norrick twice told tales 1997

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Twice-Told Tales: Collaborative Narration of Familiar Stories Author(s): Neal R. Norrick Source: Language in Society, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Jun., 1997), pp. 199-220Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4168761Accessed: 03-09-2015 21:12 UTC

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Language in Society 26, 199-220. Printed in the United States of America

Twice-told tales: Collaborative narration of familiar stories

NEAL R. NORRICK

Department of English Northern Illinois University

DeKalb, IL 60115-2863 [email protected]

ABSTRACT

Consideration of twice-told tales, of narrative events built around stories already familiar to the participants, offers a special perspective on conversational storytelling, because it emphasizes aspects of narration which lie beyond information exchange, problem-solving etc. This article seeks to show that the retelling of familiar stories has at least three functions: (a) fostering group rapport, (b) ratifying group membership, and (c) conveying group values. It is shown that familiar stories exhibit characteristic structures, conditions on tellability, and participation rights. Such stories are prefaced so as to justify their retelling on the basis of the opportunity they offer for co-narration, and this in turn allows participants to modulate rapport and demonstrate group membership. (Discourse analysis, conversation, storytelling, narrative, co-narration)*

"Even in what purport to be pictures of actual life, we have allegory." (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Preface, Twice-told tales)

This article aims to get at our reasons for collaboratively retelling familiar stories; by this I mean not just recalling shared past experiences, but co- narrating stories marked as previously told and recognized as such by some or all of the participants in the interaction. In free conversation a new story must be "reportable" (in the sense of Labov 1972, Labov & Fanshel 1977) or "tellable" (in the terms of Sacks 1974, 1992) as argued by Polanyi 1981, to get and hold the floor, and to escape censure at the conclusion of a story, a would-be narrator must be able to defend the story as relevant and newsworthy. Telling a story without a currently relevant point constitutes a loss of face for the teller, especially when it is received with a scathing So what? (Labov & Fanshel 1977) or What's the point? (Polanyi 1979).

Thus it is not obvious why retelling familiar stories occurs at all; yet familiar stories regularly appear, and their co-narration occurs quite commonly - especially within groups where some of the participants were present during

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the events reported, as well as during previous narrations. Blum-Kulka 1993 says that family stories are triggered by the presence of outsiders, but my data are full of family stories told and retold precisely among those who already know them - not in spite of their familiarity to the participants, but because of it. Moreover, retold stories are typically prefaced in ways which label them as unoriginal; yet these signals animate participants to involvement, rather than cuing them to question the relevance and tellability of the stories.' Apparently the tellability of familiar stories hinges not on their content, but on the dynamics of the narrative event itself. Story content need not be relevant or newsworthy if co-narration holds the promise of high involvement (as described by Tannen 1984b, 1989); in addition, it is precisely the familiarity of story content which influences participation rights, since it presents the opportunity for significant co-narration. We shall be looking at structural markers of retold tales, as well as the group dynamics and functions of retelling. By concentrating on narrative events where the exchange of information counts for little, we should get a clearer view of the other functions that narration fulfills in group behavior.

This investigation is informed both by my interest in narration and my research on repetition in discourse. Repetition of sounds, words, phrases, and sentences occurs with various functions within the turn, speech act, and speech event; but we also find repetition of whole turns and speech events. Indeed, repetition is constitutive for certain linguistic units such as the prov- erb and cliche, just as retelling is for anecdotes and jokes. Probably most stories are potentially repeatable but not necessarily repeated. Still, some stories may be narrated over and over for different audiences, or even repeated at separate times for a single audience. For a familiar story to crop up in everyday conversation and for the participants to collaborate in retelling it, some factors must be at work beyond the information value of the tale itself. It is these factors that I want to ferret out in the paragraphs which follow.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

The focus will be on the co-narration of familiar, retold tales. Past work on co-narration has not explicitly considered retold stories, though collaborative telling of shared past experience has received attention from such authors as Watson 1975, Tannen 1978, Michaels & Cook-Gumperz 1979, Falk 1980, Boggs 1985, Goodwin 1986, Schegloff 1992, and Norrick 1993. Especially Watson, Boggs, and Goodwin have documented the influence of co-tellers on the trajectory of a narrative through differential interest and competence in the details of talk; and Tannen brings out the importance of differing expectations about what counts as a story, and how this can lead to dissonance between co-narrators. Falk 1980 describes "conversational duets" between two co-narrators presenting a story for a third party, though not the

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COLLABORATIVE NARRATION OF FAMILIAR STORIES

re-construction of a story familiar to all present; she shows how collaborative telling affects turn-taking and related matters such as simultaneous speech. Ochs et al. 1989, Ochs et al. 1992, Blum-Kulka & Snow 1992, and to some extent Erickson 1982 and Blum-Kulka 1993, investigate collaborative storytelling around the family dinner table; but they focus on the role of parents' co-narration in the acculturation of children. Much of the literature on joint production - e.g. Erickson 1982, Tannen 1984b, and Ferrara 1992, 1994 - has considered primarily non-narrative talk. Where scholars have treated retellings separated in time, as do Hymes 1981, 1985 and Bau- man 1986, their data have been elicited stories rather than naturally occur- ring narratives. Sherzer 1982 provides a fascinating account of retelling in Kuna discourse, describing how a basic narrative varies through repetition and reformulation with different contexts, purposes, tellers, and audiences; as retellings make a story generally familiar, "what becomes increasingly important is not the news itself, but the way of telling it" (261).

This holds, mutatis mutandis, for the sort of co-narration considered below. Chafe 1980 and Tannen 1980, 1984c investigate narratives produced as retellings of a silent film, while Scollon & Scollon 1984 examine children's retellings of stories they had previously read, and Romaine 1984 looks at multiple tellings of a single event by separate children. This work, which has highlighted differences between cinematic, written, and oral versions of a story, has also produced insights into interpersonal and intercultural differences in the comprehension and production of narratives. Finally, Ferrara 1994 explicitly examines unelicited retellings; but her description of talk in therapy sessions necessarily identifies different structures, functions, conditions on tellability, and participation rights from those of everyday conversation.

In this investigation I follow Bauman 1986 and Blum-Kulka 1993 in clearly distinguishing the story from the performance, or the narrative text from the narrative event - as well as separating the story from the past events narrated. It is in this way that we can be said to be retelling a single story, as argued by Polanyi 1981. The bare skeleton of temporally ordered narrative clauses constitutes the substratum of any particular performance, which will generally flesh it out with an abstract, an orientation, dialog and evaluation, a result or resolution, and a coda (as described by Labov & Waletzky 1967, Labov 1972). The same real-world events may provide the stuff for several stories, just as the "same story" will receive different narrative treatments from different tellers; indeed, even a single teller will vary the narrative form to fit the particular occasion. But the variation of story in performance is probably most obvious in cases of polyphonic narration in natural conversation, where no single participant can control the course of the narrative, and multiple voices vie for the right to formulate the point of the story. Sacks 1974, 1992, Watson 1975, Tannen 1978, Polanyi 1979, 1985, Falk 1980, Schiffrin 1984, Boggs 1985, Duranti 1986, Goodwin 1986, and others have

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stressed the importance of the audience as co-author, and the role of co- narration in determining the structure and point of a narrative. This work on co-narration underscores the nature of telling as a NARRATIVE EVENT: a speech event among others, with its own characteristic norms governing the scene, participation rights, message content, message form, and rules of interpretation (as described by Hymes 1974:55-58).

We can follow Labov & Fanshel in distinguishing A-EVENTS, known only to the primary story teller, from A-B EVENTS, known to the teller and one other participant; and we can further distinguish both from O-EVENTS,

known generally to members of a group or culture at large. Blum-Kulka & Snow 1992 and Blum-Kulka 1993 extend this list to include F-EVENTS, those shared by the members of a family; and since any close-knit group might share events constitutive for their identification as a group, I would add G-EVENTS as a parallel category. But where does this leave events familiar to a group through frequent narration? As an event is re-created and more sharply defined through narration (and re-narration) for a certain group, it may come to have a status like that of a genuine G-event: thus children may tell an oft-heard anecdote about their parents' meeting, getting married etc., just as any new member will begin to absorb stories about the origins and history of the group, and participate in their telling. These "vicarious G-events" are often the stuff of repeated co-narration in groups.

But membership in any group (even a family), whether constitutive for a genuine G-event or a vicarious G-event, is not a pre-established fact that we can simply apply to our data. Rather, as Schegloff 1987, 1992 has particularly stressed (following Sacks), it is up to the researcher to find in the data appropriate evidence for the status of the participants involved, including the matter of whether they view each other as group members for purposes of the current exchange. The definition of "family" itself can be problematic, even if we restrict ourselves to the traditional definition of two heterosexual parents living together with their biological offspring. As Blum-Kulka 1993 shows, children sometimes count as full members of the family, but at other times they do not. Further, an aunt or a grandmother living with the nuclear family may act as a full member in some interactions, e.g. co-narrating a story of a past event in which she took part; but perhaps this "relative" may be excluded from other talk exchanges, such as discussions about teenagers' dating behavior. Of particular interest in the examples below is the inclusion of married-in daughters-in-law in family storytelling; as we shall see, family membership is a status to be negotiated and repeatedly ratified in some families. The narrative integration of second spouses, acquired after the death or divorce of one biological parent, raises issues that I do not explore in this investigation, but I assume that they adhere to the pattern I have found for daughters- and sons-in-law - namely remaining silent during co- narration of family stories, looking for opportunities to append parallel sec-





ond stories of their own to align themselves with the values of their adopted families.

In the following I identify and develop three important functions of retelling stories, in particular of co-narrating them in a group, through close consideration of examples from natural conversation. In various guises these three functions appear in other forms of conversational interaction; and each is implicit, or has received at least passing mention, in work on narration in free conversation. What is original here is my focus on the functions of retelling stories already heard. I argue, first, that we retell familiar stories to foster group rapport. Second, we co-narrate familiar stories to ratify group membership. And third, we retell group stories which portray shared values. Often all three objectives co-exist in a single narrative event, while one function may dominate a whole narrative or a whole section of it. With this in mind, I have sought to choose narrative passages illustrative primarily of one function, and to treat them in the three separate sections below; but I reserve the right to comment on any of the three functions not directly at issue, as may seem appropriate.

RETELLING AND RAPPORT

My notion of RAPPORT grows out of Politeness Theory as developed by Lakoff 1973, Brown & Levinson 1978, and Tannen 1986: it is the shared sense of camaraderie created by reciprocal acts of positive politeness, redounding to the enhancement of FACE (in the sense of Goffman 1955, 1959) for all participants. Face enhancement occurs when others endorse the "line" that we present; this includes accepting and positively evaluating our stories, opinions, and other conversational contributions. The coordinated give-and- take of conversational interaction that is characterized as "high involvement style" by Tannen 1984b, 1986 naturally accrues to rapport as well, since participants constantly complete, continue, borrow, and build on each others' contributions. Moreover, if the topic of conversation recalls happy memories or conduces to laughter, as in the passage below, this serves to further enhance rapport, as is argued in Norrick 1993, 1994.

It seems often that the principal goal of storytelling in conversational interaction consists in reliving pleasant moments and enhancing rapport; thus we frequently retell an already familiar story with little information exchange, and no new point to make. This is particularly obvious in cases where the events retold have no personal import for the tellers. Again examples abound in everyday conversation, e.g. when interlocutors conspire to rehearse the plot of a book, play, or film. The first exchange I have chosen to illustrate this sort of co-narration shows Frank and Ned collaborating to retell a comic scene from the movie Mr. Roberts.2 The passage originates in a set of tapes made during a long weekend which Ned and his family spent at the home of




NEAL R. NORRICK

his parents, Frank and Lydia, along with the family of his brother Brandon. But at this particular time Frank and Ned are alone in the den; Ned is leaf- ing through a movie book, asking Frank about various movie titles and actors as he comes across their names. The name of William Powell leads Frank to mention Mr. Roberts. Once they have straightened out the dramatis personae, Frank and Ned go on to dramatize a central incident from the film;3 and although Frank ends up supplying most of the narrative thread, Ned takes only one less speaking turn overall, so the co-narration is pretty well balanced.

Mr. Roberts Frank: He was good as the shipboard doctor in Mr. Roberts.

Ned: We didn't see it, we just saw a little bit of it, we just saw that it was on. A whole bunch of people are in that movie, Jimmy Cagney's in that movie.

Frank: Oh yeah. He's the captain. Ned: But who's the:

Frank: Henry Fonda. And uh: Ned: Henry Fonda, and Jack Lemmon.

Frank: And Jack Lemmon. Ned: Well huhhuh what a cast.

Frank: And they were all good, boy. Ned: And I was wondering though, I thought "Yeah, William Powell," but I didn't know

him well enough. Frank: He was the doctor. And Jimmy Cagney was the son of a bitch. He was the command-

ing officer. Ned: But he's the all rules an-

Frank: Ah he was a son of a bitch and he had a potted palm tree that sat up on the bridge. And it was (h)the huhhuh Jack Lemmon's job to come by and water that thing y'know an-

Ned: But what does Lemmon finally do, does he throw it overboard? Frank: Yeah. He just got so goddamn-

Ned: He was- says "I'm gonna-" Frank: got so goddamn mad he just-

Ned: "To hell with this plant." Frank: Huh huh huh huh. He just took it huhh. Threw it over huh huh. And the men all

watched him do it of course and everybody just, Ned: Huh huh huhhuh.

Frank: Hyah hyah hyah. And then the old man then lined them all up and he was gonna huh huh huh draw and quarter all of them until he got a confe(he)ss(h)ion of who di(hi)d (h)it huh huh (h)y'know huhhuhhuhhuh and Lemmon stepped forward and, "I threw your god damn plant [overboard."]

Ned: [Huh huh huh] huh. Frank: Hu hu hu hu huh huh huh huh.

Ned: So you can look up in here anyway not just guys, y'know look up names of people, but names of directors.

Once Frank and Ned get clear about the actors in the movie, and the roles played, the main type of data exchanged in this joint performance consists in the sort of information we signal almost any time we talk, namely personal particulars about films we have enjoyed, scenes we recall etc. Nevertheless, Ned explicitly asks for confirmation of his recollection that Lemmon threw the palm tree overboard; and he receives it. Otherwise each participant freely





fills in details, and invents dialog that the other accepts: joint production aligns the participants together, rather than setting up a teller on one side and an audience on the other. Consequently, the passage illustrates excellent conversational rapport. As Frank and Ned conspire to relate scenes from a movie which both have seen in the past (though Frank has seen it again more recently), experiences which had been A-events for both separately now com- bine into an A-B event for the two of them. They agree on what scene to relate, and they effectively negotiate its telling. Their rapid-fire turn exchanges and overlaps attest to their high level of involvement. Each laughs about the way the other dramatizes events and finally about their joint performance overall. So they succeed in making their separate past experiences into a common experience, which represents a fundamental mechanism of rapport through talk.

Much of this same desire to recreate and re-enjoy a common experience presumably motivates my next example - a true family story, both in the sense that the events described involved the whole family, and that it is co- told by these same family members. Like other close-knit durable groups, families have their own stories, recalled and repeated spontaneously during regular interaction between group members. Though these stories may be retold primarily for amusement, they function simultaneously to inform/ remind members, especially children, of a common past and shared values, so that they enhance feelings of a family's identity as a group.

The story that Pat introduces in the passage below can serve as a typical example of a family story jointly constructed by two or more members. The participants are Pat, her husband Ralph, and their two college-age daughters, Amy and Mary, who are home for Thanksgiving. Only these four family members are present, and all four are involved to some degree in the events rehearsed in the narrative, though Pat identifies Amy as the primary character in "the story about you [i.e. Amy] and the little chipmunk." The family has remained seated at the kitchen table after supper is over. Pat has been describing a party she attended where she related this same story for the amusement of outsiders; but here the story is told as one familiar to every- one in the immediate family, all of whom are present.

Chipmunk Pat: And I told the story about you and the little chipmunk out in the garage.

Mary: Oh [huhhuhhuhhuh.] Amy: [ I kept- I kept- ] I was just thinking about that the other day. That thing scared

the heck out of me. Pat: With all with all the:

Amy: It was twice. Mary: Huhhuhhuh. Amy: It was twice. And the first time, "There's a rat in there, there's a big mouse in there.

I saw it." Mary: Hehhehhehheh. Amy: "No, there's nothing in there." "Yes, I saw it."




NEAL R. NORRICK

Mary: I wouldn't believe her. Pat: Well I went out. Remember, and set the bag- it was a bag of cans. That was when

we were looking for the golf ball, cause you hit the ball in the can. Amy: Yeah and then you found its little cubby holes in a box or something.

Pat: Well, what- what- Mary: You found all the seeds, didn't you?

Pat: All the seeds. Ralph: All the seeds in a plastic bag.

Pat: Right by the wood out there. And when we moved the wood to clean it there was the whole thing. It must have sat against the wood and then ate all hehhuh the huh [su(huhh)unflowers.]

Ralph: [All the] sunflower seeds. All the shells were in [the bag.]

Pat: [There were] shells everywhere. Amy: Yeah and you guys wouldn't believe me. Mary: Well I guess there was [something there.]

Pat: [Well I didn't] the first time but the second time I did. Amy: Sca(ha)red me bo(ho)th [times hehehehe.] Mary: [hahalhaha. Amy: And of course it happened to me. You know, nobody else.

Pat: Little sucker was living in the garage and Ralph: Living [it up. Living high on the hog.]

Pat: [had it made. He was in out of] the cold and he had something to eat. And, and by the way, we have to get a bird feeder. I'll have to talk to Ma and go to that Audubon place.

All the features found typical of collaboratively constructed family stories are present here. First, there are explicit markers that the story is already known to at least some of those present. Thus Pat prefaces the passage with a definite description, "the story about you and the little chipmunk," which presupposes general familiarity with the basic gist; and she says "remember" as she gets into the actual narrative. Participants also check on the accuracy and completeness of their own recollections, with open-ended statements like Amy's "and then you found its little cubby holes in a box or something" - or with explicit questions, often in the form of a statement plus a tag, as in Mary's "You found all the seeds, didn't you?" Conversely, participants confirm each other's statements, as does Amy in beginning two contributions with "yeah and." As we have seen, this give-and-take with its successive stages of agreement conduces to rapport.

Second, there is substantial co-telling. Amy immediately ratifies the familiar character of the story by claiming that she was thinking of it just the other day. At the same time, she makes a bid to become co-teller of the story. After all, Pat has identified Amy as the human protagonist, and Amy wastes no time in trying to place her emotional response at the center of interest in the story. Participants demonstrate knowledge of the story and hence group membership, particularly through addition of details. Ralph speaks little, overall; but when he does, he contributes salient details, first that the seeds were "in a plastic bag" and then that "the shells were in the bag."





Third, there is often disagreement about details, and especially about the point of the story. As a consequence of differential memories and points of view, participants correct each other's accounts, and vie for the right to formulate the story's point.4 When Amy says, "Yeah and you guys wouldn't believe me," Pat objects, "Well I didn't the first time but the second time I did." Amy seeks to construct the story around her fright, and her indigna- tion at failing to convince the others of her credibility; but Pat and Ralph conspire to focus the story on the chipmunk's successful survival strategy. Their joint assessments to this effect stand unchallenged as the final evaluation of the story, following Amy's last gasp with "And of course it happened to me. You know, nobody else." Again Ralph's contribution is short on words but long on meaning, because he casts it in idiomatic and prover- bial language: "Living it up. Living high on the hog." Pat makes a final determination that the story was about animals in winter, by moving to the related topic of feeding birds. Agreement on the final point of a story not only enhances rapport, it may also serve to fix the story in the minds of participants for future tellings, and it locates a further building block in the family history.

NARRATION AS RATIFICATION OF GROUP MEMBERSHIP

In the literature on conversational storytelling, much is made of narrating as a "bid for power" (Toolan 1988:6) and of asserting the RIGHT to participate in the narrative event (Shuman 1986, Blum-Kulka 1993). Within the nuclear family, however, participation in co-narration seems more concerned with demonstrating membership, i.e. with belonging in the family. Falk 1980 shows how couples display for others their joint participation in past events through co-narration in carefully orchestrated "duets." Cederborg & Arons- son 1994 see disagreement about facts as accusation in family therapy sessions; but in my data, the disagreements disappear as family members allow each other to refresh their memories of details. Co-narration ratifies family membership and values not just de-jure by birth, but de-facto by producing shared memories, feelings, and values. Children gain full family membership to the degree that they can contribute to family co-narration in appropriate ways. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins etc. may participate as family members in the retelling of some stories familiar to them, though they are excluded from others involving only the nuclear family. In the pair of examples below, an aunt plays a central role in one retelling, but is sidelined in the following narrative event.

At the same time, the first passage illustrates a fairly common practice whereby group members relate recurrent shared past experiences in generalized form, without reference to any specific instance. Instead of pure past-




NEAL R. NORRICK

tense clauses in temporal order, as required by Labov's definition of narrative, these generalized collaborative exchanges thrive on verb phrases with would and would be -ing, along with used to forms. Explicit 1st person we pronouns frequently give way to 2nd person you with general reference. This passage provides a typical example in which participants recount a recurrent experience they had with a particular hairdresser. Annie and Jean are cousins in their late 20s or early 30s; Helen is Annie's mother and Jean's aunt. All three have lived in close proximity their whole lives, so that they may be said to form a loose family group. They are gathered before a late-afternoon Thanks- giving dinner in the living room of the house where Annie and Helen live.

Tipsy Annie: And I always thought that her and Vance just were great

[together.] Jean: [Yeah.] Used to [get s-]

Helen: [They were both] good. Annie: Yeah. They were really good.

Jean: You could go over there around the holidays and get smashed before you left [the place.]

Helen: [Oh yeah.] Jean: We used to have the last appointment, right?

Remember, the two of us would go? Annie: Yeah, yeah.

Jean: "Want some wine girls?" "Sure we'll have a glass of wine." You walk out of there you're half tipsy.

Annie: You were under the dryers. Jean: Well sure. And he'd be pouring the wine and we were tipsy by the time we walked

out of that place. Annie: Then he moved all the way out at Rand Road.

Jean: Near the town show, remember? Annie: Yeah.

Jean: [We went there.] Annie: [We used to go there.] And then we went on to Union Road, when he was there.

Jean: Yeah. Yeah. We followed him around.

Here again we find many of the same devices characterizing the exchange as a recollection of shared past experience. Jean initiates the co-telling with an ostensible request for confirmation, in the tag question "We used to have the last appointment, right?" But she does not pause long for a reply, and receives none; so the question stands simply as a marker of shared background knowledge. Then, with "Remember, the two of us would go?" Jean explicitly seeks testimony from Annie, who this time complies with "Yeah, yeah." Jean again questions Annie with "remember?" later in the exchange, again receiving a positive "yeah" in return. Jean's "Well sure," in response to Annie's "You were under the dryers," and Annie's near repetition of Jean's "We went there" as "We used to go there," are instances of checking details and coordinating accounts of the shared experience. All these markers of shared experience count as evidence of group membership.





Co-telling is quite prevalent, though Jean clearly remains the primary narrator. Helen confirms Jean's basic point about drinking at the hairdresser's at the outset, with "Oh yeah"; and Annie not only confirms Jean's claims, but adds the salient detail about being "under the dryers" as well. But Annie's co-telling veers off in the direction of telling what happened to Vance and his partner; this suggests another point about collaborative family tales, namely that disagreements during co-narration tend to arise especially about the point of the story. From Jean's perspective, the story focuses on the avail- ability, consumption, and effects of alcohol at the hairdresser's; but Annie is far more concerned with Vance as a good hairdresser, and how the sisters followed him as he moved around. Jean comes around to this point of view in the end, agreeing with Annie and summarizing the story in line with her interpretation: "Yeah. Yeah. We followed him around." This final agreement about the point of the narration caps off an interaction already filled with signals of shared group identity and high rapport.

Another story, with a more narrowly familial focus in this same setting, demonstrates how group dynamics can shift, based on family membership. Annie's younger sister Lynn had remained silent during the foregoing talk of hairdressing, because she had at the time been too young to accompany her older sister, cousin, and mother on trips to the beauty parlor. But as this conversation continues, Lynn finds occasion to introduce a story of a third sister, Jennifer, not present in the group; and this suddenly makes their cousin Jean a partial outsider, as someone not living in the same house when the reported events took place.

During most of the immediately preceding interaction, Jean had controlled the floor, and she holds forth as long as she can while Lynn attempts to begin her story. Even then, at the first pause, Jean attempts to ratify her status as a family member by hopefully contributing a detail to the story, albeit in the form of an uncertain request for confirmation: "She put something on her head, a bag or something?" As soon as Lynn appears to have finished her story, Jean again assumes control of the floor with a comment about her own hair, which leads back into more general talk not focused on the nuclear family.

Poodle Jean: Annie gave me a permanent once, too.

Lynn: Annie did? Jean: Once and only once.

{general laughter} I would never allow her to touch my hair again.

Lynn: Well remember the time- Jean: Yoooh. Talk about afro when afro wasn't even in style.

My god. Annie: Well see I started [something.]

Jean: [Frizz ball.] I was a frizz ball.




NEAL R. NORRICK

It wasn't even afro. I was just frizz. Lynn: Remember [when-] Jean: [It was] terrible.

Lynn: Jennifer, the first time Jennifer had a perm when she came home. It was the funni- est thing.

Jean: She put something on her head, a bag or something? Lynn: She wore her-

Annie: Huh huh huh. Lynn: Well she wore her-

Helen: "Hair ball, hair ball." Yeah. Because she- Annie: She just always had this hood on. And she ran right upstairs, Lynn: No. First she threw her bag up the stairs, almost hit me.

Annie: Oh yeah. Lynn: Then "bang." The door slams. And I'm like- I was on the phone. I was like

"Ah I don't know. My sister just walked in. I think something's wrong." And [then she ran up the stairs.]

Annie: [Oh that's it.] "I look like a damn poodle." (general laughter}

Lynn: Like sobbing, "I look like a poodle." Helen: Aw huhhuhhuh. Annie: Then she came down to eat and she'd wrapped a towel around her head. Helen: Aw huhhuhhuh. Lynn: She barricaded herself for a while in her room. Jean: My hair takes like this. I mean.

Annie: Yeah.

Lynn first announces her story with: "Well remember the time-," before Jean lets her have the floor. As we saw above, the preface with "remember" provides a way of explicitly marking a story as familiar to at least some participants. When Jean again seems to have finished, Lynn reiterates her "remember" preface, and allows Jean one final evaluative comment before plunging into the story about Jennifer's first perm.

Both Annie and Helen are involved in co-telling the story. Helen adds only a bit of dialog and sympathetic sounds, but she makes the most of this contribution - since, as Tannen notes, animating dialog illustrates shared experience (1989:11). By contrast, Annie makes extensive contributions, but receives corrections from Lynn on almost every detail she adds.. Thus Annie's description "She just always had this hood on" is allowed to stand; but her following statement, "she ran right upstairs," elicits a prompt "No" from Lynn, who proceeds to place herself in the center of the story's action. Again, when Annie attempts to add a piece of dialog: "I look like a damn poodle," Lynn objects to her tone: she says it was "Like sobbing," renders Jennifer's sentence as sad rather than angry, and deletes the "damn." Finally, even Annie's statement beginning "Then she came down to eat" displeases Lynn, who insists that Jennifer first "barricaded herself for a while in her room." Although Lynn has a hard time getting started, and has difficulty respond- ing to Jean's query about what Jennifer wore on her head, she shepherds the story through to the end, as becomes quite clear in Annie's concurring responses to Lynn's corrections: "Oh yeah" and "Oh that's it."





Even without a final coda to express agreement on the evaluation of a past event, or on the point of the story about it, collaborative narration serves to ratify group membership and modulate rapport in multiple ways - first because it allows participants to relive pleasant common experiences, second because it confirms the long-term bond they share, and third because the experience of collaborative narration itself redounds to feelings of belonging.

NARRATION TO CONVEY SHARED VALUES

We have seen how family membership must be negotiated anew for each narrative event. Family members, as defined loosely or tightly by their social roles, may jockey for insider status in the course of an interaction. Of course, nuclear family members themselves sometimes tussle over the right to co-tell a story or to summarize its point; but the demonstration of membership goes beyond shared F-events for co-narration, to the demonstration of shared values. Even non-family members can gain a degree of acceptance by espous- ing values dear to the family; this is accomplished most expeditiously by constructing stories from one's own past which parallel those told in the family to which one seeks admission. Thus a person who cannot participate in co-telling a story familiar to group members can at least tell a story like it, which repeats its action and reiterates its values. This strategy becomes especially obvious in cases where daughters- or sons-in-law have entered a family by marriage, but so far share few F-events as a basis for co-narration. For such marginal family members who feel they are on temporary probation, displaying shared values is of special importance.

The next two passages both show a daughter-in-law attempting to ratify her de-facto membership in her adopted family by telling stories from her own past - first on her own, then at the behest of her husband, who is the younger son in the nuclear family circle. By fitting her second stories about thrift to her mother-in-law's preceding ones, the daughter-in-law attests that her own values match those of the family into which she has married. In this section, then, we move beyond the retelling of a single story to include the telling of parallel stories.

Research on family storytelling has revolved around its role in the acculturation of children, e.g. Ochs et al. 1989, Ochs et al. 1992, Blum-Kulka & Snow 1992, and to some extent Erickson 1982 and Blum-Kulka 1993. Par- ents encourage children to tell stories, especially around the family dinner table; then they edit and co-narrate to help the kids improve their logical thinking, organization skills, and story performance generally. By contrast, I focus here on family stories co-narrated by grown-up siblings and their parents, who shared a home for years but now live separate lives. In these narrative events, it is if anything the offspring who tend to take over and correct the older parents. After all, they are college students and college-educated




NEAL R. NORRICK

professionals, accustomed to producing texts for the consumption and edu- cation of diverse audiences, while their parents are retired or nearing retire- ment age. At the same time, one may imagine, the parents continue to define family values, and to act as the authorities on family history.

The following examples from a single setting demonstrate how family stories can serve to define characteristic family values vis-a-vis outsiders. In particular, the matriarch Lydia stands for frugality, which she learned from her mother and grandmother, namely the "Grandma Imhof" described as "the stingy one" by Lydia's husband, Frank. Although they laugh about frugality and claim to have been embarrassed by the frugal habits of their parents, all the family members tacitly endorse it as a primary (family) virtue, as documented variously by my recorded material.5 Ned and Brandon, as sons of Lydia and Frank, have imbibed frugality, as it were; their respective spouses, Claire and Sherry, have to establish their in-group status through demonstra- tions of frugal behavior and, of course, appropriate stories. Sherry is particularly eager to confirm her family membership, since she has more recently married into the family, and comes from a background less obviously frugal than does Claire. The conversations take place at the home of Ned and Claire, where the others are visiting over the Thanksgiving weekend; in both, most of the participants remain seated at the dining room table, while Claire and Brandon move between the dining room and the adjacent kitchen.

Darned dish towels Frank: Grandma Imhof, she was the stingy one.

Ned: Claire has darned dish towels. Frank: Her mother did it. Sure. Lydia: Well see I said if you grew up in a house where your mother

[patched washcloths]. Ned: [Remember darning, Sherry?]

Sherry: I was going- "What are darned dish towels." Ned: Well. It's when you don't want to say damn dish towels.

{General laughter} Don't you call that process darning?

Lydia: But my mother just put them under the sewing machine and took two washcloths and made one. And patched the middle of a washcloth when it was worn out.

Ned: Your mother didn't invent that huh huh huh. Lydia: And I said when you grow up like that it's hard to get with this world that throws

things away. Claire: {arriving} Here are darned dish towels. Sherry: Huhhuh darned dish towels. Lydia: But were you ever embarrassed, Claire? When you invited friends to your house,

did you ever have to be embarrassed? I was embarrassed when the girls from town came.

{Laughter from Sherry, Brandon, and others} Ned: Our mother was embarrassed?

Lydia: And saw my mother's patched washcloths. I tried to hide them really fast. {Sherry and Lydia in two-party conversation from here on}

Sherry: We had a- my mom always had like a dish cloth that had holes in it? And I always still get holes in them before I throw them away. And he's like going, "Don't you think we need a new dish towel?" And she always had an old green pad that she





used to scrub the pans with. And we always called it that ratty green pad. And so in my mind it's supposed to be like really awful and ratty. Before you throw it away huhhahaha, And once a year I buy two new dish cloths whether I need them or not hehehe.

Lydia: Khuh khuhhuh.

The whole family has gotten onto the topic of frugality - or stinginess, as Frank insists on calling it - which suggests for Ned the example of darning dish towels from his wife's family, and for Lydia her own mother's patching washcloths. Then, in the midst of talk about darning dish towels, Lydia pieces together her story about her mother's patched washcloths. Although Lydia narrates through laughter and Ned's snide comments, her story elicits no real co-telling, since it relates purely A-events; in particular, it focuses on Lydia's own embarrassment and attempt to hide the offending washcloths when "the girls from town" came and saw them. Apparently not just thrift itself, but suffering embarrassment for it from outsiders, assumes importance for Lydia. Although Lydia declares her embarrassment about her mother's thrifty habits in such a way as to elicit laughter from her listeners, it is clear from what she has said before how she values frugality. It is also clear that "the girls from town" represent the rejected wasteful attitudes to which Lydia cannot get accustomed.

It is most certainly clear to Sherry, who immediately seeks to paint herself in Lydia's colors by constructing a parallel "second story" (in Sacks's sense). Sherry's second story corresponds to Lydia's original in multiple ways. First, it casts Sherry in the same role as a daughter to a frugal mother. Sherry initially begins her story with "We had a-"; then she backtracks and self- corrects, placing her mother up front with "My mom always had ..." Then the story shows her taking over her mother's thrifty habits - despite objec- tions from her husband, Lydia's son. Finally it lets her, like Lydia, express a sort of laughing embarrassment, though she wisely eschews mention of a particular outsider group like "the girls from town." Note especially the final, partially formulaic statement that she buys new dish cloths "whether I need them or not" - with accompanying laughter, which Lydia echoes. This degree of congruency between a second story and its original model goes far beyond the sorts of structural parallelism that Sacks describes, particularly in the area of demonstrating shared attitudes. This is precisely what we expect in the sort of family story at issue here.

In fact, Sherry may feel it is particularly important at this juncture, for several reasons, to record her solidarity with Lydia as a frugal woman. First, the more senior daughter-in-law Claire has just physically produced darned dish cloths to attest her frugality. Second, Sherry has just admitted not even knowing exactly what darning is: in response to Ned's needling her with "Remember darning, Sherry?" she replies, "I was going- 'What are darned dish towels'," though she may have honestly interpreted "darned" as the euphemism for "damned" suggested by Ned's pun. Third, Lydia explicitly




NEAL R. NORRICK

directs her story at Claire with her question "But were you ever embarrassed, Claire?" Apparently Lydia has no doubt about Claire's frugality, seeking only confirmation from her with regard to embarrassment vis-a-vis "the girls from town." But Sherry feels the need to attest both her thrift and her embarrassment for it - and her story seems perfectly constructed to accomplish these ends in a low-key way, while Frank, Ned and Brandon enter into a separate conversation of their own.

Apparently, however, Sherry has nothing to fear from her mother-in-law, who has already accepted her into the fold of frugal family women - so much so that Lydia can reproduce an anecdote about Sherry's thrifty coupon use. Lydia's story about Sherry then leads into another "frugal" story which Sherry tells on herself, after prompting by husband Brandon. There follows a truncated narrative which connects with our foregoing consideration of collaboratively constructed narratives, and brings this investigation to a close.

Rubber wallets Frank: We don't tear out coupons.

Brandon: I think you've got to enjoy the process. Frank: We don't.

Brandon: I don't, Frank: So:

Brandon: She does. She's religious about it. Sherry: What, hon. (just tuning in to this conversation)

Brandon: Coupons. Lydia: How I know she's the coupon lady. I've told the cute story about Elizabeth say-

ing when her mom's ready to go out to the store, "Got the coupons Mom?" I thought that was the cutest thing I'd ever heard.

Brandon: Did you hear the one the other day? Tell the one about you in the grocery store Sher.

Sherry: I was- I saw this new yogurt. That had only fifty calories. And you know they have the Yoplait that's a hundred and fifty, and the other is ninety, and Weight- watchers has a ninety calorie one- this one was fifty calories and I just looked at it and I went- Wow. And Elizabeth said, "What. Did you see a really good price Mom?" Huh huh huh huh [huh huh huh huh.]

Lydia: [Isn't that embarrassing] ha ha ha ha. Sherry: Huh heh heh. And I just started laughing and laughing. And I hugged her. And

she was saying, "Well, was it? Was it?" Said "No honey, I" Lydia: Maybe you'll have the joy of having your children tell you what I've had them

say to me about my uh rubber wallets? And their scrounging cheap mother. I've been told that often. So I hope it happens to you too.

Brandon: Rubber wallets? Lydia: Henry still today kids me about rubber wallets.

Ned: I don't remember. Lydia: I wouldn't buy the boys little leather wallets when they were little. And he calls

them rubber, Sherry: Hehheh. Lydia: Because he thinks his mother's such a terrible cheapskate.

Brandon: Henry? Lydia: Oh yes. He never lets me forget that. (h)Rubber (h)wallets huh huh huh huh.

Ned: Hehhehheh. Lydia: And I know the exact little wallet he's talking about.

I can see it as if it were yesterday.





Lydia not only declares Sherry "the coupon lady," but tells a humorous story about her coupon use. Lydia sums up the tale by calling it "the cutest thing I'd ever heard," thus focusing on the child; but the message of thrifty coupon utilization comes through as well. Since the coupon story relates an A-event for Sherry, and an embarrassing one at that, it initially comes as something of a surprise that Lydia tells it - especially since it counts as, at most, a vicarious F-event for her. Usually we tell embarrassing personal anecdotes only about ourselves; but a mother-in-law-cum-grandmother can probably be forgiven for reproducing such anecdotes, particularly when they so nicely demonstrate both a thrifty daughter-in-law and a precocious grand- child. Moreover, the story parallels Lydia's own story of the patched washcloths, and she is eager to endorse the values it portrays. Lydia's preface, "the cute story," explicitly marks the anecdote as one familiar to at least some of those present. If Frank and Ned have not yet heard this story, then it serves to inform them about Sherry's thrifty behavior, and it becomes part of the general stock of family stories available to insiders. For Lydia to retell Sherry's coupon story ratifies not only Sherry's adoption into family membership status, but also shows that this sort of story conveys these attitudes and values. Lydia essentially validates Sherry's A-event story as an official vicarious F-event story through retelling it.

Brandon immediately responds to the tenor of Lydia's anecdote by sug- gesting that Sherry report a more recent parallel incident. His question "Did you hear the one the other day?" shows that he assumes Sherry may already have related the event - presumably since it clearly represents one sort of family story that is appropriate in this group. In particular, his phrase "the one"9 signals his evaluation of the story in question as another of the same type as Lydia told. Brandon even repeats this phrase in his explicit request to Sherry, "Tell the one about you in the grocery store." Sherry's story does in fact parallel Lydia's in multiple ways: in both, Sherry's daughter Elizabeth asks her mom a question which reveals a regular pattern of behavior on Sherry's part; and in both the behavior corresponds with frugality, namely saving coupons and looking for good prices. Moreover, Sherry's second story has precisely the desired effect on Lydia, who laughingly characterizes the incident as "embarrassing." We have seen above that Lydia attaches special importance to laughing about embarrassment for frugality vis-a-vis outsiders. Furthermore, Sherry's narrative is quite ingenious in allowing her, first, to demonstrate her frugality, and then to show herself embarrassed about it in public; this puts her into the same small group with Lydia. In this group, they can both tell stories seeing themselves pitted against outsiders, which redounds to group solidarity - here, family cohesion.

Once Sherry has finished, Lydia makes reference to "rubber wallets" in a way that makes it clear she expects her hearers to identify the family story that she has in mind. Again the story revolves around thrift, namely Lydia




NEAL R. NORRICK

giving "the boys" rubber wallets instead of the more expensive leather ones they desired. The boys in question are Ned, who is present, and the third, older brother Henry, who is not. Lydia even describes the ongoing conse- quences of the past event, alluded to with "Henry still today kids me about rubber wallets." Thus Henry would certainly identify the allusion to rubber wallets, and know the story, but neither of the two sons present seems to. Brandon asks rather bewildered: "Rubber wallets?" And Ned says explicitly that he does not remember, though it seems he recognizes himself to be one of "the boys" mentioned. We see here that even a presumed family story can backfire when one member presupposes shared memories which others fail to exhibit. What Lydia takes to be at least a vicarious F-event turns out to have been an A-B event that she shares only with her oldest son, Henry. Where we expect signs of recognition and co-narration, we get instead befud- dled questions and confessions like "I don't remember." Consequently, too, the story never really gets told at all: Lydia concentrates on the results of her "scrounging cheap" purchase, rather than on the events of the story itself.

This description brings us back to the markers of a shared family story, as identified above. Everything that goes wrong here reveals a potentially positive function of family stories when they work as they should. After two stories about Sherry, Lydia apparently wants to return to her own thrift and to sum up this whole series of narratives. Parallel to the stories about Sherry's embarrassment by her daughter Elizabeth, this story would feature Lydia being embarrassed about something her son said with regard to her frugality. A familiar family story with Lydia at the center would have accomplished all this quite nicely. Furthermore, the story Lydia chose brings the only absent child, Henry, into this family setting. The story fails not because it is no family story at all, but because the current constellation of family members do not recognize it as a tale they were involved in. In Tipsy and Poodle above, though both count as family stories, cousin Jean went from central to peripheral, and Lynn went from uninvolved to central; thus the "relevant family" alternated from one narrative event to the next, but the collaborative character of the narration was maintained. In Rubber wallets, the relevant family member is missing, so that collaborative narration never has a chance, and the tale remains inchoate.

CONCLUSIONS

Consideration of twice-told tales, of narrative events built around stories already familiar to the participants, offers a special perspective on conversational storytelling, because it emphasizes those aspects of narration beyond information, problem-solving etc. In particular, we have seen that the retelling of familiar stories has three important functions, and all may co-exist in the same narrative event, though one function often dominates a whole nar-





rative or a whole section of it. First, we retell stories to foster group rapport; second, we co-narrate familiar stories to ratify group membership; and third, we retell stories which reveal group values. Further, listeners unable to participate in the co-narration of group stories respond with parallel stories of their own which portray shared values.

We have seen that familiar stories are tellable under different circumstances than original stories. In free conversation, a new story is tellable if the narrator can defend it as relevant and newsworthy. The tellability of familiar stories depends not on their newsworthy content, but on the dynamics of the narrative event itself: it is precisely the familiarity of story content which offers the opportunity for significant co-narration. Retold stories are typically prefaced in ways that label them as unoriginal - which, however, incites participants to involvement, rather than to questioning the relevance or orig- inality of the narratives.

We have identified structural markers of retold tales such as prefaces, which include definite descriptions with the phrase the story about and questions with the word remember. Participants typically check their own recollections of a story with open-ended statements containing indefinites like or something, and requests for confirmation in the form of explicit questions and statements with question tags; they engage in substantial co-narration, contributing details and dialog. Despite disagreements about facts, and com- petition in determining viewpoint, participants frequently confirm each other's statements and negotiate agreement on the final point of the story.

We have seen that retelling can serve an informing function even when a story is known to the participants: both the primary teller and the others often gain insight into the events related through the dynamic give-and-take of co-narration. Retelling a particular story or type of story helps to coalesce group perspectives and values. Further, co-narration modulates rapport in multiple ways - first because it allows participants to re-live pleasant common experiences, second because it confirms the long-term bond they share, and third because the experience of collaborative narration itself redounds to feelings of belonging. The focus here, on narrative events in which the exchange of information counts for little, highlights the other functions that narration fulfills in group interaction.

NOTES

* All the examples cited here were recorded and transcribed by my students and me accord- ing to the conventions summarized below. In particular I thank Mary Jandek, Lynne Pantano, Shelley Synovic, and Jason Turner for sharing their recorded conversational data with me. In the spring of 1996, I presented portions of the present analysis at the annual meeting of the Amer- ican Association for Applied Linguistics in Chicago, and in the Colloquium on Linguistics and Philology at Northern Illinois University; I express my gratitude to participants in both events for comments and questions which helped me clarify my thinking on retelling and co-narration.




NEAL R. NORRICK

I am particularly indebted to Katharina Barbe, Don Hardy, and Deborah Tannen, who read the entire manuscript and commented extensively on it.

Transcription conventions are as follows:

She's out. Period shows falling tone in preceding element. Oh yeah? Question mark shows rising tone in preceding element. nine, ten. Comma indicates a level, continuing intonation. damn Underbar shows heavy stress. bu- but A single dash indicates a cut off. o(ho)kay Parentheses enclose word-internal laughter. [at all.] Aligned brackets enclose simultaneous speech by two [I just] or more participants says "Oh" Double quotes mark speech set off by speaker's voice.

sigh} Curly braces enclose editorial comments and untranscribable elements.

'Polanyi (1981:324) makes it sound impossible to tell a story familiar to hearers: A teller is only "free to begin her story" after eliciting appropriate responses to a preface like "Did I ever tell you about such and such?" If her potential audience says she has told them the story, "her response might well have been a very abbreviated 'run through' of the story or perhaps a dis- appointed 'oh'." This description is rather ironic in an article about the very possibility of retelling stories, which Polanyi apparently considers only in the abstract or with a different audience.

2 Though Labov 1972 argues that telling the plot of a television show does not yield a true story, the work reported by Chafe 1980 and Tannen 1980 shows that a film may provide a stimulating background for narration. Moreover, in this passage Frank and Ned reconstruct a single scene from the movie, enlivening it with plentiful dialog and evaluation; this runs counter to Labov's findings.

3 Watson 1975 explicitly notes the importance in co-narration of agreement on the characters in a story. She calls it a RULE FOR SPEAKING that "speakers and audience must have a mutual basis of shared knowledge of characters, events, location of events, or situation" before a story can commence, or proceed when new characters, locations, or events are introduced (see also Boggs 1985). Watson even suggests that the Hawaiian children she studied have a rule of report- ability somewhat different than the one Labov formulated for Black adolescents, since they apparently require familiar rather than extraordinary events for their contrapuntal style of co- narration. This correlates with the condition of familiarity I propose for retold stories, which also thrive on co-narration.

4This recalls Tannen's discussion (1978) of how differing expectations about what constitutes a story can cause dissonance between co-narrators - especially as concerns whether a story should end with a moral, a statement of current relevance, or neither. Goodwin 1986 nicely documents a case of co-narrators' separate determinations of when a story ends.

s That the topic of frugality is a perennial one in this family, and that Claire and Sherry work to present themselves as frugal to their mother-in-law Lydia, comes out variously in 11 hours of tape from this family reunion weekend - in stories like the ones transcribed here, as well as comments on shopping, meal planning, and (inevitably) on neighbors and acquaintan- ces lacking in the virtue. To supplement all my recorded and transcribed data, I also rely on in-group reports by my students, and on my own observations about the families and friends who consented to having their conversations taped.

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norrick twice told tales 1997

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retelling of familiar

co narrating stories

conarration oc

famil iar stories

aspects of narration

jstor terms

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new story