One of the greatest challenges faced by researchers analysing narratives is how to approach the construction of social reality through the life stories told by individuals. How are these performances related to facts? Since oral history specialists are interested in social reality and social history (facts, events), this issue is of utmost importance. To quote the prominent Italian oral historian Alessandro Portelli: “Oral history shifts between performance-oriented narrative and content-oriented document” (1998: 26, emphasis in original). During field work the interviewer is often carried away by listening to narratives, following the thread of the story spun by a narrator. Yet, as these marvellously absorbing stories are transcribed and turned into written text, an interviewer often discovers that many of them contain very little factual information, are fragmentary and even chaotic, and not all of them have been told in formal or even grammatically acceptable language. Although some stories are told in a captivating and expressive manner, transcription may reveal a lack of order, with only a few brief passages appearing to be of scholarly interest. In my study of life stories I often confront a problem: what to do with the narratives that I suspect contain interesting information which is buried in a chaotic and artistic articulation?
The aim of this essay is to explore the narrative construction of reality in life stories and the relationship between performance-oriented storytelling and content-oriented description. First, I will discuss the context of the research; second, I will explore the concept of ‘reality’. Third, I will analyse the narrative construction of one life story, from the perspective of the relationship between performance and content.

The National Oral History research project
My interest in the narrative construction of reality was initiated by listening to, and analysing, life stories collected within the context of the National Oral History (henceforth NOH) research project in Latvia. The NOH project was founded at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia. Its aim is to research the diversity of Latvian social life within a broad historical perspective; to record, preserve and analyse the life stories of the older generation, whose life experience covers the most important social changes and historic events of Latvia’s recent history. There are approximately 3,000 audio-recorded life stories in the NOH archive.
The NOH research project was launched in 1992. In the early 1990s, life stories had a special significance for the post-socialist countries in general, and for Latvia in particular. Memories were used to construct a sense of continuity with the first period of Latvia’s statehood (1918–1940) and they served as testimonies of the years of Soviet occupation (1940–1941 and 1944–1991); memories also played an important role in the process of mobilizing ethnic consciousness and constructing new identities at an individual as well as a national level (Tisenkopfs 1993: 4); and memories opened up new themes and new interpretations of events when official history from the Soviet period provided an incomplete, if not false, version of the past. As individual memories were told as testimonies to the past and as a part of national history, the question of authenticity of experience and truthfulness of story was of great importance.
I started to work with the NOH project as an interviewer and assistant about ten years ago. More than one hundred life stories have been recorded since then. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on the social construction of life stories a few years ago. Yet I am still intrigued about the subtle relationship between life, experience and story, as well as the complex task of solving this puzzle.

‘Reality’ in the context of oral history
By using biographies as sources in research, we are exploring the connections between biography and history, between individual experience and social change. Oral history research is sensitive to the historicity of personal experience and the role of the individual in the history of society and in public events (Portelli 1998: 26). In oral history research the balance between personal and social, biography and history is important.
However, there is no consensus on methodology: how this balance is to be achieved, the role of the historian and the kind of reality which is revealed through life stories and thereafter constructed in the historian’s text. The term ‘reality’ can be defined in various ways and has a long and complicated linguistic history. In the Platonic sense, realism was clearly connected to the sphere of the absolute and objective existence of universals while in the fifteenth century the English word ‘real’ refers to something that actually exists. From the sixteenth century the sense becomes more general as ‘real’ is contrasted with ‘imaginary’ as well as with ‘apparent’: realism is connected with the purpose of revealing things as they really are (Williams 1988). These conceptions are well known to historians, who are interested in the broad picture of the past. But even the term ‘history’ has a double meaning in English, for it refers both to actual past events and to the narration or description of past events (Tonkin 1992: 117); the border between what actually happened and what appeared to spectators is blurred. What is more, as social historian Paul Thompson (1988) cautions, history is never knowledge for its own sake; it always depends upon its social purpose. This makes the problem all the more complex, for it means that in our memory we not only make note of some events and dismiss others, but that the historian of the past can also do the same thing.
Historians are generally interested in past events, how they really happened. In other words, they are keen to render an accurate picture of the past. In the 1960s, the task of the oral historian was thus formulated: eyewitnesses were interviewed in order to reconstruct the past. Drawing a distinction between true and false history and evidence was of great importance. Although contemporary oral historians now speak about the ‘construction of the past’ rather than its ‘reconstruction’, the question of truth continues to be of contemporary concern. For example, in his discussion of the achievements of oral history, Paul Thomson says: “Oral evidence, by transforming the ‘object’ of study into ‘subjects’, makes for a history which is not just richer, more vivid and heart-rending, but truer” (Thompson 1988: 99, emphasis in original text). ‘True’ being the adjectival form of ‘truth’, we now have an even more tendentious term than reality. Common dictionary definitions for truth include “agreement with fact or reality” (Wikipedia), or “the body of real things, events, and facts” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus), but in philosophical discussions there is no single agreement about the meaning of truth.
There are two main approaches dealing with the problematic character of truth and reality in the social sciences. One view is based on a positivist approach, which is closely related to the natural sciences—reality or truth objectively exists (furthermore, only one truth is possible), and a scientist goes out into the field and discovers it (correspondence theory). Another view, the constructivist approach, contends that there is a significant distinction between nature and human society: in human society reality is always socially constructed in a particular time and space (constructivist theory). For example, the same events of the past can be seen and interpreted differently in various periods of time (Charmaz 2002). A telling example is the written or official history produced during totalitarian epochs. Even in a less controlled situation, however, social reality remains constructed and an opinion is recognised as true only according to mutual understanding and agreement. In these circumstances it is possible that people will be unable to agree on a single version of the truth (or the past), and that various social groups will hold distinct opinions on what happened—on what is objectively true and what is not. Oral history, to a large extent, is a child of postmodernism and pluralism, and projects a view of the recent past as a room where different voices coexist, thereby demonstrating just how complex and versatile so-called objective reality actually is.
The advantage of oral history is that, unlike most documentary sources of history, it proffers various views of the same event, in some cases challenging the established version accepted by the majority. Oral history sees the world as significantly diverse. However, this issue is even more intricate, because in oral history we have to deal not only with history, but with memory as well. As we know, reality and our perception and experience of it, as well as its recounting, differs according to circumstance (Bruner 1986; Riessmann 1993). The oral historian works with evidence—narratives that essentially are interpretations of experience in language and always structured according to some conventions. But the goal is to reveal a truer picture of reality.
As mentioned before, oral history shifts between performance-oriented narrative and content-oriented document. A life story recorded during a biographical interview is performance-oriented narrative, while the product of the historian’s research should be a content-oriented document which constructs or reconstructs the reality of past events. In a life story the division between genres is nebulous—narrators do not draw a line between a true story based on facts and a good narrative, told with expression. Possibly, narrators are inspired by the joy of telling itself, whereas the historian looks for factual information. Portelli asks just what kind of truth can be found in narratives. For him, the answer resides in the possibility that the aesthetics of the narrative, through its symbols and feelings, may enlighten our understanding of history (Portelli 1998). Consequently, the task of the oral historian is much broader than simply being a rational analyst of the past. A symbolic and aesthetic narrative may turn out to be just as important as factual information if we are seeking to understand meanings attributed to the past by people who have lived through it, and how these meanings are constructed.

The introduction to Elvira’s story
The following is an analysis of the construction of a particular story with an aim to explore the tangled web of narrative and facts (something factually existing). In oral history research it is relatively easy to analyse clear, well structured and factually-oriented narratives. Yet few narrators tell their tales to please the scholar, and scholarship would be impoverished if only the model narrators were studied. I would like to present a rather ordinary interview from which a life story was recorded. Recorded in 1996, it is a three hour interview conducted by researchers from the NOH project in the small village of Vadakste in Latvia. Elvira was born in 1935 and adopted when she was one year old. An agriculturist by education, she spent all her working life on a collective farm, mostly as a simple farm worker, but at some periods also as agriculturist. Thematically, the narrative focuses on the time of the collective farms and it is told as a web of anecdotal situations. Elvira’s story is a very expressive performance, with rich intonations, changes in the speed of speech and various means of expression. It contains vivid information about the establishment of collective farms and the particularities of work on these farms. Nevertheless, the structure is chaotic, the narrative mode is mixed with the factual mode, and the episodes which are remarkable are often hidden amidst awkward narrations.
The sequence of episodes bears more resemblance to stream of consciousness texts than to a chronologically arranged life story. Succinctly put, the structure revealed during the first forty-five minutes makes it possible to distinguish twenty-four episodes or passages. To mention the first few: Elvira’s origins; her foster-parents and the change of residence; the beginning of her schooling; her father, his education; schooling during the war; self-appraisal (the fanatical country dweller); attitude towards learning; attitude towards work in former times and nowadays. While some episodes do not exceed more than a minute, the few longer ones add up to five minutes of narrative. Two themes, namely education and work, predominate in these episodes. Each small episode or passage contains some interesting details, personal information or a scrap of factual information, as well as an abundance of reflection and appraisals. However, this entanglement of episodes is more associative than chronological, even though overall the narrative follows a linear sequence in the development of events (it begins with childhood, proceeds with school and work, and concludes with the time after Latvia regained independence).
For example, when Elvira begins the story of her schooldays, a redirection takes place as she characterises primary-level education in pre-war independent Latvia based on the educational level of her father (who received only primary schooling), contrasting it with the level of training courses in the agricultural professional schools during the 1950s. She notes that her father was given the task of supervising the work of other trainees in the tractor courses, despite his ostensibly ‘low’ educational qualifications. When speaking of herself, she relates that she worked on a collective farm after graduation from primary school and it was only after three years of work experience that she went on to continue her education; then her son is mentioned, who went to professional school but after his first year there was contemplating abandoning his studies. The episodes are united by the same geographical location of action, and most importantly, by the same moral: simple labour makes one appreciate the value of education. Through the narrative, even though it is not a coherent, linear account, we discover facts about the life of the narrator and her close relatives, but more importantly, analysis allows us to explore Elvira’s values and world view.

to be continued...

BAIBA BELA , Ph.D
RESEARCHER
INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY
LAT VIAN UNIVERSITY
Baiba.bela-krumina@lu.lv

Source: SUOMEN ANTROPOLOGI, Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, Volume 32, Number 4, WINTER 2007, pp: 24-33.



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