›13). But tell what,
and to whom? Who, who was not there, will understand that ultimately the experi-
ences defy understanding? Despite their deep and lingering anguish, many survi-
vors of trauma do feel compelled to tell their stories, not because they believe that in
so doing they will experience relief, but rather because not to do so is to betray those
who cannot do so. Their words testify to the very existence of a people. In Elie Wi-
esel’s words: ‘If someone else could have written my stories, I would not have written
them. I have written them in order to testify. My role is the role of the witness. Not to
tell, or to tell another story, is… to commit perjury.’ (quoted in Felman, 1994, p.â•›90).
The central dilemma for many survivors of trauma is that they must tell their
stories, and yet their stories cannot be told. The experiences which they have en-
dured defy understanding; the very act of rendering them into narrative form
lends them a coherence which they do not have. Isak Dinesen is quoted as saying
that any burden is bearable if it can be put into a story; but perhaps the psychologi-
cal reality is more complicated this. For some survivors of trauma, transforming
an event which is wholly absent of meaning into a story form might be to lose ‘the
force of its affront to understanding’ (Caruth, cited in Edkins, 2003, p.â•›41).
In this article, I will argue that oftentimes survivors of trauma articulate their
experiences in ways in which we who are ‘outside’ are unable to accept, and so we
begin a project to redeem the stories which we are told. This reshaping of blank
spaces is carried out in a number of ways, which I will crudely outline here. The
journey of redemption begins even before the transmission of the story, when we
tell ourselves that the process of telling will itself be a healing one — a journey from
suffering to recovery. We encourage a traditional emplotment — what happened
where, and when, to whom, and what followed after this — and even when this is
not offered, we reorganise what we have heard to fit such a mould. We regard those
Chapter 9.â•‡ Beyond narrative 149
who tell us their stories as somehow special, often over-identifying with them (and
thus appropriating their subject position as our own), while at the same time pre-
senting them as heroes. We are prone to over-interpret both what we are told and
what we are not told. And we refuse to accept that we can neither understand nor
represent that which has been told to us; that in many ways the experiences them-
selves are not capable of being understood nor represented.
Healing: Personal pain and social suffering
I have written elsewhere (Andrews, 2007) about the ‘myth of healing’ which re-
searchers often use to soothe our worries about the potentially detrimental effects
of the work which we undertake, particularly with vulnerable and/or wounded
others. Building upon the cornerstone of western psychology, we argue that it
is not only good for scholarly purposes that those who have endured suffering
should talk about it. Yes, it is important to document their experiences — for his-
torical and/or scholarly purposes — but it is also good, we persuade ourselves, for
them to talk to others (which may or may not include us). This overly simplistic
model has come under criticism from a number of different angles, two of which I
will address here: (1) this misconstrues the boundaries of the scholarly project; (2)
this conflates individual pain and the suffering of the community.
South African oral historian Sean Field has argued that ‘oral historians should
not cast themselves as “healers” … Oral history will neither heal nor cure but of-
fers subtle support to interviewees’ efforts to recompose their sense of self and
regenerate agency” (Field, 2006, p.â•›31). There has been much discussion of the
potential healing effects of giving testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Com-
mission (see, for instance, the account of Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, one of the
commissioners of the TRC, in Van de Merwe & Gobodo-Madikizela, 2007); how-
ever, many of the witnesses who did come before the commission did not have this
experience, and some even underwent a retraumatisation. However, there is no
evidence to suggest that the majority of people agreed to give testimony in order to
unburden themselves. While this may have been a motivation for some, there were
other concrete and practical reasons to testify, including the perceived possibility
of reparations for loss, acquiring new information about the fate of absent loved
ones, and contributing to the larger project of rebuilding the broken nation. Even
those who were retraumatised by giving testimony did not necessarily regret their
decision to participate, as their contribution may have achieved other ends, at the
same time that it caused them anguish.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not established as a mecha-
nism for providing individual therapy, nor could it perform that function in any
150 Molly Andrews
systematic way. While some of the rhetoric surrounding the commission implied
that personal suffering was likely to decrease as a result of providing testimony,
indeed this was not part of its mandate. Rather, the Promotion of National Unity
and Reconciliation Act, which established the Truth and Reconciliation Commis-
sion, refers to the desired goal of the ‘restoration of human and civil dignity’ (cited
in Field, 2006, p.â•›32). Critically, the restoration of civil dignity and the promise of
personal healing are different, and possibly at times conflicting, pursuits. Politi-
cally, the TRC was established as a forum for reconciling the factions of a radically
divided country. This was its function. The healing, if there was to be any, was for
the country, not for the individual. But this distinction was not always clear. Thus,
while the TRC banner which was in full view for much of the time stated: ‘The
TRC: Healing the Nation’ Desmond Tutu voiced a slightly different message at the
first victim hearing:
We pray that all those people who have been injured in either body or spirit may
receive healing through the work of this commission… We are charged to unearth
the truth about our dark past. To lay the ghosts of that past, so that they will not
return to haunt us and that we will hereby contribute to the healing of a trauma-
tized and wounded people. For all of us in South Africa are a wounded people.
(cited in Field, 2006, p.â•›32).
The country needs to be healed, and it requires the participation of its people in or-
der to ‘unearth the truth’ in order to ‘lay the ghosts of the past.’ In Tutu’s statement,
there is an assumed compatibility between the dual goals of realising individual
and communal healing.
However, in her work on the Naxalbari movement in Bengal, Srila Roy has ar-
gued that personal pain, when articulated in public testimony, is transformed into
‘social suffering’; the individual becomes emblematic of individuals of a kind, and
the particularities of their story — the aspects which make it their story — are lost.
In the transformation of personal pain into social suffering, the witness is trans-
posed from one that embodies personal trauma to a metaphor of collective vio-
lence and suffering……personal pain can be silenced in the transformation into
collective suffering. …the very structure of testimony, as a genre, conditions the
public articulation of pain in ways that seriously compromise a representation of
the individual subject in pain. … the act of testimony gives voice to the silence
of pain in the public domain, it forecloses the possibility of listening to and of
acknowledging personal pain…. Testimony is, in the final instance, a speech act
that draws its meaning from a collective, plural ‘us’ rather than the ‘I’ who is in
pain. (Roy, 2006, p.â•›10).
Roy’s argument, and one which seems to be upheld by many in South Africa, is
that testifying in public about private pain might ultimately lead to a silencing of
the individual sufferer, even at the same time that it might serve to further other,
desirable ends, such as establishing a common ground of truth for the rebuilding
of shattered communities.
Jean Améry is one of several well-known writers who survived the Holocaust,
only to take his own life years later.1 Before his death, he recorded feeling little
comfort from the years which separated him from Auschwitz, Buchenwald and
Bergen-Belsen, where he had been an inmate: ‘No remembering has become a
mere memory… Nothing has healed… Where is it decreed that enlightenment
must be free of emotion?’ (cited in Hartman, 1996, p.â•›137). Time does not heal
all wounds; indeed, on the contrary, as Lawrence Langer warns ‘we must learn to
suspect the effect as well as the intent of bracing pieties like “redeeming” and “sal-
vation” when they are used to shape our understanding of the ordeal of former vic-
tims of Nazi oppression’ (Langer, 1991, p.â•›2). While time and narrative are always
intricately bound to one another — and if, what and how trauma is narrated will
be influenced in part by the distance of time from the event — time alone neither
creates nor erases the narrative impulse of trauma survivors.
Life and narrative
Jerome Bruner argues that narrative is the only means we have for describing
‘lived time’. “[A]rt imitates life… life imitates art. Narrative imitates life, life imi-
tates narrative” (1987, pp.â•›12–13). Narratives structure our experience, and they
are the means by which we organize our memories. It has become commonplace
to say that we are the stories we tell, indeed the stories we live. Our stories are our
identity, and without them, we lose our compass.
There is considerable debate amongst narrative scholars regarding to what ex-
tent narrative is an inherent quality of human experience. Is life, as Roland Barthes
famously contends, just ‘scrambled messages’ (communications brouillées) (cited
in Carr, 1986, p.â•›14)? Or rather, does life itself, in the words of Paul Ricoeur ‘de-
mand narrative’ (1991, p.â•›29)? Ricoeur argues that there is a ‘pre-narrative quality
1.â•‡ Included in this group are such renowned figures as the Romanian-French poet Paul Celan,
the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski, and the Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi (though
whether or not Levi’s death was accidental is still debated). When Levi heard of Améry’s sui-
cide in 1978, he commented that the latter’s last book on the death camps should be seen as “as
the bitterest of suicide notes” (Gambetta, 1999,). When Levi’s close friend, Ferdinando Camon,
heard the news of Levi’s own death (in 1987), he commented “This suicide must be backdated to
1945. It did not happen then because Primo wanted (and had to) write. Now, having completed
his work (The Drowned and the Saved was the end of the cycle) he could kill himself. And he
did” (Gambetta, 1999).
152 Molly Andrews
of human experience’, and it is because of this that we can speak of life as ‘a story
in its nascent form…an activity and a passion in search of a narrative’ (Ricoeur,
1991, p.â•›29; italics in the original). But even while narratives might in some sense
be inherent to the structure of life — in that life is ‘in search of narrative’ — they
are not and cannot be synonymous with life. And hence the questions persist: By
structuring our experiences into traditional narrative form, do we lend to them
a coherence and unity which raw life does not contain? Are narratives ultimately
products of our own creativity, our human way of lending order to a world which
is characterized by chaos and disorder? Ricoeur’s response to these pressing issues
can be summarized in his characterization of narrative as a ‘synthesis of the heter-
ogenous’ (1984, p.â•›64), whereby concordance and discordance — which lie at the
heart of narrative and its twin sister time — exist in a dynamic tension with each
other. The emplotment of events and incidents into a narrative “â†œ‘grasps together’
and integrates into one whole and complete story multiple and scattered events”
(Ricoeur, 1984, p.â•›x). Thus Ricoeur describes the ‘discordant concordance of nar-
rative and the concordant discordance of time’ (Ricoeur, 1991, p.â•›32).
When we tell our stories, there is a certain pressure to deliver them within an
Aristotelian conventional narrative configuration — one in which concordance
looms large, where there is a sense of the connection between events, where the
conclusion is ‘congruent with the episodes brought together by the story’ (Ricoeur,
1984, p.â•›67). According to Brockmeier (2008) these stories are ‘narratives told ac-
cording to the conventions of linearity, continuity, closure, and omniscience…
[and] are often taken as the quasi-natural condition of narrative’ (Brockmeier,
2008, p.â•›28). Typically, these are stories with beginnings, middles, and endings. As
historian William Cronon writes:
What distinguishes stories from other forms of discourses is that they describe
an action that begins, continues over a well-defined period of time, and finally
draws to a definite close, with consequences that become meaningful because of
their placement within the narrative. Completed action gives a story its unity, and
allows us to evaluate and judge an act by its results. (1992, p.â•›1367).
It is precisely this conventional configuration, this ‘natural condition of narrative’

which eludes so many survivors of trauma when they attempt to give an account
of that which they have endured. There is a pressure to provide a certain kind of
narrative, the story of their lived experience, and this emplotment ‘transforms a
succession of events into one meaningful whole” (1984, p.â•›67). But this transfor-
mation is a product of human creation. As Ricoeur describes it: ‘I see in the plots
we invent the privileged means by which we re-configure our confused, unformed,
and at the limit mute temporal experience’ (1984, p.â•›xi). The very reconfiguration
of events into a plot ‘imposes “the sense of an ending” on the indefinite succession
of incidents’ (1984, p.â•›67). Kermode argues that ‘In “making sense” of the world
we… feel a need to experience that concordance of beginning, middle and end
which is the essence of our explanatory fictions…’ (Kermode, 1968, pp.â•›35–36).
But such fictions ‘degenerate’ into ‘myths’ whenever we actually believe them or
ascribe their narrative properties to the real ‘whenever they are not consciously
held to be fictive’ (p.â•›39). How we construct the stories of our lives not only assists
us in making sense of our lives, but is itself a reflection of our framework for mak-
ing sense of the world and our place within it. But what happens when no sense
can be made?
Beginnings of narratives demarcate the point from which all subsequent ac-
tion must follow. But if beginnings are important, endings are even more so. In
the words of Aristotle, ‘the end is everywhere the chief thing’ (cited in Cronon,
1992, p.â•›1367). The ending of a story is its most crucial component, because it is
only here that we can appreciate where all the preceding events have been leading.
As Paul Ricoeur comments, the story’s conclusion is ‘the pole of attraction of the
entire development’ (cited in McQuillan, 2000, p.â•›259), and elsewhere, ‘the point
of view from which the story can be perceived as forming a whole’ (1984, p.â•›67).
Only when we can emplot our experiences (which Ricoeur describes as ‘an act of
the productive imagination’ (1984, p.â•›76), can we decipher meaning in the events
of our lives.
But in order to narrate our experiences, ‘we force our stories on a world that
doesn’t fit them’ (Cronon, 1992, p.â•›1367). As Jackson observes:
The idea that any human life moves serially and progressively from a determinate
beginning, via a middle passage, towards an ethically or aesthetically satisfying
conclusion, is as artificial as the idea of a river running straightforwardly to the
sea. Lives and rivers periodically flood and run dry; rapids alternate with calm
stretches, shallows with depths; and there are places where eddies, counter-cur-
rents, undertows, cross-currents, backwaters and dark reaches make navigation
unpredictable (Jackson, 2002, p.â•›22).
Life is characterized by an infinite unfolding of time. There is no beginning, mid-

dle or end, just a state of forever continuing. We organize our life and our past
into structured events precisely because that contains them for us, renders them
more manageable. We cannot keep a ‘forever continuing’ entity in our heads; it
surpasses even the great potential of our imagination, and is something which
we can only dip into once in a while, when we afford ourselves the opportunity to
contemplate the structure of life. But on a daily basis, we do not do this; we cannot
do this, the task is simply too enormous. And so experience is broken down into
constituent parts. From this partitioning, we gain the ability to make sense of what
we are living. But we lose something as well. Although our life can be recounted
154 Molly Andrews
as a story, there are aspects of our human experience which cannot be contained
within the boundaries of a conventional narrative structure. This is particularly so
in trauma testimony.
Ricoeur devotes a significant amount of attention to considering the narrative
potential of ‘untold stories’. He comments:
We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being nar-
rated. This remark takes on its full force when we refer to the necessity to save the
history of the defeated and the lost. The whole history of suffering cries out for
vengeance and calls for narrative. (Ricoeur, 1984, p.â•›75)
And yet to narrate suffering can prove impossible for some. Chris Colvin has
argued that ‘Stories framed as stories of “trauma” are always already implicated
in some way in a specific perspective on psychological suffering and recovery’
(Colvin, 2003, p.â•›155). The very set-up of the TRC in which witnesses gave their
testimony imposed on their narrative a premature closure (an ‘ending’), which,
however hoped for, was not for them a reality. Colvin provides the example of
Mbuyiselo Coquorha, who endured torture and multiple forms of deprivation un-
der apartheid. A crucial component of Coquorha’s testimony was his insistence
that the effects of this treatment were ongoing, into the present time. ‘This is what
they have done to me, and I still cannot eat. I am still sick. What will happen to
me? I ask you, what will become of me?’ he asks the commissioners. As Colvin
comments:
… the historical moment is not, for him, a new one in any tangible way. He still
suffers physically and psychologically from his torture. He still lives in poverty
and fears for his life. He still has not been able to recover from a past (and a pres-
ent) that keeps him too thin, too medicated, too hungry, and too vulnerable. Sto-
rytelling here is not redemptive exercise (Colvin, 2003, pp.â•›163–164).
Some of those who gave testimony before the TRC participated in other, non-
official, community-based storytelling ventures. Here, the focus was not on the
therapeutic effects of telling trauma. Rather ‘crafting the history of the struggle
means writing a history about a struggle that is not over. Time has passed but the
suffering and the struggling continues’ (Colvin, 2003, p.â•›165). The benefit which
is derived from such communal storytelling is one of bonding. As people listen to
the stories of others, they can recognise some elements of their own experience.
They know that if and when they come to tell their story, others will, in turn,
recognise themselves. This mirroring between self and other functions as connec-
tive tissue between traumatized individuals and their community.
Narratives and traumatic testimony
Traumatic testimony is marked by what is not there: coherence, structure, mean-

ing, comprehensibility. Edkins has articulated the bind of the trauma survivor for
whom ‘it is both impossible to speak, and impossible not to speak’ (p.â•›41). Their
stories can only be told in narrative form, and as argued earlier in this paper, that
very form lends the testimony a framework of meaning which, critically, it lacks.
Edkins and others have argued that the very conception of time — which lies at the
heart of narrative construction — is different in the articulation of trauma. Edkins
distinguishes between ‘trauma time’ and ‘linear time’ — the latter variously re-
ferred to as narrative time2 — which, she says has ‘beginnings, middles, and ends.’
Linear time is central to the workings of the nation state, and even though many
of us assume that it is ‘real’,
it is a notion that exists because we all work, in and through our everyday prac-
tices, to bring it into being… the production and reproduction of linear time take
place by people assuming that such a form of times does exist, and specifically that
it exists as an empty, homogenous medium in which events take place. (Edkins,
2003, pp.â•›xiv–xv).
But not only does trauma time not conform to this construction, but when it is
forced to do so, something crucial is lost — or, stated differently, something fun-
damentally extrinsic is added. One of the most important implications of this re-
scripting of traumatic memory into linear time is that memory is depoliticised
(Edkins, 2003, p.â•›52). The actual emplotment of trauma narratives transforms
them into something which they are not: experiences which are contained in time,
indeed which happened in the past and are now finished (as indicated by their
‘endings’). Edkins cites the work of Allan Young, who has worked on post-trau-
matic stress disorder: ‘The traumatic experience/memory is in a sense timeless. It
is not transformed into a story, place in time, with a beginning, a middle and an
end (which is characteristic for narrative memory). If it can be told at all, it is still a
re-experience’ (cited in Edkins, 2003, p.â•›40). Trauma narratives exist in the forever
present; in order to capture the heart of experience, individuals must risk another
journey back to moment of rupture. Hartman describes this as taking a ‘descent
to the dead.’ In trauma testimony, witnesses often explicitly speak ‘for the dead
or in their name. This has its dangers: to go down… may be easy, but to come up
again… that is the hard task’ (Hartman, 1996, p.â•›139).
2.â•‡ Edkins use of the term ‘narrative time’ is very different from Ricoeur’s theory on the relation
between time and narrative, to which the latter dedicated three volumes. The important point
here, however, is that trauma time is characterised by being imprisoned in a forever present.
156 Molly Andrews
Dominick LaCapra speaks of ‘double inscription of time’ which characterises

trauma testimony:
one is both back there and here at the same time, and one is able to distinguish
between (not dichotomize) the two. In other words, one remembers — perhaps
to some extent still compulsively reliving or being possessed by — what happened
then without losing a sense of existing and acting now. (LaCapra, 2001, p.â•›90).
It is perhaps this temporal schizophrenia — both being locked in the past and
yet knowing that that time is not this time — which makes trauma testimony so
difficult to articulate, and why the imposition of a traditional narrative structure
compromises the attempt to speak the unspeakable.
The temptation to reshape trauma testimony into a conventional narrative
configuration means that we instil in them a wholeness which they do not contain.
Hayden White has written about the ‘desire for narrative foreclosure’. We urgently
want and need our narratives to make sense, to be characterised by a logical se-
quencing, and towards this end, we instil in them a wholeness which is not theirs.
We want, White writes, real events to ‘display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and
closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary’ (White, 1987, p.â•›24).
Evidence for this argument can be found in the transcripts of the Truth and Rec-
onciliation Commission. Boc and Mpolweni-Zantsi (2006) have written thought-
fully about the process by which the words of those who gave testimony before the
TRC became transformed into the transcripts that now appear on the TRC website.
First, a brief word on the role of interpreters in the TRC proceedings. Prior
to 1994, there were two official languages in South Africa, English and Afrikaans.
However, in the country’s new constitution, eleven languages were officially recog-
nised. Contained within the mandate of the TRC was the stipulation that when
at all possible, witnesses should be able to speak in their native tongue. Although
there had never been a professional class of interpreters prior to 1994 — there
was perceived to be no need for such skills as all were assumed to speak either
English or Afrikaans — in 1994 all of that changed rather dramatically. Not only
were interpreters needed, but immediately, and for very intensive work. In the end,
twenty-three people were trained for ten working days, and it was this group of
men and women who performed the simultaneous translation for 57,008 hours of
non-English language testimony into English.
Some of the most memorable images which were flashed around the world of
the proceedings of the TRC were those of interpreters crying as they performed
their duties.3 It was they who had the impossible job of translating that which
3.â•‡ For a discussion on the instantaneous accessibility of images of trauma across the globe,
see Susan Sontag’s book, Regarding the pain of others. She opens with the statement that ‘for
a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people
could not be communicated. In Edkins’ words ‘What we can say no longer makes
sense, what we want to say, we can’t. There are no words for it. That is the dilemma
survivors face’ (p.â•›8). Testifiers struggle to put their experiences into words, and
interpreters struggle with putting these often ruptured and chaotic expressions
into another language. As Huston (1999) writes ‘There are some things which can-
not be translated’ (cited in Apfelbaum, 2001, p.â•›27). The result was that often the
original testimony was cleaned up, and in some cases information was added. A
close comparison of the recordings of the hearings with the official transcripts of
these hearings shows that sometimes the original testimony differs significantly
from its subsequent representation.
An example is where Mrs. Mhlawuli describes the burial of her husband,
whose hand had been chopped off. He was buried without this, and in her tes-
timony — translated from the Xhosa into English — she says “We buried him
without his right wrist — right arm or whatever — hand actually. We don’t know
what they did with the hand.” This appeared in the official transcripts as “They
chopped off his right hand, just below the wrist. I don’t know what they did with
that hand.” (cited in Boc & Mpolweni-Zantsi, 2006, pp.â•›107–108). While the testi-
mony has been ‘cleaned up’, it has erased some of the most vital information that
was contained in the original. Not only does the actual testimony reflect more
accurately the emotional rupture experienced by the narrator, but critically, the
revised version omits the information that Mrs. Mhlawuli’s husband was buried
without his hand. This information is culturally significant, as for a Xhosa person
to be buried without all of their body parts means they cannot rest in peace (Boc
& Mpolweni-Zantsi, 2006, p.â•›108).
There are other examples where the ‘incoherence’ of an original statement is
cleaned up, thereby no longer communicating the utter rupture experienced by
the speaker. In Mrs. Calata’s testimony (cited in Boc & Mpolweni-Zantsi, 2006,
p.â•›105), for instance, in which she recounts a story where her children see a picture
in the newspaper of their father’s friend’s burned out car, the English translation of
the Xhosa reads: “If Mathew’s car is burnt what happened to them [her husband
and his friend]? Hey! No! I became anxious and the situation changed immedi-
ately.” The official published version of the transcript, however, omits her exclama-
tion of ‘Hey! No!” At this point in the hearings, Mrs. Calata becomes so distressed
would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war’ (Sontag, 2003, p.â•›14). Her book is
an exploration into why this has not happened. While pictures and sounds of war might pour
into our living rooms daily, the reality does not pierce the skin. Her book concludes with the
haunting comment: ‘â†œ“We”… don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was
like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t
understand, can’t imagine’ (Sontag, 2003, pp.â•›125–126).
158 Molly Andrews
that Archbishop Tutu decides to adjourn the meeting. However, the deep level of
anguish, as represented by her self-interruptions and exclamations, are not in evi-
dence in the official transcript. Yet, these very utterances are an important compo-
nent of the testimony, as they contribute to our understanding of how the horrific
events being described impacted on the person who is left behind, struggling to
create a narrative.
Language and the ‘confusion of tongues’
Paul Ricoeur describes narrative as a ‘semantic innovation’ which opens us to ‘the

kingdom of the “as if ”â†œ’ (Ricoeur, 1984, p.â•›64). While narrative might indeed en-
hance our ability to imagine other possibilities, to envision the ‘as if ’, it may be
deficient as a tool for capturing the experience of lived human trauma. Elie Wiesel
describes his feelings of trying to write about the Holocaust: ‘words seem too in-
conspicuous, worn out, inadequate, anaemic, I wanted them burning. Where can
one find a novel language, a primal language?’ (cited in Apfelbaum, 2001, p.â•›26).
Lawrence Langer makes a similar point: ‘The universe of dying that was Auschwitz
yearns for a language purified from the taint of normality’ (Langer, 1995, p.â•›93).
But how are trauma survivors to find such a language? Of course the task
is impossible. If one is to speak, if one is to offer witness of the things one has
known and seen, then one must resort to language, all the while accepting that
there cannot but be a chasm between ‘that world’ and ‘this.’ Langer (1991) terms
this ‘a confusion of tongues’, which marks ‘the clash between the assumptions and
vocabulary of the present world of the survivor and interviewer and the word-
breaking realities of the concentration camp survivors’ (Hartman, 1996, p.â•›140).
Language is inextricably linked to social structure and power; what words
mean, how they are used, the blank spaces which exist between and beyond words,
all of these issues emerge as key considerations in the current discussion. As Ed-
kins writes: ‘… the language we speak is part of the social order, and when the
order falls apart around our ears, so does the language’ (Edkins, 2003, p.â•›8).
And yet — and this is important — it is not sufficient to state, as many have,
that the horrors of the Holocaust (or other ‘limit events’) are simply too terrible for
words, and therefore must be left unsaid, and thus unheard. For ultimately, even if
language is insufficient for the task, it is, if not all we have, then at least one of the
most effective tools we have for communicating that which must not be forgotten.
Too often we have heard the phrase that those who survive trauma are left speech-
less; they do not wish to talk about what they have endured, and this remains for-
ever within them as a black hole of suffering. While this may be true for some (and
one must avoid retreating into generalisations about ‘all survivors of trauma’), for
many others this is simply not the case. Many survivors of trauma emerge from
these experiences wanting to talk about what they very often describe as ‘unsay-
able’ or ‘unimaginable’. Despite the content of what they say, what is crucial is that
they do say it — that is, if there is someone in place to hear it. As Edkins com-
ments, the terms ‘unsayable’ and ‘unimaginable’ have often served as an excuse for
neither imaging it nor speaking about it’ (Edkins, 2003, p.â•›2). This is not a sufficient
moral response. The claim that those who survived the concentration camps were
unwilling or unable to talk about their suffering must be evaluated in light of the
fact that immediately following the war there was a flurry of testimony which was
published by those who had been to hell and were crawling their way back. How-
ever, people did not want to read them. As Wieviorka comments:
Publishers are not philanthropists; they want their books to sell. A successful book
often leads to the publication of other books on the same theme. It is the absence
of this market of buyers and readers — indicating the indifference of public opin-
ion once the initial shock had passed — which partly explains why the stream of
testimonies came to an end. (Wieviorka, 1994, pp.â•›26–27)
We in the safe outside world told ourselves that the victims of the camps could not
speak. But many of those who survived tried to speak; when they found they were
not listened to, they stopped speaking.
One of the most thoughtful treatments of the paradox of language in the con-
text of trauma testimony has been that of Giorgio Agamben. Following Foucault,
he asks ‘What happens in the living individual when he occupies the “vacant place”
of the subject… How can a subject give an account of its own ruin?’ (1999, p.â•›142).
And yet give an account, the survivor must, all the while recognising that any-
thing that will be said, indeed that can be said, will be an empty container for that
which has happened. The significance of such testimony lies not in what is said,
but simply that something is said. The fact that the testimony exists, this is what is
critical. He writes ‘The subject of enunciation… maintains itself not in a content
of meaning but in an event of language’ (Agamben, 1999, p.â•›142). Testimony, he
tells us, is that which lies
… between the inside and the outside of langue, between the sayable and the
unsayable in every language — that is, between a potentiality of speech and its
existence, between a possibility and an impossibility of speech. (Agamben, 1999,
p.â•›145).
The distinction Agamben makes between the content of meaning and the event
of language is a crucial one. The content of meaning of much trauma testimony
is, in fact, that there is a void; those who give witness to trauma, and we who are
their audience, are, in Maurice Blanchott’s words, ‘guardians of an absent meaning’
(cited in Hartman, 1994, p.â•›5). But the event of language, the fact of the testimony
160 Molly Andrews
itself, is what is vital, not so much because of the historical information that such
testimony conveys (though this is important too) but more because of the depths
of darkness that it begins to make visible to those who were not there, ‘the psy-
chological and emotional milieu of the struggle for survival, not only then but also
now’ (Hartman, 1996, p.â•›142).
Agamben describes the paradox confronting those who survive, those who
can and must give witness:
to bear witness is to place oneself in one’s own language in the position of those
who have lost it, to establish oneself in a living language as if it were dead, or in a
dead language as if it were living — in any case, outside both the archive and the
corpus of what has already been said. (Agamben, 1999, p.â•›161).
Limit events pose a challenge to narrative, because they lie beyond language, and
possibly beyond representation. Just as these events demand a new language, so
too they demand a new method of representation; and yet, we have not prov-
en ourselves equal to the task, despite the fact that more than half a century has
passed since the end of Second World War. What might this new representation
look like? And might new forms of narrative be a useful tool in this most challeng-
ing pursuit? These are questions which scholars of trauma testimony have been
grappling with, and to which there are no definitive answers. In the words of Saul
Friedlander, notwithstanding a fifty years’ accumulation of factual knowledge, ‘We
have faced surplus meaning or blankness, with little interpretive or representa-
tional advance’ (cited in Hartman, 1996, p.â•›10). The challenge for future scholars
remains.
Language and ‘the threshold of silence’
Before one can ask how to represent the Holocaust (and other limit events) one
must first confront the question of whether it is possible to do so — at all. Some
of the greatest minds of the late 20th century dedicated themselves to this most
difficult question — but ultimately, they did so through words. George Steiner’s
work on language and silence provides a thoughtful example of this. He acute-
ly describes the dilemma that confronts the writer in a world forever scared by
genocide:
To a writer who feels that the condition of language is in question, that the world
may be losing something of its humane genius, two essential courses are available:
he may seek to render his own idiom representative of general crisis, to convey
through it the precariousness and vulnerability of the communicative act; or he
may choose the suicidal rhetoric of silence. (Steiner, 1967, p.â•›69).
Many writers resorted to language, all the while struggling with its paucity, its ulti-
mate inability to carry the weight of the historical moment. The playwright Arthur
Adamov, exponent of the Theatre of the Absurd, wrote, just before the outbreak of
the Second World War: ‘Le mots, ces gardiens du sens ne sont pas immortels, in-
vulnerable… Commes les hommes, les mots souffrent… Certain peuvent suivivre,
d’autres sont incurables.’ [‘Words, guardians of meaning, are not immortal, invul-
nerable. Like men, words suffer. Some can survive, others are incurable.’] And
then, with the war, he elaborated on this: ‘Worn, threadbare, filed down, words
have become the carcass of words, phantom words; everyone drearily chews and
regurgitates the sound of them between their jaws’ (cited in Steiner, 1967, p.â•›71).
Jens Brockmeier challenges the view that language is the ‘form and medium
that represents or transforms experiences into clear and intelligible statements or
propositions which are communicable and can be reflected upon’ (Brockmeier,
2002, p.â•›92). Rather, he argues, ‘language is itself a reality, a reality that at times can
be murky, messy, and even ineffable…. [language] outlines — and thus embraces
— both the sayable and the unsayble’ (Brockmeier, 2002, pp.â•›92–93). It is not the
choice between language or silence, but rather the relationship between the two
that has provoked many writers on this subject. Parain comments that ‘language is
the threshold of silence’, while Lefebvre describes language as ‘at once inside lan-
guage, and on its near and far sides’ (cited in Steiner, 1967, p.â•›72). Silence always
and only exists in relation to that which surrounds it. It is the blank spaces between
words, and as such it helps to frame not only the meaning of what is said but that
which can be said, a refuge for both the unsaid and the unsayable. As historian
Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes:
Not all silences are equal and they cannot be addressed in the same manner; any
historical narrative [is] a bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the
operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly. (cited in
Passerini, 2003, p.â•›249).
Having considered the importance of silence, and its force as a way of marking
meaning, let us now return to Agamben’s argument, discussed earlier, in which he
emphasises that what matters is not what is said, but rather that something is said.
If this is the case, Agamben asks, then ‘To what does such a language bear witness?’
His response is powerful:
What cannot be stated, what cannot be archived is the language in which the
author succeeds in bearing witness to his incapacity to speak… Just as in the
starry sky that we see at night, the stars shine surrounded by a total darkness
that, according to cosmologists, is nothing other than the testimony of a time
in which the stars did not shine, so the speech of the witness bears witness to a
time in which human beings did not yet speak; and so the testimony of human
162 Molly Andrews
beings attests to a time in which they were not yet human. (Agamben, 1999,
pp.â•›161–162).
Traumatic testimony bears witness to a total darkness. Although it often is incom-

prehensible and incoherent, its significance is that it functions to mark the void.
Dominick LaCapra (1996, 1998), amongst others, has written about the crisis
of representation posed by the Shoah, a crisis which pertains to the problem of his-
torical understanding. How can such limit events be represented at all? Hartman
argues that ‘there are no limits to representation, only limits to conceptualization,
to the intelligibility of the Shoah’ (Hartman, 1996, p.â•›28). The limits are not what
can be represented, so much as what can be thought. Simply ‘we do not believe
that what we are made to feel and see is part of reality’ (p.â•›28), and with this, then,
there follows a most indicting corollary: ‘… the problem of limits … is not so much
the finiteness of intellect as the finiteness of human empathy that comes into view’
(Hartman, 1996, p.â•›129). Hartman describes a representational rupture which ‘in-
volves story as well as history: the story of hell, of its representations. Before Ausch-
witz we were children in our imagination of evil; after Auschwitz we are no longer
children’. Citing Des Pres, he describes ‘a new shape of knowing which invades the
mind’, concluding that ‘we have changed as knowers’ (Hartman 1996, p.â•›130).
Erika Apfelbaum speaks of the ‘profound dilemma’ which confronts those
who are presented with stories of trauma. We respond with a ‘stubborn deafness’
for to do otherwise is to put ourselves, and the moral universe in which we oper-
ate, at risk. Apfelbaum elaborates on ‘the threatening implications of listening’:
It requires a willingness to follow the teller into a world of radical otherness and
to accept the frightening implications it carries for our personal lives and society
as a whole. The only way to truly hear is to acknowledge the unbridgeable gap be-
tween the two worlds, and to assimilate the impact of this unbridgeable difference.
Understanding is irrelevant (the reality always exceeds what the narrative is able
to represent and convey). What is important is the willingness to become part of
the transmission. (Apfelbaum, 2001, p.â•›31).
Brockmeier’s work with twenty-six written personal narratives provided by eye-

witnesses of the attacks on the World Trade Center — collected as part of “The
9/11 National Memory Survey on the Terroist Attacks” — deals with the problem
of how people talk about elusive experiences. These accounts, Brockmeier summa-
rizes, speak to ‘the experience of the limits… not only… of language but also the
limits of experience itself ’ (Brockmeier, 2008, p.â•›29). Echoing the work of Hart-
man, LaCapra, and others who have written on the crisis of representation (in
relation to the Holocaust), Brockmeier’s work on the Twin Towers testimony pro-
vides evidence for the claim that at the core of traumatic experience is ‘its failure
to be represented in any common forms or modes or representation’ (Brockmeier,
2008, p.â•›29). Brockmeier then describes work with ‘antirealist, experimental, and
formally innovative types of narrative’ which he characterizes as ‘non-Aristotelian
forms of broken narrative [which] do not claim to represent the original trauma’
(Brockmeier, 2008, p.â•›29). While these non-traditional narrative forms might hold
more promise for ‘communicating with others about events that demand witness
but defy narrative expression’ (Apfelbaum, 2001, p.â•›20) Brockmeier concludes by
describing traumatic experience as
…a break not just with a particular form of representation but with the very pos-
sibility of representation at all… The traumatic gap between language and experi-
ence does not just reflect a rupture with the way the world is depicted but with
the existential basics of human meaning making. (Brockmeier, 2008, pp.â•›33–34).
The search for heroic meanings
This poses a key challenge for those who listen to traumatic testimony. Because
we believe in the power of stories, and because we are creatures who are forever
engaged in creating and deciphering meaning in our world, we cannot accept what
we are told time and time again: There is no meaning in these stories. There are no
heroes. There are no lessons. All of this suffering did not resolve itself in a better
world. And yet if we cannot accept this — and there is much evidence that we do
not — then we have not even learned the very first lesson about listening to trau-
ma. For ourselves, we want these painful narratives to signify something, and we
recreate those who offer their testimony in another image, one which effectively
makes further telling more difficult. Those who emerge from the ruins cannot be
who we want them to be, who we need them to be. We persist in our efforts none-
theless, as too much is at stake.
Lawrence Langer tells the story of Magda F., who survived the Holocaust
though her husband, parents, brother, three sisters and all their children did not.
Another brother and sister had emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, where
she joined them at the end of the war. They wanted to hear from her what had hap-
pened, and yet she found herself painfully unable to communicate anything which
they could understand. ‘nobody, but nobody fully understands us. You can’t. No
[matter] how much sympathy you give me when I’m talking here.’ She says that she
hopes they will never be able to understand ‘because to understand, you have to
go through with it, and I hope nobody in the world comes to this again, [so] that
they should understand us. … nobody, nobody, nobody…’ (cited in Langer, 1991,
p.â•›xiv). Here her testimony breaks off. Magda’s efforts to communicate what she
has seen are persistent, even while she believes that these attempts will always be
thwarted by the limitations to imagine that of which we have no experience.
164 Molly Andrews
Geoffrey Hartman writes poignantly about our inability to listen to the void
… we who were not there always look for something the survivors cannot offer us.
… it is our search for meaning which is disclosed, as if we had to be comforted for
what they suffered …. If we learn anything here it is about life when the search for
meaning had to be suspended: we are made to focus on what it was like to exist
under conditions in which moral choice was systematically disabled by the perse-
cutors and heroism was rarely possible. (Hartman, 1994, pp.â•›133–134).
As the founder of the Fortunuff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale
University, Hartman knows of what he speaks. Having overseen the collection of
over 4000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors, Hartman warns against the ‘search
for heroic meanings’ in which interviewers over-identify with the witness. This
inclination is, he says, ‘far from innocent’ as it effectively eradicates the message
of the narratives, at the same time that it strips witnesses of their agency. Rather
than experiencing any kind of empowerment from giving testimony, witnesses
are instead confined by we their listeners to perpetual victimhood. Removing the
weight of the heroic genre, space is created for a different kind of narrative, one
which documents the pain of speaking the unspeakable.
…the strength required to face a past like that radiates visibly off the screen and
becomes a vital fact…breaking the silence is, for those who endured so dehuman-
izing an assault, an affirmative step, in part because of their very willingness to use
ordinary words whose adequacy and inadequacy must both be respected. (Hart-
man 1996, pp.â•›142–143, 145).
Concluding comments
In this article, I have explored some difficulties associated with telling and listen-
ing to traumatic testimony. My own entry into this discussion is as one who is
interested in political narratives, how the very stories which individuals tell about
their own lives function as a point for viewing the wider social context. Personal
narratives have the potential to act as a bridge between private and public worlds.
In the case of trauma testimony, this is perhaps the most one can hope for. There
may be no promise that telling leads to healing, but very act of speech — no matter
how garbled or seemingly nonsensical — can begin the process of reconnecting
one to the world of the living. Hannah Arendt has written that
A life without speech and without action… is literally dead to the world; it has
ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men. With word
and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a
second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our
original physical appearance…. [The impulse to do this] springs from the begin-
ning which came into the world when we were born and to which we respond by
beginning something new on our own initiative. (Arendt 1958, pp.â•›176–177)
Traumatic testimonies might not provide listeners with a beginning, middle, and
end, but they have the potential to assist individuals to “move beyond the self into
what Buber calls the essential-we relationship, so opening oneself up to the stories
of others and thereby seeing that one is not alone in one’s pain” (Jackson, 2006,
p.â•›59). And here lies the potential gift of narrative: the knowledge that we are not
alone. As Lacan reminds us ‘What I seek in speech is the response of the Other…
There is no speech without a reply, even if it is only met with silence’ (Lacan, 1995,
p.â•›40, 86).
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Chapter 10
Afterword
‘Even Amidst’: Rethinking narrative coherence
Mark Freeman
The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts
The Manifest and the Latent
I fear that I am about to intrude on the party — or, to put the matter in more ex-
plicitly narrative terms, I fear that I am about to disrupt some central aspects of the
storyline that has evolved throughout the pages of this book, rendering it just a bit
less of-a-piece. Please understand: I concur with much of what has been said here,
particularly regarding the possible ‘bias’ toward narrative coherence and linear-
ity, the importance of recognizing the interactive and performative dimension of
narration, and, more generally, the value of remaining hermeneutically suspicious
about those teleological tales that flatten difference and heterogeneity, whether
wittingly or unwittingly, in the name of normalization. Let it be said from the out-
set, therefore, that this volume does indeed provide a most valuable counterweight
to the coherence paradigm — as traditionally conceived.
But there is a curious fact that needs to be emphasized here. And that is that
nearly every chapter in this book seeks to show that, behind the manifest in-coher-
ence or ‘a-coherence’ of the narratives in question a latent coherence lurks. More-
over — and here I enter even more contested territory — most of these chapters
suggest that there is in fact some relationship between narrative coherence and
well-being. Two qualifications are in order. The first is that narrative coherence is
surely not equally necessary for all people. In fact, it may not be necessary at all.
There are no doubt people whose lives and consequent ‘stories’ (should they even
be called that) are dispersed, heterogeneous, even fragmented. This simple fact
should be enough to convince even the most stalwart torch-bearers of coherence
that it is not a strict requirement of a human life. Moreover, it may very well be the
case that these more dispersed, dis-unified beings are just fine about it, perhaps
even rejecting the very coherence others seem to want to foist upon them. Now, it
might be argued here that this ‘anti-coherence’ — or even anti-narrativism — be-
speaks a coherence of its own, that it is the inverted image of, and is thus parasitic
168 Mark Freeman
upon, the very coherence it rejects and replaces. But no matter; such lives and the
stories that might be told about them are still ‘open works’, testifying to the fact
that those tidier beginning-middle-end narratives that are so much the lore of the
coherence crowd are not for everyone.
As a corollary to these qualifications, it should also be noted that some peo-
ple become imprisoned by too-coherent narratives, assimilating everything that
comes their way to the ‘same old’ storyline, and that what they seem to need most
of all is a good dose of difference, one that might allow them to live and breathe a
bit more freely. In a related vein, we must not forget that in the case of traumatic
‘limit events’ of the sort that Molly Andrews addresses in the last chapter, it may
be that there is simply no coherence to be had, that the experiences in question
far exceed that sort of intelligible sense that is often sought in narrative. Indeed, it
could be the case that such experiences not only bring us beyond coherence but,
following Andrews, beyond narrative altogether. It all depends on what we might
mean by coherence and narrative.
Taking this line of thinking one step farther, it could also be the case that these
experiences, in their excess, their surplus, their ostensible beyond-tellability, reveal
something fundamental about the ‘gap’ between experience and narrative more
generally. For all of its apparent virtues, particularly to the likes of us ‘narrativists’,
narrative seems to have its share of vices too. In fact, if Crispin Sartwell’s polemical
End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History (2000) has it right, it
is the vice-like grip of narrative itself that must be cast into question. What is it, Sart-
well asks early on in the book, that escapes linguistic, and more specifically narra-
tive, articulation? ‘[A]t a rough estimate,’ he answers, ‘almost everything’ (p.â•›5). How
curious it is, therefore, that there should have emerged an industry, such as our own,
so strenuously devoted to the narrative cause. ‘Narrative,’ Sartwell writes, ‘has be-
come a sort of philosophical panacea, performing all sorts of tasks that philosophers
and other intellectuals seem to think need performing’. These range from explaining
‘the human experience of time’ to addressing ‘the personal existential project of con-
structing a coherent life out of the chaos of experience’ (p.â•›9). The problem at hand,
however, is not just that narrative has overextended its reach; that would simply re-
quire trimming it back a bit. The more significant problem, for Sartwell at any rate, is
that narrative seems to have a built-in tendency to flatten and homogenize the very
experience it seeks to tell about. And at the very heart of the problem is coherence
itself. ‘This is not to say that narrative doesn’t have liberatory possibilities, and it is
not to say that you or I could or should live without it.’ But its liberatory possibilities
notwithstanding, ‘every [such] counter-narrative brings with it a new capacity for
oppression, and … this capacity is proportional to the coherence and meaningful-
ness of the narrative. So the more narrativized the narrative, the more thoroughly
organized and chock-full of significance it is, the more problematic’ (p.â•›10).
Chapter 10.â•‡ Afterword 169
Narrative’s ‘problematic’ nature is perhaps most visible in the context of cata-

clysmic traumas such as those Andrews explores: the Holocaust, 9/11, and other
such unspeakable horrors. It is also visible in experiences ranging from ecstatic
mystical trances to the ‘selflessness’ of dementia (see Freeman, 2008). As Sartwell
puts the matter, ‘Narrative comes apart at the extremes… [I]t comes apart in ec-
stasy, in writhing pain, at death. But it has already also come apart everywhere, all
the time, wherever people are breathing, or walking around, or watching TV, and
not getting anywhere narratively speaking.’ What to do? ‘Pull yourself away from
significance for a moment and let yourself feel the sweet, all-enveloping insignifi-
cance all around. And take comfort in your own insignificance; take comfort in
the triviality of your culture; take comfort in the triviality of your life-project and
your failure in realizing it’ (p.â•›65). Try, in other words, to move beyond the vice-
like clutches of narrative, particularly those forms of it that seek to render coherent
the irrevocable otherness and ineffability that is part and parcel of being itself. We
thus return to an idea posed earlier, which I now put in the form of a question: Is
it time to move not only beyond narrative coherence but beyond narrative itself?
I return to the aforementioned answer as well: It all depends on what we mean by
coherence and narrative.
What do we mean? Just as I began writing this chapter, I sent a note to Matti
Hyvärinen that said the following: ‘I am finally working on my chapter for the
book, and I should have it to you within a week or two. I apologize for the delay.’
(It’s important to keep certain academic traditions alive.) In any case, and more
substantively, I went on to note that ‘I do have a concern about it. Although you
moved from the idea of broken narratives to that of coherence, a number of the
chapters continue to use language more appropriate to the former idea than the
latter. Is there a way of rectifying this? On one level, it’s a minor problem. But con-
ceptually, the notion of “brokenness” is quite different than of coherence/incoher-
ence, and it seems important to address in some way. What are your thoughts on
this?’ This is what he wrote (in a wonderfully Matti-esque way):
Your question seems to be on the tricky side. Due to the long editorial process we
were not able to re-shape the articles after the change of the title. We discussed
the option of a longer subtitle, including the earlier themes of broken, fragmented
and unfinished narratives, but writers voted for a simple and straightforward title.
It seems to me, thus, that anything that can be done should be included in your
comments.
My take on the issue is rather more historical than strictly philosophical: even
though “coherence” and “brokenness”, for example, may be seen to locate on en-
tirely different levels, in praxis the problem has repeatedly been to equate coher-
ence, linearity, and clear story-level moral ending. I agree that in many a case the
reading model still is to find the ultimate coherence — but again it is ethically
170 Mark Freeman
and scholarly a better option than [to] start with claims about [narratives] lacking
coherence. Thus, to my mind the antonym of “coherence” may change from “in-
coherence” to complexity, incompleteness, brokenness, depending on the context.
If and when you can shed some clarity — and theoretical coherence — on this
conundrum, we would be pleased!
A tall order, this one. Let us begin at the beginning by asking, once again: What
do we mean by narrative coherence? And is it in fact something to move beyond?
A New Paradigm?
In their introduction to the volume, Hyvärinen and his co-authors wish ‘to suggest
and nurture a kind of paradigmatic change within narrative studies’. Operating
under the (questionable, in my view) presumption that the earlier phase of ‘the
narrative turn’ tended to posit ‘a vital and many-layered relationship between nar-
rative and coherence’, they wish to recast the relationship at hand. Whether the
coherence at hand was linguistic, temporal, sequential, or what have you, it ‘was
assumed as a norm for good and healthy life stories’. It was also “something that
scholars ventured to investigate and to find, for instance, in life-story interviews’
(p.â•›1). These scholars might even bemoan gathering an incoherent narrative —
unless, of course, they could find some interesting pathology (a silver lining, as it
were) amidst the narrative debris. What, then, is coherence?
The coherence paradigm generally implies that i) good and competent narratives
always proceed in a linear, chronological way, from a beginning and middle to an
end, which also constitutes a thematic closure; ii) the function of narrative and
storytelling is primarily to create coherence in regard to experience, which is un-
derstood as being rather formless (which may be understood as a merit or disad-
vantage of narrative); iii) persons live better and in a more ethical way if they have
a coherent life-story and coherent narrative identity (or, in contrast, narrative is
understood as being detrimental because it creates such coherence). (p.â•›1–2)
The present volume, Hyvärinen and his colleagues go on to assert, challenges this
paradigm theoretically, methodologically, and ethically via both theoretical argu-
mentation and by exploring specific cases that cannot be assimilated to the para-
digm, those in which the stories told are ‘fragmented, disorganized or where the
narrative text is superseded by the performance of the story’ (p.â•›2).
The preceding chapters have done well to remind us of what lies beyond narra-
tive coherence as the coherence paradigm conceives it. They have also done well to
render more subtly the notion of narrative identity, which, not unlike narrative it-
self, had been ‘thematized from the perspective of unity and coherence it was able
to afford, not in terms of complexities, contradictions and undecided elements it
might include’ (p.â•›8). As Hyvärinen et al. go on to note in this context, it had been
maintained by Hayden White and others that narrative provided a kind of aes-
thetic counterweight to ‘life itself ’, in its messy, formless, ongoingness. The result,
however, was ‘a binary opposition between the multitude of life and the full, fixed
and eternal form of narrative’ (p.â•›5) that kept the coherence paradigm front and
centre. Bearing this in mind, there would seem to emerge a dual task: to recognize
the narrativity that is part and parcel of experience and, in so doing, to loosen the
hold of the coherence paradigm. Narratives need not flatten out difference — at
least not to the extent that had been posited; they are not to be understood merely
as ordering machines, seeking (an illusory) unity, harmony, and closure amidst the
chaotic openness of reality. Insofar as ‘coherence’ is equated with unity, harmony,
and closure, therefore, it is indeed something to be moved beyond, and the present
volume should be instrumental in hastening the process. But it could also be that
the idea of coherence itself needs to be rethought, in a way that at once explodes
the unity-harmony-closure equation while still retaining the sense-making ‘bind-
ing’ function that narrative is designed to serve. By ‘binding’, I have in mind the
desire of survivors of trauma, among others, to speak — even while recognizing
that their experience exceeds what words can say and that, consequently, whatever
‘account’ they might provide will fall short of the mark of containing it, express-
ing it adequately. Only by speaking, indeed only by narrating, will they be able to
prevent the utter dispersion of experience, its evaporation into nothingness. By all
indications, moreover, they will need and seek to find some measure of coherence
— broadly conceived — in and through the act of narrating. That is to say, they
will need to find a language commensurate with, if not ‘adequate’ to, their traumas
and their lives. It will not, and cannot, be a language rooted in unity, harmony, and
closure. But nor can it be a language wholly devoid of the sense-making, binding
function to which I have referred. To move entirely beyond coherence is to move
beyond narrative itself, and this, I believe, we cannot do. Nor do the contributors
to this volume. The challenge, therefore, is to think anew both coherence and nar-
rative and in such a way as to render them more appropriate to the complexities of
experience. As shall become clear, doing so will take us to the very edge of both.
Beyond ‘Weird’
Jens Brockmeier and Maria Medved’s chapter on ‘Weird stories’ is a fitting point of
entry for the central ideas I want to convey. According to Brockmeier and Medved,
‘the standard — Aristotelian — view on what represents narrative coherence in
autobiographical narrative is misleading because it offers too narrow a picture of
coherence and incoherence’ alike. Appearances notwithstanding, ‘not all weird
172 Mark Freeman
autobiographical stories are necessarily incoherent, and not all incoherent stories
mirror a weird self ’ (p.â•›21). The ‘main difficulty’ of the Aristotelian approach, they
go on to suggest, has to do with ‘its tendency to decontextualize stories’, from both
‘the intersubjective context in which all stories are told (which includes the dialog-
ic relationship between teller and told), the larger autobiographical context that is
behind all self-narratives (which includes one’s life history), and the socio-cultural
context (which includes the social environments in which narrators share their
lives with others)’ (p.â•›22). Exclude this trio of contexts from the fragmentary tales
told by those with brain-based memory impairments and the like, and what they
have to say may sound incoherent indeed. These people ‘struggled to formulate
narrative accounts’, either because their linguistic and cognitive resources were
seriously limited’ or ‘because they simply had no or very few autobiographical
memories … on which their stories could draw’. What came as a surprise to Brock-
meier and Medved was that these individuals ‘did not complain about changes in
their sense of self and their identities in time’ (p.â•›22).
This comes as a surprise to me as well, largely owing to my own experience
with my 86-year-old mother, who has suffered from dementia for some five years.
On the one hand, she, like those Brockmeier and Medved have studied, tells stories
that sometimes appear ‘disconnected, fragmented, and implausible’ (p.â•›22). Unlike
them, however, she does complain, about who and what she has become. Lately,
she has taken to waking up from afternoon naps only to find that she has no idea
where she is, how she got there, or how long she’s been there. She looks around
to find somebody, anybody, who can answer these questions. But of course these
people are unknown too. So their words don’t stick. No; she needs to speak to me;
I’m still in the picture, on the edge of consciousness. And when the phone rings
sometime in the late afternoon and I see who is calling, I know how the conversa-
tion will unfold. ‘Mark? I’m just trying to find out what’s going on.’ There’s confu-
sion in her voice, and perhaps panic; and there may be some rage too. Nothing
makes any sense. She’s reaching for a narrative through-line, an anchor, a story
that makes sense. But she can’t find one. It’s at that point that I may try to explain
to her, for the umpteenth time, that she’s home (in an assisted living residence),
that she’s been there for some five years due to her memory problems — which, of
course, she forgets she has, thus inaugurating yet another cycle of dialogue about
her ‘whereabouts’. As for her response to this dialogue, it is almost always exactly
the same: ‘Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god.’ And then she might utter a Yid-
dish phrase that she used to hear from her own aging mother years ago, which
translates roughly as, ‘Oh, what becomes of a person.’ It is at these junctures that
she has an acute and very painful sense of her own loss and infirmity. She can
complain about being ‘dumb,’ ‘stupid,’ a ‘moron.’ ‘I have to be put in a nursery with
infants, to be watched,’ she said recently. ‘Brainless. I don’t have a brain anymore.’
On one level, my mother’s situation seems quite different from what Brock-
meier and Medved report. Instead of the ‘unbroken continuity between their lives
and selves before and after the neurotrauma of their tellers,’ coupled with ‘a strong
sense of sameness’ (p.â•›22), she displays a rather more broken continuity — a con-
tinuity in discontinuity, as it were — coupled with a disturbed sense of sameness:
the ‘I’ who reflects looks upon the ‘me’ that has emerged only to find its radical
difference and otherness. But of course it is precisely at this point that Brockmeier
and Medved’s account and my own come together once again. For even amidst the
chaos and debris of her life, ‘she’ nevertheless remains, a witness to the devasta-
tion (see Freeman, 2009). Were we to rely on those ‘rounded and autonomous
Aristotelian stories told by an isolated individual’ (p.â•›24), we might readily be
lured by ‘deficit diagnoses’, seeing in the more fragmentary stories told little more
than testimony to the incoherence of narrative and identity alike. But the fact is,
‘the coherence of stories … can change relative to the rhetorical dynamic of the
conversation in which the interplay among the possibly different strategies, inten-
tions, and narrative competencies of the participants plays a central role’ (p.â•›25). It
can also change as a function of ‘world knowledge’, for instance knowledge about
the life of the storyteller. So it is that when cast against the backdrop of her life
history, a ‘weird’ story, of the sort told by one of Brockmeier and Medved’s in-
formants, ‘begins to make more sense’ (p.â•›26). More to the point still, ‘obsessive,
bizarre, and weird’ though her stories might have been, ‘they were not incoherent
stories, at least not when understood as … attempts to struggle against the utter
breakdown that fully realizing and accepting her desperate situation would have
entailed’ (p.â•›26).
I am not sure Brockmeier and Medved would want to frame it this way, but ul-
timately they seem to be issuing a plea on behalf of narrative coherence — albeit of
a different sort than Aristotelian. It is one that is less ‘rounded’ and ‘autonomous’,
to be sure, and it is founded not so much upon the tidy flow of meaning from
beginning to middle to end as it is upon a search for continuity and wholeness
amidst the assaults that have come one’s way.
Lars-Christer Hydén’s reflections on identity, self, and narrative extend these
ideas by asking explicitly ‘whether the inability to tell stories about the past and to
establish a plot implies a loss of identity, replaced by a void never to be filled again’
(p.â•›34). Rather than dealing with storytelling in ‘representational’ terms, Hydén
wants to call attention to how it is ‘used as a tool to establish and negotiate identity
in specific situations’ (p.â•›37). By doing so, he also wants to call attention to the
‘narrative expansion of identities,’ the way in which ‘the teller is able to put for-
ward something new about him/herself, something that he/she wants to highlight
at a certain moment in the ongoing interaction. In this way,’ Hydén maintains,
‘the teller is able to negotiate his or her identity with the audience by presenting
174 Mark Freeman
contrasts and alternatives, by stressing continuity or discontinuity’. Indeed, there

is a distinct sense in which, through such negotiation, ‘the teller to some extent
becomes someone else, or becomes at least a bit different compared to before the
telling of the story’ (p.â•›40). Whether in fact the teller ‘becomes someone else’ is
an open question. Framing the issue this way implies that ‘the’ self that had ex-
isted previously has become wholly other. But insofar as the identity of the self
is itself framed in more plural terms — as what William James (1981) refers to as
a ‘loosely construed thing’, an identity ‘on the whole’, wrought out of multiplicity
— one has simply become oneself, yet again. Having offered this qualification, let
me hasten to acknowledge that Hydén does well in his chapter to underscore the
fluid, interactive, performative dimension of narrative and identity alike. What
he has also underscored is the idea that ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity’ are not to
be understood as immutable properties of identity but are rather constructed and
reconstructed anew in interaction. Whether the former is stressed or the latter
thus depends on the nature and purpose of the interaction itself, especially how
one wishes to ‘position’ oneself therein (e.g., Bamberg, 1997). ‘In this way the or-
ganization of the storytelling event can be used as a tool for presenting identity’,
and ‘concerns how the telling of autobiographical stories can be used to change the
audience’s perception and definition of the teller — and probably also the teller’s
perception of him- or herself ’ (p.â•›44).
How, then, does the issue of coherence enter this picture of narrative identity?
In emphasizing the expansion of identities, Hydén seems to want to keep a version
of coherence in the picture. ‘I am this too’, one essentially says through his or her
performance. One can, of course, imagine instances in which coherence is under-
mined. During a dinner with the boss, I begin to act in a way that is ‘out of charac-
ter’, and when I reflect on it later on I see just how crude my performance was. Or
I get drunk and begin to do things that are quite unexpected, even offensive, given
my usual ways of being in the world. ‘He’s not himself ’, an observer might say,
hoping to calm the situation down. Even in these more extreme cases, it should be
emphasized, there will likely be some attempt to tell a (more or less) coherent story
after the fact. ‘It was pathetic how I acted with my boss’, I might eventually say. ‘I
wish I didn’t have such a profound need to be affirmed by people’. Or: ‘What a jerk
I become after a few too many — the wild rogue, with his devil-may-care attitude.
I ought to look at that part of me a little more closely’. There is no questioning the
fact that ‘one important aspect of identities is that they are performed through
the storytelling event’ and that such storytelling ‘is a way of ritually changing the
relationship and the social status of the participants’ (p.â•›46) — even if only tempo-
rarily. ‘In this sense the storytelling has a performative force,’ such that ‘by telling
the story a certain identity is put in place’ (pp.â•›46). This implies that ‘it is important
when studying identity in social scientific situations to not only study stories, but
also the way stories are told, received and negotiated’ (p.â•›47). Doing so will surely
call attention to the complexity, mutability, and multiplicity of narrative identity.
It will also serve to undermine the notion of narrative coherence as strict self-
sameness. But unless we do in fact ‘become someone else’ altogether — in which
case the term ‘identity’ would no longer be applicable — there is bound to remain
some measure of continuity and coherence amidst the flux. In people with intact
brains, and memories, and enduring social relationships, how could the situation
be otherwise?
Tarja Aaltonen offers some similar ideas in her consideration of ‘mind-read-
ing’. Acknowledging the interpretive problem often posed by aphasic speakers, the
speech therapist, nonetheless, ‘treats the speech acts of the aphasic man as if they
were coherent, … as if his speech had a point, … as if it was meaningful’ (p.â•›55).
The communicative efforts of the aphasic’s partners in dialogue are key in this con-
text. Indeed, ‘Research on strategies people use when communicating with aphasic
individuals have shown rather unanimously that communicative partners attempt
to support the smooth flow of conversation and try to resolve the problems cre-
ated by aphasia’ (p.â•›57). It is difficult to imagine doing otherwise: operating on
the assumption — or at least the hope — that there is meaning immanent in the
utterances being made, people generally do what they can, with aphasics among
others, to make sense of things. Skill will be required. ‘In her interpretation the
speech therapist is filling in the gaps by combining the information she gleans
from both what the aphasic speaker says and the prosodic and nonverbal commu-
nication’. Moreover, ‘she also draws from her knowledge of rehabilitation practices
in Finland,’ such that ‘hypotheses’ about what is being said rapidly emerge (p.â•›60).
As Aaltonen goes on to suggest, the therapist is thus ‘reading both the individual
mind as well as the social mind and the meaning of the utterances is linked to
both minds’ (p.â•›60). Here too, taken out of context, the aphasic’s utterances may
appear quite nonsensical. But placed in context, and supported by the skills and
knowledge of the therapist, the manifestly nonsensical becomes decidedly more
meaningful. Indeed, writes Aaltonen, through the ‘co-construction’ of meaning,
‘the aphasic man’s utterances and non-verbal messages are interpreted and made
a coherent part of the storyworld’ (p.â•›62). It is this storyworld, she continues, that
‘provides the presuppositions that enable the reader or the listener to construct a
coherent understanding of the narrative that is told’. So it is that ‘We were able to
recognize that he was telling us a story even without knowing from time to time
what that story meant’ (p.â•›63). From this perspective, therefore, coherence very
much remains the rule. The challenge is precisely to locate it amidst debris of what
is said.
176 Mark Freeman
Multiplicities and Coherences
There are some apparent exceptions to the rule. As Maria Tamboukou suggests in
her chapter through her presentation of Gwen John, the very ‘events’ that transpire
in John’s life bear within them an instability, an unfixedness. Rather than being
bounded occurrences, happening ‘in’ time, the letters she writes ‘embody traces of
virtual forces, narratives of intensities and passions, messages for the yet-to-come;
they do not represent “realities” — they are pure events emitting signs and releas-
ing forces, … vectors of deterritorialization’ (p.â•›74). Along these lines, ‘subjects
are dispersed, sometimes even emerging in the text as pre-individual singularities
rather than coherent characters’ (p.â•›75). There is no singular ‘Gwen John’ discern-
ible through her letters; there are ‘traces of a divergent series of states, difficult
to be enveloped in the sequential unity and structure of classic narratology: they
become broken narratives of nomadic distributions, while her paintings release
forces of her narratability’. John thus ‘lives out of order and her letters and paint-
ings carry traces of disjointed space/time blocks’ (p.â•›77). Indeed, Tamboukou as-
serts, ‘There are many and different Johns and her character has both an actual and
a virtual dimension’. At the same time, ‘Her letters hold differences together, not
as oppositions but as multiplicities: despair — and — hope, woman — and — art-
ist, inside — and — outside, solitude — and — communication’. One might ask:
Is John an unusual person? Yes and no. Yes: she is unusual in the degree to which
she is dispersed, heterogeneous, ever-reconstituted. Presumably, this is one of the
reasons Tamboukou has elected to tell her story. But in other, perhaps more funda-
mental ways, it would seem that she is simply ‘one of us’, the events that comprise
our own lives being, in the end, no more fixable than those comprising hers. Per-
haps this too is a reason why Tamboukou wishes to tell her story. In John herself,
we can find an emblem of the open event, ‘in the sense that she is complicated,
keeping all the selves that compose her in a continuous state of intensity’ (p.â•›78).
Strictly speaking, ‘she’ doesn’t exist — not, at any rate, as some ‘thing’ that lives in
a circumscribable time/space block. And nor do we. We are perpetual openings,
becomings, nomadically on the move.
Are we heading anywhere? Nowhere in particular, it would seem. And yet
John, and we, are ignited and indeed moved by desires, which draw us this way
rather than that. So it is that ‘John has written extensively in her letters about her
love of the Parisian quarters, the city gardens and the grand boulevards, … the
countryside and the sea’ and ‘about her walks in the woods and her boat rides on
the Seine’ (p.â•›80). Even if she is heading nowhere in particular — no single teleo-
logically-driven place — there is a certain selectivity at work, a space of desire that
is at once open and delimited. We, as readers, are thus able to gather some sense of
who she is, even in her dispersion and heterogeneity. To tell her story, Tamboukou
cannot possibly resort to the beginning-middle-end framework of narrative en-

shrined in the aforementioned coherence paradigm. This tripartite structure, one
might argue, itself relies on a conception of the event that is being cast into ques-
tion here, one that remains tethered to Chronos rather than set free by Aion. And
yet we read the story at hand, with interest, imagining and wondering, not only
who she is but who we are. The question is sensible, if ultimately unanswerable.
‘Identity created in narrative,’ Linda Sandino adds, ‘is always in process and
imcomplete’ (p.â•›88). In the case of the artist especially, ‘the emplotment of the char-
acter … is made up of “fits and starts” rather than describing a coherent, stable
selfhood’ (p.â•›91). This is so for fairly clear reasons: Insofar as one devotes oneself
to creation, and insofar as the objects one creates are themselves transformative of
their creators, one is engaged in a process of constant re-creation. As Heidegger
(1971) puts the matter, ‘The artist is the origin of the work,’ while at the same time
‘The work is the origin of the artist.’ (p.â•›45) What’s more, even though a given work
may be completed, brought to an end, this end is but a pausing before the next be-
ginning. There is thus an irrevocable incompleteness to the process of creation, an
unfinalizability. No work will ever, no work can ever, say it all. Indeed, in line with
what Tamboukou tells us, the work of art is not to be considered a discrete event of
saying, able to be encapsulated in discursive terms, but an open space of meaning,
disclosure, unconcealment. ‘The work,’ Heidegger states succinctly, ‘holds open
the open of the world’ (ibid).
Are artists unusual? The answer, once again, would seem to be yes and no. Yes,
to the degree that they devote their lives to the creation of objects that hold open
the open of the world and, folding back upon those who create them, hold open
their very stories and identities. Not only may there emerge an unusual trajectory
of fits and starts, as Sandino mentions, but, in some instances, outright breaks,
givings-up and beginnings-anew. Once again, however, it isn’t only artists who
are ‘open works’ but the entire lot of us, ever in the process of bringing into the
world new ‘objects’ — children, meals, cars, book chapters — that return our way,
transforming, yet again, the stories we might tell about the movement of our lives.
There will be both change and, to a greater or lesser extent, continuity and coher-
ence — manifested perhaps most visibly in the form of our own distinctive style
of being and our own particular oeuvre of creations, whatever they may be. There
can of course be radical changes in style in artists and non-artists alike — so much
so that an outsider, utterly unaware of the context within which such changes have
taken place — may become convinced that those in question have indeed become
different people altogether. But most artists, and most non-artists too, would be
extremely reluctant to claim this, not least because even amidst their, our, fits and
starts or even radical breaks, there are threads of continuity. Whether the break in
question is an artistic turnabout or a divorce or a mid-life crisis, there will more
178 Mark Freeman
than likely be some sense to the move, some way of linking up before and after
— in retrospect if not at the time. There can, of course, be psychotic breaks too,
in which the very connections between ‘I’ and ‘me’ have been severed. But that is,
truly, another story altogether.
Let us explore more closely this language of ‘breaking’ through Hänninen
and Koski-Jännes’ chapter. Against the backdrop of those ‘well-formed narratives’
found in most research on ‘ordinary people’ when asked to tell the story of their
lives, Hänninen and Koski-Jännes want to focus on a ‘non-canonical’ narrative. ‘A
researcher who has set out to find well-formed narratives from the data is tempted
to relegate a non-chronological text to the margins in presenting her results’. But
it need not be this way. For ‘she can, depending on her level of commitment to the
canons of narrative psychology, either see it as indicating some kind of abnormal-
ity or as a reminder that it can, after all, be quite normal not to write, indeed not
even to grasp one’s life, according to traditional narrative conventions’ (p.â•›104). It
may be that such non-canonical telling is intentional; ‘a person with a fully coher-
ent inner narrative may write about her life in an experimenting fashion’. Likewise,
it may be that more canonical telling masks a rather hazier inner narrative. As
Hänninen and Koski-Jännes rightly acknowledge in this context, ‘There is no one-
to-one relation between the narrative text [and] the author’s inner life’ (p.â•›105).
More important for present purposes is the fact that a manifestly ‘deviant’ text may
well serve important psychological functions for the teller, its surface incoherence
and contradictoriness sometimes signifying deep inner work. The story of Anna
is just this kind of story. ‘She moves between varying positions in relation to her
life and to the text: between the hierarchical positions of a protagonist, a narrator
and an author, between the immediacy of narration and distanced reflection, and
between multiple same-level perspectives’ (p.â•›107). Her text is ‘also at times popu-
lated by different same-level voices addressing, condemning and even haunting
each other’ (p.â•›108). There is what Hänninen and Koski-Jännes term a ‘distrust
of language’ as well, in the sense of a resistance to too-codified meanings and an
attempt to find those words that will authentically convey what most needs to
be said. Finally, and most prominently, is the text’s ‘lack of chronology; it does
not proceed neatly from past to present…. On the contrary, its event structure is
totally broken,’ such that ‘the major part of her story dwells in the “timeless” inter-
nal universe of crisscrossing thoughts and memories’. Was Anna a self-conscious
postmodernist, mixing it up for the social scientists? Or was her text ‘rather an
intuitive choice that reflects her relationship to her current life problems?’ (p.â•›110).
Although there may be elements of the former contributing to the text, Hän-
ninen and Koski-Jännes lean more to the latter in their understanding of Anna
and her world. Something is being done in and through her fashioning of this
deviant text. Perhaps some of the ‘devastating events’ that have come her way ‘are
made bearable’ by the ‘distancing’ displayed therein. Perhaps the fact that there are
‘no strong connections of cause and effect’ signifies that she is more in the mode
of exploration and speculation than causation. There is no canonical story to be
told at this point in time. Anna remains very much ‘in process’, and to stop the
process in the name of a well-formed story would be defensive and destructive
of her inner reality. Nevertheless, certain themes emerge, most notably ‘her rela-
tions to other people and her relation to herself, and the tensions between these
two poles’ (p.â•›114). Even amidst the story’s deviance, therefore, there arise some
plotlines, candidates for making sense of what is being said. Indeed, Hänninen and
Koski-Jännes speak of a ‘core contradiction’, between ‘relationality’ and ‘autonomy’,
their supposition being that, in some way, Anna is trying to work through the con-
tradiction at hand. ‘Ambivalent’ though she is ‘about describing her life in storied
form,’ she still seeks to ‘â†œ“find the thread, find the shape of her path”â†œ’. In Hänninen
and Koski-Jännes’ view, ‘Anna’s text shows the pieces of a puzzle but does not as-
semble them as a picture’ (p.â•›115). Her story is like a dream in this respect, a some-
what fragmented constellation of images and plots-in-formation, pointing at times
in the direction of a meaning but moving along multiple associative pathways.
Recognizing once more the possibility that Anna’s text reflects her desire ‘to
write in an artistic way,’ Hänninen and Koski-Jännes go on to raise the more likely
possibility that ‘the characteristics of Anna’s text … reflect her striving towards
a more authentic inner narrative’. Operating on the assumption that ‘The search
for self-understanding seems indeed to be the most prominent motive in Anna’s
story,’ it ‘is not just any self-understanding’ that will do: ‘she seems to want to find
a solid and authentic understanding which she could rely on’ (p.â•›116) — elusive
though it may be at the present moment. It is curious that Hänninen and Koski-
Jännes go on to discuss ‘the psychological meaning of the incoherence and uncon-
ventional structure of Anna’s text and how it can be related to her inner narrative’.
I suppose one can consider her text ‘unconventional’. But I am not at all sure why
it would be considered ‘incoherent’. Taken out of context and background knowl-
edge, shorn of interpretation, sure: some of it might seem downright senseless,
akin, perhaps, to the utterings of the brain-injured or demented. But this would be
precisely to mistake the manifest text for the latent thoughts that inform it; and as
the authors’ own interpretive unpacking of Anna’s story has shown, it is impera-
tive to avoid this sort of conflation. Is it true that ‘some people are just episodic in
their thinking about their life?’ And, ‘Could this be true of Anna?’ Well, I hesitate
to say it again, but yes and no: Yes, in the sense that ‘her memory operates on the
basis of vivid images rather than on verbal storylines’ (p.â•›116). But no, in the sense
that, whatever her mode of telling may be — whether through words or paint,
chronologically or non-chronologically, causally or non-causally — it seems to
represent an attempt to move beyond the episodic, toward some semblance of
180 Mark Freeman
narrative coherence. Along these lines, the kind of ‘shuffling of one’s memories’
one finds in Anna’s text ‘may serve as a necessary step in creating a fresh and
authentic interpretation of the past and in avoiding premature consolidation of a
new story’ (p.â•›116). Well said. Moving ‘beyond narrative coherence’, therefore, may
very well be a ‘transitory phase’ in Anna’s case, paving the way, ultimately, to one
that is deeper, more real — true and authentic narrative coherence, one might say,
rather than false and inauthentic.
In their concluding comments, Hänninen and Koski-Jännes avow their reluc-
tance ‘to take a definite stance as regards whether a coherent and chronological
understanding of one’s life is in general superior to an incoherent and fragmentary
one’ (p.â•›117). As far as I can tell, there is no reason whatsoever to assume that a
‘chronological understanding’ of one’s life is superior to a non-chronological one.
I also see no reason for one’s narrative to be ‘well-formed’ in the Aristotelian sense.
In fact, I would tend to regard most well-formed narratives with a measure of sus-
picion, and for one very basic reason. Most of our lives are quite messy, and to the
extent that we are inclined to tell about them — some people are, some aren’t —
the resultant stories ought to be messy in turn. Anna is to be commended for see-
ing this. Perhaps one day there will emerge ‘a solid and coherent story that welds
together the discrepant parts of [her] life’ (p.â•›117). Or, perhaps not. What would be
unlikely is for Anna to remain in a purely episodic mode, one in which she is fully
resigned to a fragmentary, saccadic, senseless inner story. Somehow or other, she
will need to find that particular mode of narrative coherence that suits her life and
being, that allows her to carry on with some sense of connection to what matters
most, in all of its messy multiplicity.
To Speak the Unspeakable
Alison Perez, Yishai Tobin, and Shifra Sagy’s chapter on the broken discourse of
Israeli bus drivers also serves to show the latent coherence within the manifest
text. ‘In particular, the interviewee’s use of personal pronouns throughout the nar-
rative — while initially seemingly arbitrary and “illogical” — emerged through
deeper analysis as not only following a pattern of non-random distribution, but
also representative of specific, systematic communicative strategies’ (p.â•›121). No-
tice that, here as elsewhere, I have referred to manifest and latent properties of
the text itself. Important to emphasize in this context is that the latent properties
eventually to be disclosed only emerge in and through interpretation: only then,
after the fact, can we speak of what might exist beyond the seemingly incoherent,
the arbitrary and the illogical. As such, one might ask: Is the coherence revealed
to be ‘located’ in the text, the interpretation, or both? My own inclination is to say
‘both’; for while interpretation is in fact needed to move from manifest to latent,
what is disclosed through the process nonetheless refers back to the text itself. In
the present case, the interviewee’s use of personal pronouns might have escaped
the naked eye. Eventually, however, we come to see patterns in the text itself that
can plausibly be said to have been there ‘all along’, awaiting savvy interpreters to
find them. So it is that Perez et al. maintain their analysis ‘emerged directly from
the interview transcript, as these discursive phenomena simply commanded at-
tention, almost screaming that “something interesting” was happening within and
surrounding them’. Admittedly, ‘It took a great deal of time … to find the “miss-
ing link” that would tie these various linguistic signs and discursive forms into a
cohesive story explaining the larger picture’. In fact, ‘It was only after conducting a
thorough analysis … that we were able to understand the central message’ (p.â•›136).
Only after: Putting aside those instances of narrative coherence that wear their
coherence outright, Aristotelian-style, what we find in many of the chapters in
this volume is that narrative coherence is sometimes deferred, ‘put on hold’, until
some interpretive work has been carried out. Then, after the fact, we come to see
a greater measure of coherence than meets the eye. Whether we frame the matter
spatially, via terms like manifest and latent, or temporally, by speaking of deferral,
the story is much the same. Strictly speaking, coherence — and meaning more
generally — is neither ‘found’ nor ‘made’. Rather, there is a distinct sense in which
it is found and made at one and the same time — or, as I have put it elsewhere,
meaning is found through being made (Freeman, 2002, p.â•›24). I am speaking here
of poiesis. On one level, I have suggested, the term highlights the constructive,
imaginative dimension entailed in the process of meaning-making. But this very
process of meaning-making has as its ultimate aim disclosing what is there, in the
world — including the world of the text.
Let us return to Perez et al.’s chapter with these ideas in mind. Dani, their
interviewee, ‘appears to directly contradict statements he made mere sentences be-
forehand; and yet,’ they suggest once more, ‘there may indeed be an internal logic
to Dani’s discourse. Perhaps what may appear to be contradictions are actually the
signs of Dani attempting to make sense of his ambivalence and his own realizations
that some of his statements may seem to be paradoxical’ (p.â•›139). Dani’s specific
situation aside, the authors’ position on the coherence of the narratives derived
from their work is clear enough: ‘Embedded within the moments and positions in
which certain linguistic signs are used, there is a meaning, a message, a systematic
nature, and a significance to both this usage and the surrounding context’ (p.â•›140).
I must confess to being just a bit uncertain about this claim. Do all of their narra-
tives have a message and a systematic nature? Can all of them be ‘decoded’ in the
way Dani’s has been? One might also ask, more generally: To what extent do we,
as interpreters, seek coherence in the narratives we explore? And how often do we
182 Mark Freeman
‘find’ it in narratives that may actually not warrant it? ‘Seek and ye shall find’. But
might it not be the case that some narratives are as incoherent as they appear to
be? A still more vexing question might be raised at this point as well: How do we
know, how can we know, which narratives bear within them a latent coherence and
which do not? Is the question even a meaningful one?
Here, we come full circle and can turn once more to Molly Andrews’ chapter
on traumatic testimony. On the face of it, her chapter would appear to be differ-
ent in kind than virtually all the others. For, by all indications she is committed,
for ethical reasons, to honour and preserve the manifest form in which survivors’
words are uttered. ‘The central dilemma for many survivors of trauma,’ she writes,
‘is that they must tell their stories, and yet their stories cannot be told. The expe-
riences which they have endured defy understanding; the very act of rendering
them into narrative form lends them a coherence which they do not have’ (p.â•›4). As
Andrews points out, this situation may in fact be an extreme version of the more
general relationship between experience and narrative. ‘By structuring our expe-
riences into traditional narrative form, do we lend them a coherence and unity
which raw life does not contain?’ (p.â•›152). We have already established that there
is an element of poiesis, meaning-making, entailed in the interpretive process itself
and that coherence, in turn, is derived — issues? is discovered? is articulated? —
after the fact. It is true: the transformation of experience into narrative form ‘is a
product of human creation’ (p.â•›152). It is also true that we sometimes ‘force’ nar-
ratives onto experience in a way that dilutes and detracts from the autonomous
power of such experience. Here, we enter some perilous territory:
Life is characterized by an infinite unfolding of time. There is no beginning, mid-
dle or end, just a state of forever continuing. We organize our life and our past
into structured events precisely because that contains them for us, renders them
more manageable. We cannot keep a “forever continuing” entity in our heads; it
surpasses even the great potential of our imagination, and is something which we
can only dip into once in a while, when we afford ourselves the opportunity to
contemplate the structure of life. But on a daily basis, we do not do this; we cannot
do this, the task is simply too enormous. And so experience is broken down into
constituent parts. From this partitioning, we gain the ability to make sense of what
we are living. But we lose something as well. Although our life can be recounted
as story, there are aspects of our human experience which cannot be contained
within the boundaries of a conventional narrative structure. This is particularly so
in trauma testimony. (p.â•›153–154)
Andrews is surely right to note that there are aspects of experience that cannot be
contained within a conventional narrative structure. That this is ‘particularly so’
in the case of trauma testimony stands to reason as well: according to some, there
is no language, narrative or otherwise, that can adequately convey the enormity
of traumatic experience. But Andrews seems to be going a significant step farther

here, claiming in essence that narrative cannot help but falsify ‘raw life’. The prob-
lem, therefore, is not coherence per se but narrative itself.
‘Traumatic testimony,’ Andrews continues, ‘is marked by what is not there: co-
herence, structure, meaning, comprehensibility’ (p.â•›155). It is also marked by a dif-
ferent dimension of time — ‘trauma time’ — than the linear time that is said to char-
acterize the temporality of narrative, with its beginnings, middles, and ends. But
narrative time, I would argue, is not to be equated with linear time (see Freeman,
1998; Ricoeur, 1981). And while there surely is a distinction to be made between
‘raw life’ and the stories we might tell about it at some subsequent point in time, it
is not at all clear that the former is as devoid of narrative — or, more appropriately,
narrativity — as Andrews implies or that narrative is quite as ‘imposing’. Yes: ‘the
imposition of a traditional narrative structure compromises the attempt to speak
the unspeakable’ (p.â•›156). But all this means, in my view, is that it is precisely this
‘traditional narrative structure’ that needs to be gotten beyond, not narrative itself.
But what about coherence? Drawing on the work of Hayden White (1987),
Andrews writes, ‘We urgently want and need our narratives to make sense, to
be characterised by a logical sequencing, and towards this end, we instil in them
a wholeness which is not theirs’ (p.â•›156). There is no questioning the tendency.
Along with White, Kermode (1979) notes that we all seek narrative ‘fulfillment, …
the center that will allow the senses to rest, at any rate for one interpreter, at any
rate for one moment’ (p.â•›73). Paul Smith (1988) goes a step farther, speaking of our
‘claustrophilic’ inclinations, our desire for narrative closure. Insofar as narrative
coherence connotes such claustrophilic inclinations, then it too must be gotten
beyond, particularly in the context of cases such as those Andrews is examining.
To demand this form of coherence from those who have experienced unspeak-
able atrocities is to do violence to them. On some level, again, experience always
exceeds narrative. In extreme situations, this fact becomes that much more clear.
Also clear is the fact that there are more, and less, appropriate demands for nar-
rative coherence. When investigating a petty crime, it may be important fashion
as coherent a story as possible, such that in the end one can proclaim: case closed.
But when dealing with experiences tied to large-scale political traumas, such as
those related in the transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it is
imperative to not elide ‘messy’ discourse for the sake of the tellable story.
As noted earlier, Andrews is speaking here of ‘limit events’, and these ‘pose
a challenge to narrative, because they lie beyond language, and possibly beyond
representation’. At the same time, of course, there still remains the desire to speak
on the part of many victims of trauma, and there still remains the need to tell their
stories in a way that is somehow commensurate with, if not entirely adequate to or
representative of, their experience. ‘Just as these events demand a new language, so
184 Mark Freeman
too they demand a new method of representation’. Andrews therefore asks: ‘What
might this new representation look like? And might new forms of narrative be a
useful tool in this most challenging pursuit?’ (p.â•›184). It is here, at this juncture,
that we can see most clearly the import of this very volume. The challenge at hand
is neither to move beyond narrative nor beyond coherence. Rather, it is to find
forms of narrative and modes of coherence that move beyond — well beyond —
the classical model in order to do justice to reality, in all of its potential unruliness
and beauty, violence and horror. In some narratives, there is simply no room for
consolation or redemption — indeed no room even for the sort of ‘followability’
that is generally associated with stories. And certainly, ‘There may be no promise
that telling leads to healing’. At the same time, ‘the very act of speech — no matter
how garbled or seemingly nonsensical — can begin the process of reconnecting
one to the world of the living’ (p.â•›164).
Do such acts of speech or writing deserve to be called narrative acts? ‘Trau-
matic testimonies might not provide listeners with a beginning, middle, and end’
(p.â•›165). I therefore ask: Is it possible to think the idea of narrative — and narrative
coherence — apart from these classical categories? Some would say no; do away
with this temporal triad and one does away with narrative itself. But it is precisely
here, in thinking both narrative and narrative coherence anew, that the challenge
at hand begins to emerge in full force. As Andrews has pointed out, the classical
categories — endings in particular — frequently seem downright impertinent in
traumatic testimony, for there may be no ending, no conclusion, and surely no les-
son. But these classical categories, I have suggested, may not work much better in
the context of more ordinary lives, like most of our own. As Paul Ricoeur points
out in Oneself as Another (1992),
there is nothing in real life that serves as a narrative beginning; memory is lost in
the hazes of early childhood; my birth and, with greater reason, the act through
which I was conceived belong more to the history of others — in this case, to my
parents — than to me. As for my death, it will finally be recounted only in the
stories of those who survive me. I am always moving toward my death, and this
prevents me from ever grasping it as a narrative end. (p.â•›160)
So much for the classical categories: at the most, it seems, all we can speak about,
with any cogency and clarity, are ‘middles’!
Hayden White and others are partially right when they note that ‘real life’ is
different from the stories we subsequently tell about it, particularly those stories
that entail false coherence, with the rough edges of experience smoothed out, even
erased. But they err, I believe, in separating real life and narrative in the way they
have. ‘Without leaving the sphere of everyday experience,’ Ricoeur (1991) adds,
‘are we not inclined to see in a given chain of episodes in our own life something
like stories that have not yet been told, stories that demand to be told, stories that
offer points of anchorage for the narrative?’ Following Ricoeur, we are ‘entangled’
in stories; narrating is a ‘secondary process’ that is ‘grafted’ onto this entanglement.
‘Recounting, following, understanding stories is then simply the continuation of
these unspoken stories’ (p.â•›30).
As for narrative coherence, there is no question but that it entails some mea-
sure of what Ricoeur refers to as a ‘synthesis of heterogeneous elements’, a seeing-
together of the disparate and different. There need not be unity, in the sense of a
single, circumscribed narrative arc. Nor, I would argue, need there be chronology
or linearity; many of the most mundane stories we tell about experience move
beyond chronology and linearity. What, then, does there need to be in order for
us to use the magical word ‘narrative’? There needs to be an aspect of ‘after-the-
factness’, a looking-backward, that somehow binds together, however loosely, the
‘heterogeneous elements’ about which Ricoeur speaks. In no way does this mean
that narratives deal with the past alone; they can deal with the present and future
as well. Nor, emphatically, does it mean that the seeing-together and binding-to-
gether process must culminate in coherent stories in the classical style. In point of
fact, such stories are of minimal applicability to real life — or at least those aspects
of real life that matter. ‘I went to the store, bought some wine, and came home’. The
end: case closed, once again. When it comes to the messy stuff of life, on the other
hand, the classical categories break down.
How messy is it? Messy enough that the classical categories will not suffice but
not so messy that we need to relinquish entirely the idea of narrative coherence.
Something similar may be said of another fraught term, namely ‘identity’. And
here, the story is much the same. I refer once again to Paul Ricoeur (1991):
Our life, when then embraced in a single glance, appears to us as the field of a con-
structive activity, borrowed from narrative understanding, by which we attempt
to discover and not simply to impose from outside the narrative identity which
constitutes us. I am stressing the expression ‘narrative identity’ for what we call
subjectivity is neither an incoherent series of events nor an immutable substanti-
ality, impervious to evolution. This is precisely the sort of identity which narrative
composition alone can create through its dynamism. (p.â•›32)
Neither incoherent nor immutable, neither senseless nor static, ‘we’ persist, never
quite the same and, with rare exceptions, never entirely different. Even amidst
profound difference, there is a measure of identity. And, as we have seen here,
even amidst manifest arbitrariness, illogic, senselessness, and incoherence, there
is a measure of coherence — or at least, in the case of the victims of limit events,
a process of ‘reconnecting one to the world of the living’. In a way, this process of
reconnecting may itself be seen as a mode of coherence, binding together what
remains of the human community even amidst its devastation.
186 Mark Freeman
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In W. Patterson (Ed.), Strategic narrative: New perspectives on the power of personal and
cultural stories (pp.â•›9–27). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Freeman, M. (2008). Beyond narrative: Dementia’s tragic promise. In L.-C. Hydén & J. Brock-
meier (Eds.), Health, illness, and culture: Broken narratives (pp.â•›169–184). London: Rout-
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Freeman, M. (2009). The stubborn myth of identity: Dementia, memory, and the narrative un-
conscious. Journal of Family Life, 1. Retrieved March 19, 2009, from http://www.journalof-
familylife.org/mythofidentity
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Harvard University Press.
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Ricoeur, P. (1991). Life in quest of narrative. In D. Wood (Ed.), On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and
interpretation (pp.â•›20–33). London: Routledge.
Ricoeur, P. (1992). Oneself as Another. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sartwell, C. (2000). End of story: Toward an annihilation of language and history. Albany, NY:
SUNY Press.
Smith, P. (1988). Discerning the subject. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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timore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
List of contributors
Tarja Aaltonen is an Assistant Professor in Social Psychology at the University

of Tampere, Department of Social Research. Her research interests include such
themes as inter-subjectivity, talk-in-interaction, narrative studies and experiences
of chronic conditions like aphasia and allergies.
Molly Andrews is Reader in Sociology at the University of East London, London,
England, and Co-director of the Centre for Narrative Research (www.uelac.uk/
cnr/index.htm). Her research interests include the psychological basis of political
commitment, psychological challenges posed by societies in times of acute politi-
cal change, the psychology of patriotism, the politics of remembering, gender and
aging, and counter-narratives. Her most recent book is Shaping history: Narratives
of Political Change (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Jens Brockmeier is a Senior Scientist in the Department of Psychology of the Free
University of Berlin, Germany, and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Psy-
chology of the University of Manitoba, Canada. His research is concerned with the
cultural fabric of mind and language, with a focus on narrative as psychological,
linguistic, and cultural form — issues he has explored both as empirical phenom-
ena and as philosophical questions.
Mark Freeman, Ph.D, is Professor of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross
in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, where he also serves as Dean of the Class of
2011. He is the author of Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (Routledge,
1993); Finding the Muse: A Sociopsychological Inquiry into the Conditions of Artistic
Creativity (Cambridge, 1994); Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Back-
ward (Oxford, forthcoming); and numerous articles on memory, the self, and au-
tobiographical narrative. Among other projects, he is currently working on a book
entitled The Priority of the Other: Attention, Devotion, Transcendence, in which he
seeks complement his longstanding interest in the self with an in-depth explora-
tion of the category, and place, of the Other in psychological life.
Lars-Christer Hydén received his PhD in Psychology from Stockholm Univer-
sity. His current position is as full professor at the Department of Medicine and
Health, Linköping University, Sweden. He is also visiting professor at the Univer-
sity College of Bodö, Norway. His research primarily concerns the use of narrative
188 List of contributors
in psychological and social contexts, especially in the area of health and illness. He
has published extensively in international journals and edited a number of books
about narrative research.
Matti Hyvärinen is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the Department of
Social Research, University of Tampere, Finland. He is the convener of the Finnish
Network of Narrative Studies, and has been active in organizing several Tampere
Conferences in Narrative. He is the leader of the research team Politics and the
Arts at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change,
University of Jyväskylä. He is the co-editor of volume Terror and the Arts, Pal-
grave 2008, the special issue “Narrative Knowing, Living, Telling”, Partial Answers,
June 2008, and the electronic volume The Travelling Concept of Narrative, at http://
www.helsinki.fi/collegium/e-series/volumes/index.htm.
Vilma Hänninen is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Kuopio.
She attained her doctoral degree in 1999 at the University of Tampere. Her re-
search interests focus on narrative approach to coping with life changes, mental
health and recovery from addiction.
Anja Koski-Jännes is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Tampere.
She attained her doctoral degree in 1993 at the University of Helsinki. She has
done both quantitative and qualitative research in the area of addictive behaviours.
Her current research interests range from conceptual issues to narratives of recov-
ery and various interventions in problem behaviours.
Maria I. Medved is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at
the University of Manitoba, Canada, and a licensed practicing psychologist. Her
research is concerned with the way people deal with threats to their sense of self
in disease or after injury. She is especially interested in the narratives people tell
themselves and others in order to cope with illness and disability, and one main
topic in this regard has been neurotrauma narratives.
Alison Stern Perez is currently in the combined MA/PhD program in Social Psy-
chology at Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, Israel, where she is a Kreitman
Doctoral fellow. Her doctoral thesis, under the advisorship of Professors Shifra Sagy,
Yishai Tobin, and Dan Bar-On, focuses on coping and psychological resilience in
Israeli bus drivers who experienced a terror attack. She is investigating the nature of
coping with ongoing fear and threat of terror on a daily basis, and the ways in which
Israeli society may both contribute to and hinder resilience in these individuals.
Marja Saarenheimo, PhD, is a psychologist and works as a senior researcher in
the Central Union for the Welfare of the Aged in Finland. Her research inter-
ests include geropsychology, mental health, psychotherapy and autobiographical
List of contributors 189
memory. Moreover, she has given courses on narrative and discursive methods in
psychology and social sciences co-operating with several universities in Finland.
Shifra Sagy is a Professor of Psychology, head of the Conflict Management and
Conflict Resolution graduate program, and chair of the Center for Enhancement
in Education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Her major research
interests are stress, coping and adjustment to stressors, both normative and non-
normative. She is actively involved in peace education in the Palestinian-Israeli
context.
Linda Sandino gained an MA in Design History at the Royal College of Art/Victo-
ria & Albert Museum, and is currently embarked on a PhD at the Centre for Narra-
tive Research at the University of East London on identity in life history narratives
of applied artists. Her current post is Camberwell College of Arts, University of the
Arts London Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum, develop-
ing an oral history archive in collaboration with Camberwell College of Arts. Her
work also includes a substantial number of recordings for National Life Stories at
The British Library National Sound Archive with architects, craftspeople, design-
ers, and painters. She is editor of the Special Issue of the Journal of Design History
‘Oral Histories and Design’ (2006). Other publications have focused on the history
and theory of contemporary applied arts.
Maria Tamboukou is Reader in Sociology and Co-director of the Centre of Nar-
rative Research, University of East London, UK. Her research interests and pub-
lications are in the sociology of gender and education, gender and space, the ex-
ploration of foucauldian and deleuzian analytics and the use of auto/biographies
in research. She is the author of Women, Education, the Self: a Foucauldian Per-
spective (Palgrave, 2003) and co-editor with Stephen J. Ball of Dangerous encoun-
ters: genealogy and ethnography (Peter Lang, 2003) and with Molly Andrews and
Corinne Squire of Doing Narrative Research (London, Sage, 2008). Her current
research focuses on fin-de-siècle women artists’ letters and paintings, exploring
power/desire connections in the interface of visual and textual narratives.
Yishai Tobin is a professor in the Department of Foreign Literatures & Linguis-
tics and the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the
Negev, Israel. He is the author and editor of 15 books and over 185 articles in the
fields of developmental and clinical phonetics and phonology, discourse and text
analysis, and semiotics. He is the editor of the series Studies in Functional and
Structural Linguistics at John Benjamins Publishing Company and serves on the
editorial boards of several international linguistics journals. His research reflects a
cognitive and functional approach to language as a system of signs used by human
beings to communicate.
Index
9/11   148, 162, 169 52, 73, 97, 103–7, 171–72, Bunin, Ivan   110, 112
174, 187–88 Burke, Kenneth   19
A autobiography   88, 103–104, bus driver   11–12, 121–25, 129,
Aaltonen, Tarja   11, 12, 175, 107–8, 110, 115 140, 144–45, 180, 188
187 Autoportrait a la lettre   68
absent meaning   159 avant-garde   9, 97 C
Actual Minds   4 Ayalon, Ofra   124 Cain, Carole   45–46
Adamov, Arthur   161 Ayalon, Yael   145 Capps, Lisa   9
addiction   103, 105, 107, 113, Caspari, Isabelle   20
115–17, 188 B Cavarero, Adriana   72
addressee   38, 70, 82, 107, 127 Bakhtin, Mikhail   61 Cavell, Marcia   62
addresser   70, 83 Bamberg, Michael   47 ceramic art   92–94
Agamben, Giorgio   159–60 Bar-On, Dan   145, 188 character   4, 6, 34–37, 41, 44,
Alzheimer’s disease   9, 23, 29, Barthes, Roland   151 50–51, 55–58, 60, 75–76,
34, 36, 40, 42 Baum, Nehami   124 78, 89–91, 95–96, 99–101,
Améry, Jean   151 becoming   69–70, 74–76, 110, 134, 174, 176–77
amnesia   25 78–79, 83–84, 87–89, 91, chronological order   103, 105,
Andrews, Molly   11–13, 98, 176 112
168–69, 182–84, 187, 189 becoming imperceptible   78 chronology   6, 10, 103, 110,
annals   5 beginning   1–3, 5, 7, 9, 19, 35, 112, 178, 185
anticipated telos   117 69, 107, 112–13, 115, 137, lack of chronology   110,
Apfelbaum, Erika   162 152–53, 155, 165, 168, 170, 112, 178
aphasia   11, 34, 40, 49–50, 54, 173, 177, 182–84 chronotopes   77
57–58, 63, 175, 187 Bernstein, Michael André   10 Clarissa   83
archive   68, 71, 84, 160, 164, Blanchott, Maurice   159 closure (see also foreclosure)   1,
189 Boc   156 7, 81, 106, 152, 154, 156,
Arendt, Hannah   72, 164 bohemian   69, 77, 83 170–71, 183
Aristotle   2–3, 5, 8, 19, 153 bombing(s)   124–5, 129, 132, cognition   29
art(s)   11, 67–69, 72–74, 77, 82, 135–36, 144 coherence   1–2, 4–13, 17–21,
84, 87, 89–95, 97–99, 101, Boulogne Forest, the   81–82 23–26, 28–29, 33, 36, 46,
112, 114, 151, 177, 189 brain   9, 11, 17–18, 20–22, 91, 95, 99, 101, 103–4,
artist   11–12, 67–70, 73–74, 25–29, 33, 36, 40, 50, 53, 147–48, 152, 155–56,
76–81, 83–84, 87–101, 103, 172, 175, 179 167–71, 173–77, 180–85
106, 109, 176–77, 189 brain injury   11, 17, 20, 22, coherence paradigm   1–2, 11,
artistic creativity   114 27, 33, 36, 40 167, 170–71, 177
assemblage   75–76, 79, 82, 84 brain trauma   9, 40 coherence thesis   1, 9
author   4, 9, 12, 18–19, 23, 87, Brockmeier, Jens   2, 11, 104, Colvin, Chris   154
93–94, 103–8, 112, 117, 115, 117, 152, 161–63, communicative disability   2
123, 132, 145, 161, 178–79, 171–73, 187 completeness   8, 92–93, 98, 101
181, 187, 189 Bruner, Jerome   4, 8, 9, 17, 33, complexity   4, 7, 20, 82, 170–71,
autobiographical   17–19, 21–25, 100–1, 113, 151 175
27–29, 33–42, 44, 46–47, Buber, Martin   165 composition scheme   111
192 Index
configuration (see also recon- diegesis (see also mimesis)   2 45, 49, 50, 56–58, 61, 63,
figuration)   76, 91–92, 94, Dinesen, Isak   148 70, 73–74, 76–80, 88, 91,
96, 99–100, 147, 152, 156 discourse   7, 9, 22–24, 34, 99, 103–4, 109–10, 115–16,
conventional configuration 50–53, 55, 110–11, 121–23, 121–23, 125, 127–36,
(see also beginning, 125–28, 130–31, 133, 140–44, 147–49, 151–55,
narrative)   152 135–36, 139–42, 144–45, 157–59, 161–63, 168–72,
consciousness   18, 29, 34–35, 152, 180–81, 183, 189 182–85, 187
53, 55–56, 76, 113, 172 discourse analysis   122, 125 experientiality   9, 58
consciousness novel   9 discursive mind   29
contemplation   10, 74, 78 disorder   8, 25, 104 F
content vs. form   128 disposition scheme   111 Fabula   110–11
continuity   19, 22, 27, 40, 74, distributed cognition   29 family   9, 11–12, 23, 26–27,
152, 173–75, 177 Doležel, Lubomir   50, 53 34–35, 45–46, 50–51, 83
conversation analysis   2, 49, Douglas, Jacinta   20 Fictional minds   49
51, 63 Dover, Yael   145 Field, Sean   149
conversational   9, 24–25, 51 drama (see also tragedy)   2 Figure 5,   8, 12, 36–37, 39, 68,
cope   8, 51, 121–22, 124, 72, 74, 77, 82–83, 88, 91,
142–43, 145, 188 E 93–94, 151
Coper, Hans   93–94 Eakin, Paul   33, 104 film   9, 71
coping   121–24, 128, 142, Edkins, Jenny   155, 157–59 Fludernik, Monika   9, 58
188–89 Elmer, Fanny   78 folk psychology   8–9, 100
Coquorha, Mbuyiselo   154 empathy   42, 96, 162 folklore   1
correspondence   68, 73, 81, emplotment   87, 89–92, 96, 101, For the Love of God   90
83–84 147–48, 152, 155, 177 force   36, 46, 56, 67, 69, 71–78,
Count of Monte Cristo, The   4 emplotment of trauma narra- 80, 82–84, 114, 124, 144,
Craib, Ian   7 tives   155 147–48, 154, 161, 174,
Cronon, William   152 traditional emplotment   148 176, 184
Cups of Tears   147 end (see also beginning, visual forces   67, 72, 83–84
curriculum vitae   7 middle)1–3,   5, 9, 19, 35, foreclosure (see also closure)   5,
44, 95, 107, 112–13, 115, 88, 156
D 149, 151, 153, 155–56, 159, form and content   20, 121–22,
Damasio, Antonio   18, 53 165, 170, 173, 177, 182–85 133–34, 136
Davidson, Donald   60 End of Story: Toward an An- Foucault, Michel   159
defensive strategy   117 nihilation of Language and Fragile X syndrome   23, 25, 51
Deleuze, Gilles   68–71, 73, History   168 fragmentation   4
75–76, 78, 80, 82–84 epiphany   93–95, 101 Freeman, Mark   7, 13, 88–89,
dementia (see also Alzheimer’s ethics   67 187
disease)   9, 11, 20, 22, 27, evaluation   3, 10–11, 41–44, Friedlander, Saul   160
29, 33, 40, 42, 169, 172 60, 93
Dennett, Daniel   18 event   6, 8–9, 18, 23, 26, 33–39, G
Denzin, Norman K.   94 41–46, 53, 56, 58, 67, gap(s)   24, 29, 52, 55, 60, 63, 67,
dependence   72, 105, 107–9, 70–80, 82–84, 90, 95, 69, 78, 81–82, 110, 175
117 101, 105–7, 109–17, 124, gaze   77–78
Derrida, Jacques   71 126–27, 136, 139–40, 144, Gazzaniga, Michael   18
deterritorialization   69, 74–76, 148, 151–53, 155–56, gender   92, 126–27, 130, 134,
78, 176 158–60, 162–63, 168, 174, 141, 187, 189
developmental   6, 18, 20, 53, 176–78, 182–83, 185 gendered   7, 11, 74, 80, 121,
189 expectation   9, 11, 34, 36, 61, 126–27
developmental disability   20 140, 143–44 genocide   12, 160
dialogue   36, 55, 97, 106, 108, experience   2, 5–7, 11–13, 19, genre   5, 19, 61, 91, 104, 150,
134, 172, 175 22, 24, 29, 33, 37, 39, 41, 164
Index 193
“Gentle Breath, The”   110 125–26, 141, 151, 172–75, John, Gwen   11–12, 67–84, 176
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra   51 177, 185, 189 Joyce, James   4, 9
Gibson, Andrew   71, 75 construction   17–21
Goffman, Erving   40, 46 idem   12, 41, 87, 89–91, 95, K
Goldstein, Kurt   29 97, 99–101 Kerby, Paul   33
Goodwin, Charles   50–51 ipse   12, 41, 87, 89–91, 97, Kermode, Frank   153, 183
grammatical subject   82 99–101 Kohler Riessman, Catherine   10
Greenberg, Daniel   18 illness   11, 17, 27, 3336, 40, 106, Koski-Jännes, Anja   10, 12,
Greimas, Algirdas   113 111, 188 178–80, 188
Guattari, Felix   69–70, 76 image   18, 67, 71–73, 75, 77, Kundera, Milan   78
84, 94–95, 97, 106, 109,
H 113–14, 116, 135, 156, 163, L
haecceity   76 167, 179 Labov, William   3, 41
“Hang Up”   98–99 in-depth interview   121 Lacan, Jacques   165
Harré, Rom   29 incoherence   11, 20–23, 25, LaCapra, Dominick   156, 162
Hartman, Geoffrey   148, 155, 27–28, 103, 105, 116–17, lacunae   81–82
162, 164 157, 169–71, 173, 178–79, landscape of action   113
health (see also well-being)   19, 185 landscape of consciousness   113
35–36, 74, 114–15, 188 incompleteness   87, 95, 97, 99, Langellier, Kristin M.   9, 52
Heidegger, Martin   177 101, 170, 177 Langer, Lawrence   151, 158, 163
Heritage, John   60 individual   6–7, 10–11, 17–24, language   3–4, 12, 25, 34,
Herman, David   9, 53, 62 26–27, 29, 33, 46, 53–55, 50–51, 53–54, 60–61,
heroic meaning   163–64 57, 60, 75, 78, 88, 96, 100, 80–81, 83–84, 98–101,
Hesse, Eva   95–99 121–24, 127–28, 132, 109–10, 122, 130, 147–48,
Hirst, Damien   90 140–42, 144–45, 147–51, 156–63, 169, 171, 178,
historiography   2, 4–5 154–55, 159, 164–65, 182–83, 187, 189
history   1, 4–5, 7, 22–23, 25–26, 172–73, 175–76, 188 language and silence   147,
87–95, 97, 99, 101, 149, individualism   4 160–61
154, 162, 172–73, 184, 189 injury   11, 17, 20, 22, 27, 33, 36, language and social order   158
Holocaust   12, 148, 151, 158, 40, 142, 188 langue (and parole)   3, 159
160, 162–64, 169 inner speech   104 larval subject   78
crisis of representation   162 interaction   9, 24–27, 29, 36, Lefebvre   161
European Holocaust   12 39–40, 42–44, 46–47, letter(s)   12, 67–84, 176, 189
Holocaust testimonies   164 49–50, 54, 56, 61–63, 88, Lewin, Abraham   147–48
Huston   157 97, 100, 136, 173–74, 187 life accounts   104
hybridity   7 intermezzo   70,78 life experience   58
Hydén, Lars-Christer   11–12, internal dialogue   106 life history   22–23, 25–26,
22–23, 173–74, 187 interview   1, 11–12, 27, 33, 35, 87–93, 97, 99, 101, 172–73,
Hymes, Dell   3 37–40, 46, 87–88, 92–93, 189
Hyvärinen, Matti   92, 169–71, 95, 101, 121–23, 125, life story   1–2, 6–7, 9, 12,
188 128–32, 135–36, 140–42, 19–20, 26, 33, 35, 45, 52,
Hänninen, Vilma   10, 12, 170, 181 87–88, 91–92, 95, 100–1,
178–80, 188 Israel   121–25, 143, 188–89 106, 115, 117, 123, 170
Israel, Kali   83 Linde, Charlotte   6
I linear time   84, 155, 183
identity (see also narrative J linearity   8, 10, 12, 67, 152, 167,
identity)   4, 6, 12, 17–23, Jackson, Michael   153 169, 185
27–28, 33–37, 39–42, James, Henry   9 lines of flight   69–70, 75, 77–78
44–47, 76–77, 80, 84, James, William   174 linguistics   1–3, 189
87–92, 95, 97, 99–101, jealousy   79 listening   2, 35, 45, 72, 150,
103–4, 114, 117, 123, John, Augustus   69 162–64
194 Index
lived experience   33, 78, 80, monochromatic   77 7–8, 10–11, 13, 17, 19–21,
115, 121–22, 131, 152 Morphology of the Folktale   3 24, 28–29, 91, 104, 167,
Living Narrative   9 Morson, Gary Saul   10 169–71, 173, 175, 180–81,
Luria, Alexander   22, 29 Mpolweni-Zantsi, Nosisi   156 183–85
multiplicity   5, 7, 75, 78, 82–83, narrative construction   8, 18,
M 174–76, 180 155
machine   76, 84, 171 Musil, Robert   4, 34 narrative context   135
MacIntyre, Alasdair   4, 6 myth of healing   149 narrative form   2–3, 5, 20, 82,
Main, Mary   19 148, 152, 155, 163, 182
Man Without Qualities, The   34 N narrative grammar   3
manifest and latent   13, 167, narratability   67, 72–73, 77, narrative identity   2, 4, 7, 10,
179–81 84, 176 17–18, 20–21, 28, 34,
masculinity   11 narration   2, 9, 11–13, 17, 22, 87–89, 92, 95, 99–101,
McAdams, Dan P.   6, 9, 19 25, 33, 51, 56, 62, 72, 83, 141–42, 170, 174–75, 185
meaning   4, 10–11, 19, 23, 103, 106–7, 167, 178 narrative performance   2,
33, 51–52, 55, 59, 60–63, narrative (see also story)   1–13, 10–13, 27, 29, 34, 44, 47,
67, 71–72, 88, 91–92, 94, 17–29, 33–36, 39–42, 44, 52, 170, 174
97–100, 108–10, 116, 121, 46–47, 49–53, 55–56, 58, narrative psychology   6–7, 18,
123, 125–28, 131, 133, 62–63, 67–68, 71, 74–75, 103–4, 178
139–41, 147–48, 150, 153, 77–84, 87–101, 103–6, narrative structure   103–5, 154,
155, 159–61, 163–64, 173, 110–13, 115–17, 121–23, 156, 182–83
175, 177–79, 181–83 127–28, 131, 133–36, narrative studies   1–2, 7, 51–52,
Medved, Maria   2, 11, 51, 138–42, 147–48, 151–56, 170, 187
171–73, 188 158, 160–65, 167–85, narrative time   155, 183
memory   20, 22, 27–28, 42, 187–89 narrativist theory of history   1
72, 94, 108, 110, 112–13, autobiographical narrative   narrativity   3, 5, 7, 9, 58, 96,
115–16, 131, 151, 155, 17–19, 21, 23, 28–29, 171, 183
162, 172, 175, 178–80, 184, 33–34, 36, 42, 104, 171, narratology   1–2, 8–9, 49, 51,
187, 189 187 53, 58, 75, 77, 176
impairment   20, 22, 172 bad faith narrative   7 narrator   1, 11, 17, 22–26,
metaphysical   82 broken narrative   2, 36, 38–39, 41, 55–57, 60, 90,
methodology   10, 122–23 49–50, 62–63, 67, 92, 94, 99–100, 103, 107–8,
middle (see also beginning and 77–78, 81–84, 121–22, 112–13, 121–22, 127, 136,
end)   1–2, 5, 9, 78, 115, 142, 163, 169, 176 141, 157, 172, 178
152–53, 155, 165, 168, 170, conventional narrative   2, natural narratology   9, 58
173, 177, 182–84 103, 146, 152, 154, 156, Naxalbari Movement (Bengal)  
mimesis (see also diegesis)   10, 182 148, 150
91 epistolary narrative   10, 67, 81 neo-Aristotelianism   4
mimesis, three-fold (see also hypothetical narrative   10 neuropsychology   18
prefiguration, configura- inner narrative   104–5, “new woman”   76–77
tion, refiguration)   91 115–16, 178–79 normative   1, 3–4, 10
mind-reading   12, 49–56, life narrative   7, 10, 89, 92, novel   4–5, 9, 34, 50–53, 57, 63,
59–63, 175 101, 104 71, 78, 82–83, 92, 113, 158
Mink, Louis   5 narratable self   72
minoritarian   74, 77 oral narrative   1, 3, 9, 12 O
model   3–4, 9, 11–13, 18, 20, 34, personal narrative   88, 162, Ochs, Elinor   9
52, 58, 77, 81, 83–84, 91, 164 Oneself as Another   90, 184
149, 169, 184 told narrative   104, 115 oral history   87, 93, 95, 149, 189
modernist autobiography   108, narrative and silence   100, 142, order   8, 10, 33–35, 74–75, 80,
115 147–48, 161, 164–65 111–12, 152
monads   84 narrative coherence   1–2, 4, Örulv, Linda   22–23
Index 195
P Q drafting the self   80

painting   67, 71–73, 75–80, 84, qualitative interview   123 relational self   29
110, 113, 176, 189 sense of self   17, 19–22, 27,
Palmer, Alan   49, 53, 57, 60, 63 R 72, 116, 149, 172, 188
paradigm (see also coherence Radstone, Sara   93, 95–99 self-narrative   7, 10, 19–22,
paradigm)   1–2, 6, 11–12, reading strategy   10 103–4, 116–17, 172
167, 170–71, 177 realism (19th century)   9 self-representation   104
paradox   8–9, 79–80, 83, reconfiguration   94, 152 self-understanding   96, 99, 104,
159–60 recovery   12, 19, 62, 103, 105–6, 107, 115, 179
Parain   161 109, 117, 148, 154, 188 semiotic analysis   121
Paris   67–69, 73–74, 77, 79 referentiality   33, 46, 96, 100 semiotic registers   73, 75, 78, 80
Parkinson, S. R.   20 refiguration   91–92, 94–96 sequentiality   8, 20
patriarchy   76 reflection   17, 24, 39–40, 72, side-shadowing   10
Pennebaker, James W.   126 95–96, 99, 101, 105–7, sign-oriented linguistics   125
Perez, Alison   11–12, 180–81, 112–13, 123, 142, 153, signs   20, 46, 58, 68, 71, 73–74,
188 173, 178 76, 78–80, 82, 84, 90, 136,
performative   11–12, 34, 36, 46, representation   5, 11, 34–35, 52, 139–41, 176, 181, 189
72, 167, 174 73, 88, 104, 150, 157, 160, Slade School of Fine Arts,
personhood   99 162–63, 183–84 the   67
Peterson, Eric E.   9, 52 resilience   123–24, 142, 144–45, Smith, Paul   183
philosophy   1–2, 73, 75–76 188 Snow, Pamela   20
place   7, 37, 46, 69, 79, 92, 100, reterritorialization   69 social action   47
112, 128, 135, 137–39, 153, rhetoric   3, 150, 160 social discourse   121, 127, 133,
155, 159, 174, 176, 187 Richardson, Samuel   83 140, 144
plot   19–20, 23–24, 33–34, 36, Ricoeur, Paul   8, 10, 41, 87, social identity   114, 126
88–89, 91, 96, 104, 106–7, 89–91, 94, 96–97, 100–1, social psychology   2, 51, 187–88
110, 112, 116–17, 142, 151–55, 158, 184–85 social sciences   1, 17, 189
152, 173 Rie, Lucie   93 social self   29, 115
polyphony   79 Rilke, Rainer Maria   74, 83 sociology   2, 187, 189
Ponsford, J. L.   20 Rodin, Augustus   12, 68–70, solitude   68, 71, 77–78, 84,
portrait   11, 68–69, 72–74, 72–75, 77, 79, 81–83 144, 176
77–78 Rosenthal, Gabriele   128 South African Truth and Recon-
post-modernist   104 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques   104 ciliation Committee   12
post-traumatic stress disorder   Roy, Srila   150 space/time   70, 77–78, 176
155 Rubin, David   18 Spector-Mersel, Gabriela  
postcard   12, 73–74 141–42
prefiguration   91–92 S split-brain   18
Pres, Des   162 Sabat, Steven   29 St Augustine   8
private/public   82, 164 Sacks, Oliver   18, 36 Stair, Julian   93–95
pronoun   11–12, 82, 89, Sagy, Shifra   145, 180, 188–89 Steiner, George   160
121–22, 125–27, 129–31, Salaman, Michel   67 Stern Perez, Alison   11–12, 188
133–36, 142–43, 180–81 Sandino, Linda   10, 12, 177, 189 story   1–10, 12, 17–26, 33–47,
Propp, Vladimir   3 Sartwell, Crispin   168–69 49–54, 58–59, 63, 72–73, 79,
protagonist   11, 37, 41, 103, Schechtman, Marya   6 83, 87–89, 91–97, 99–101,
106–8, 178 scripts   8–9, 63, 88 103–8, 110–13, 115–17,
Proust, Marcel   68, 82 self   6–7, 12, 17–23, 25, 27–29, 122–23, 132, 134, 136,
psychology   1–2, 6–9, 17–18, 33, 35, 39–41, 72–73, 139, 147–55, 157, 162–65,
51, 100, 103–4, 149, 178, 75–76, 80, 83, 87–93, 95, 167–68, 170–85, 189
187–89 98, 100–1, 115–16, 141, autobiographical story   19,
public testimony   150 149, 154, 165, 172–74, 21, 23, 25, 33, 35–41, 44,
pure thinking   77–78 187–88 46–47, 172, 174
196 Index
resolved story   106 temporal schizophrenia   156 U

told story   58 terror   121, 124, 140, 188 uncanniness   8
unresolved story   106 terror attack(s)   121–24, understandability   9
untold story   154 128–30, 132–33, 135, 137, unfolding   34, 71–72, 84, 103,
Story Logic   9 139, 141–44, 188 105, 117, 153, 182
storytelling   2, 9, 11–12, 20, terrorism   123 unity   4, 6, 77, 82, 152, 170–71,
33–35, 37, 40–42, 44–47, terrorist attack(s)   11–12, 148 176, 182, 185
49–50, 63, 128, 136, 154, testimony   87, 147–50, 154–65,
170, 173–74 173, 182–84 V
Storytelling in Daily Life   9 testimony and suffering   150, virtual   70, 73–74, 78, 84, 176
storyworld   37, 39, 50–57, 154, 159, 163 visceral experiences   77
61–63, 175 traumatic testimony   147–48, visual   67–68, 72, 83–84, 87, 91,
Strawson, Galen   6, 104, 116 155, 162–65, 182–84 97, 99, 189
stress   121, 124, 128, 144–45, textual   7, 11, 21, 36, 68, 106, voice   28, 38, 40, 50, 55, 58–59,
155, 189 189 62, 79, 87–88, 108–9, 130,
stroke   20, 22, 25–26, 54, 58 time   20, 37–39, 41, 67, 70–78, 150, 172, 178
structuralist narratology   2 84, 90, 92–95, 103, 107, Vygotsky, Lev S.   104, 110, 112
subject   4–7, 11, 25, 37–39, 112, 114, 125, 147, 151–56,
50, 67, 69, 72–73, 75–78, 161–62, 168, 176, 182–83 W
81–84, 88–89, 91–93, 96, Aion   71, 74–75, 177 Waletsky, Joshua   3
99, 101, 103, 126, 131, Chronos   71, 75, 177 Warsaw Ghetto   147
136, 140–41, 149–50, 159, Tobin, Yishai   126–27, 145, 180, well-being (see also health)   13,
161, 176 188–89 19, 167
subjectivity   7, 67, 76, 185 tragedy   2–3 White, Hayden   4–5, 156, 171,
surplus meaning   160 transitory phase   116, 180 183–84
survivors of trauma   147–48, translation   3, 11, 55, 156–57 Wiesel, Elie   148, 158
152, 158–59, 171, 182 trauma   1, 9, 11–12, 35–36, Wieviorka, Annette   148, 159
Suzhet   110 40–41, 113, 117, 124, Williams, Gareth   34–35
147–48, 150–52, 154–56, witness   11, 13, 37, 76, 148–50,
T 158–60, 162–64, 169, 171, 154–56, 158–64, 173
Tamboukou, Maria   10, 12, 182–83 Woolf, Virginia   4, 9, 78
176–77, 189 trauma studies   9
Tapiès, Antonio   97–99 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph   161 Y
tellability   9, 168 Truth and Reconciliation Com- Young, Allan   155
tellability (and the unsayable)   mittee, The (TRC)   11–12,
159, 161 149–50, 154, 156 Z
temporality   8, 91, 183 Tutu, Desmond   150, 158 zero-degree narrativity   9
linear time and trauma time   Tyrwhitt, Ursula   68, 73–74, 81
155, 183
In the series Studies in Narrative the following titles have been published thus far or are sched-
uled for publication:
11 Hyvärinen, Matti, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo and Maria Tamboukou (eds.):
Beyond Narrative Coherence. 2010. vi, 196 pp.
10 Kurkowska-Budzan, Marta and Krzysztof Zamorski (eds.): Oral History. The challenges of
dialogue. 2009. xviii, 224 pp.
9 Bamberg, Michael, Anna De Fina and Deborah Schiffrin (eds.): Selves and Identities in Narrative
and Discourse. 2007. x, 355 pp.
8 Georgakopoulou, Alexandra: Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. 2007. xii, 186 pp.
7 Shkedi, Asher: Multiple Case Narrative. A qualitative approach to studying multiple populations. 2005.
xvi, 210 pp.
6 Thornborrow, Joanna and Jennifer Coates (eds.): The Sociolinguistics of Narrative. 2005.
vi, 300 pp.
5 Quasthoff, Uta M. and Tabea Becker (eds.): Narrative Interaction. 2005. vi, 306 pp.
4 Bamberg, Michael and Molly Andrews (eds.): Considering Counter-Narratives. Narrating, resisting,
making sense. 2004. x, 381 pp.
3 De Fina, Anna: Identity in Narrative. A study of immigrant discourse. 2003. xiv, 252 pp.
2 Sell, Roger D. (ed.): Children's Literature as Communication. The ChiLPA project. 2002. xii, 352 pp.
1 Brockmeier, Jens and Donal Carbaugh (eds.): Narrative and Identity. Studies in Autobiography,
Self and Culture. 2001. vi, 307 pp.

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Beyond Narrative Coherence

Studies in Narrative (SiN)

John Benjamins Publishing Company

American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beyond narrative coherence / edited by Matti Hyvärinen ... [et al.].

© 2010 – John Benjamins B.V.

List of contributors 187

Beyond narrative coherence

Matti Hyvärinen, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo and

The introduction suggests a paradigmatic turn in narrative studies as regards

and story-telling is primarily to create coherence in regard to experience, which is

The historical vicissitudes of narrative coherence

To develop this thought ad absurdum: Aristotle never seriously considered ev-

is the way critics of narrative almost systematically subscribe to the essentialist,

The Coherent Self

The emerging narrative psychology often followed MacIntyre’s example in under-

Coherence, linearity, and completeness

By contrast, for example, McAdams’ outlines of successfully coherent life stories

Above, we have documented the great number of different research orientations

recognition of genuine narrative performances. Lars-Christer Hydén, in his ar-

Maria I. Medved and Jens Brockmeier

In the literature on autobiographical narrative, self, and identity construc-

Narrative identity and coherence: The Aristotelian version

“incohesive.” Such findings are almost always interpreted as suggesting a disturbed

Narrative identity and coherence: A discursive version

We now want to illustrate in more detail how we see autobiographical narrative

While traditional assessments focusing on rounded and autonomous Aristote-

clinical subject necessarily emphasizes impairment, disorder, and deficits and, in

Reading this transcript, it is not difficult to confirm our impression as we first

Clearly there is an enormous difference between assessing, in a decontextualized

We have presented three different ways of contextualizing narrative coherence,

Identity, self, narrative

By tradition many narrative researchers interested in questions about identity

a “disciplinary potential confronting those who fail to display an appropriately

Illness, disease, and narrative

The teller as character

As observer and commentator Peggy appears in two guises in relation to time;

by stressing continuity or discontinuity. The teller to some extent becomes some-

Performing autobiographical stories

Alzheimer’s disease, identity, and narrative

The evaluation concerns Martha as a young person, but by telling it as an old

Telling the right story

Three inches off the side of my car were gone

implication of this approach is to regard the narrative less as a finished product

‘Mind-reading’, a method for understanding

An aphasic man tells, an extremely fragmented, excited, and hard-to-compre-

Keywords: mind-reading, understanding, aphasia, cognitive narratology,

face-to-face interaction arguing that mind-reading in the form of thought report-

Reading the mind and creating the storyworld

Mind-reading, or the theory of mind, refers to our propensity to represent (either

of individuals. A storyworld opens up a frame of reference for one’s thoughts and

The Tikoteekki case

Reading the mind of an individual

7 W: Looks at her sister.

6.â•‡ KELA is the Social Insurance Institution of Finland.

an act of mind-making, and mind-reading plays a role in understanding a story.

Reading the mind of the situation

Salient meanings of language offer some guidelines for mind-reading as well.

How was the data read?

Ahlsén, E. (1985). Discourse patterns in aphasia. Gothenburg monographs in linguistics 5. Göte-

Broken narratives, visual forces

Keywords: broken narratives, Deleuzian analytics, events, nomadic subjects,

Autoportrait a la lettre [Figure 1]. In this self-portrait — the only finished water-

b. the speaker is describing an experience in which he was passive and/or