In order to elucidate the complexity of the narrative construction of reality, a specific transcription about the virtue of work makes a good example. The passage is a byplay (or redirection) in Elvira’s story about her first work experience: it opens and closes with a reference to her first work experience on the collective farm but the middle is taken up by a comparative appraisal of the human virtue of industriousness; it appears to be an explanation of the changes that took place during Soviet times and simultaneously a juxtaposition which sheds light on the narrator’s perception of work. In the course of the transcribed passage one can observe the complicated temporal construction characteristic of autobiographical narratives: events that are temporally distant from one another (the 1950s, the 1970s and the present 1990s) are brought together side by side and compared in one episode. This short narrative is seventy-seven seconds long, told in rapid-fire speech, with a sober intonation. Here it is not abbreviated; pauses are marked with dots and stronger emphases are marked in italics, but smaller intonation changes are not notated. Obviously, transcription from Latvian to English poses further problems, not specifically at issue here.

So you see, I worked on a collective farm for a while, didn’t I.

But then just... what then, they just did not work then as they do now, when they work. By the way, I have such a saying, don’t I, well, let’s say a collective farm at the end of the 1970s, of the 1980s, isn’t it... I used to say: “If we, let’s say, in the beginning of the 1950s, when the collective farms began, had had the machinery of today and the people of those times, suppose: we would not know what to do. We would have managed it all, cultivated and... and... and then looked for, as they say, picking weeds off the roadsides, suppose.”… But then, still, that exceptionally…

By the way, between us, then there is an anecdotal expression, brought back sometime from Riga: why do we dis... why do we dislike Russians, don’t we… The answer is then…, that famous Armenian radio, and the answer is, then—because they stole the joy of working from us… It is an anecdote, after all. The jobless of today, all of them. Well... well... well... is it...? Simply a man just does not realise, does not understand, what he should do and that he should do anything at all, if he has gone in the morning to... there to the repair garage, hasn’t he, and you don’t tell him—… do that and go there, and this here, he is not able to think of it himself. The young ones, as well… Well...Well, so it is. /a sigh/... Well, then I worked properly at that time, for example, my duties were...

Does this excerpt tell us any facts about reality? We may deduce that in the 1950s all agricultural work was manual, people were hardworking and self-directed, but nowadays there are groups of people who have lost these qualities (jobless, youth). And thus we have one unit of Soviet folklore. The narration also reveals the narrator’s perception of work—her evaluation of work habits, her explanation for changes in the attitude towards work during the Soviet period. It is the usage of a popular anecdote that links her subjective opinion to the one prevailing in the wider society. This episode is an illumination, elucidating a perception of the past: we are told that something happened to the work habits of people during the Soviet period and its consequences are still felt even today. Rather than the so-called hard facts of reality (statistics, concrete events), the saying and the anecdote are used so as to concisely and accurately characterise the age and the people. For the narrator it is important not only to mention her tasks, to describe the working day, but also to explain the attitude and to show the changes in work habits. Are historians interested in facts like these? For a constructivist approach, the understanding of the meanings attributed to facts is just as important as reaching for the knowledge of ‘facts’ themselves.

The work of genre
In the analysis of life stories we pay attention not only to what is told, but also to how it is told. After all, experiences are represented through language in narrative. The past may be constructed differently. Life stories may be told as testimonies, reports, or even simply as stories. The genres themselves structure the account. The rules of form and the means of expression are the tools through which reality (the past) is constructed. Elvira tells her life as a story by making use of rich cultural resources and it is their presence which allows one to perceive the factual information of the text rather like the elucidation of truth, as perceived by the narrator in her sense of that age.
The narrator often uses the word “anecdote”, referring both to anecdotes as a recognised genre of folklore, as well as to various episodes of her life—not only comical, but also those in which individual values are juxtaposed with the officially dominant ones. The units of narrative in this case are also often built according to the principles of the structure of an anecdote, forming short stories which vividly show a particular aspect of life which contains a lesson for the listener and makes one smile (or sigh) at the same time. The narrator calls these small episodes anecdotes, stories and even—novels. Timothy G. Ashplant (1998) has studied anecdotes and jokes as a narrative genre in the life stories of British workers; these succinct narratives allow their narrators to characterise, and their listeners to recognize, an episode as comical. Ashplant (1998) has shown that the form of the narratives is borrowed from popular musicals, which provide an example based on which the story of private experience is constructed. Like British workers, who have adjusted the form of musicals to narrate their life stories, the former farm worker in Latvia has adjusted an anecdote as a form which aids in the communication of her life experience. It must be noted, however, that some elements of the episodes are not comical at all, but the irony in this case makes for an easier telling and perception of a story which also includes difficult life situations (for example, the lodgement of new farm workers in the property in 1940, joining a collective farm in 1949, not entering Komsomol at the beginning of 1950s, etc.). The ironic anecdote is a lens through which life events are told. In these episodes the narrative mode prevails over the factual mode.

Certainly, the overall form of a life story involves far more complex modes of expression than that of an anecdote. This story also contains other manners of expression as well, such as language formulas that are related to the texts of folklore or their contemporary interpretation, and popular elements of colloquial speech which impart life and expression to the narrative (Bela-Krūmiņa 2004). The narrator uses expressive metaphors such as, for example, “Upeniek’s church” (when talking about a technicians’ workshop—‘Upeniek’ being the surname of the premise’s builder). She freely borrows means of expression from the folk repertoire when describing her job experiences: “I was one smart wife” (Wagtail was a smart wife, Latvian folksong No. LD 2594-0); (1) “mixing about up there” (As I mixed about at the front, Latvian folk song No. LD 7918- 4). Stories of some episodes in her life often create ‘a special time’ and begin with a reiterated linguistic formula: “then again it was so”; “and then the situation was such that” (‘once upon a time’—a typical introductory formula to a fairy tale). She also introduces some narrative episodes with a title, just like a tale: “how the new farmers were made”; “how the collective farms were made”. The narrator uses the popular elements of contemporary colloquial speech and a humorous mode of expression, for example: “And I look, dear me!—Those are fields of beetroot!” and “Because, you see, I entered there from a farm, and got to be a head specialist for some reason, isn’t that right.”
The narrator builds expressive and picturesque scenes by using contrasts: “Damn! However didn’t I get white hair, do ya know? Maybe I did, it just can’t be seen in my case. That was a silent horror.” “Even though I lived on with a hope—it will all be alright somehow. It might become better, or then again it might not, we’ll live to see, won’t we?” The narrator uses, as she calls them herself, private sayings: “I served in a collective farm all my life as a notes puļķis” (a virtually untranslatable term describing someone who can substitute for others in almost any situation); “Well, it is no different than a manor” (about the collective farm); “I said: I have it well, I do not have to restructure, as I have not structured anything yet!” (about perestroika, the economic reform policy of Mikhail Gorbachev).
On the basis of a classic oral history interview (as well as in a classic oral text) one can find motives and themes emphasising the interconnection between the individual and the public. For example, narrators relish stories of ‘standing up to the big man’: theatrical anecdotes about a personal confrontation with representatives of institutional authorities (workers against superiors, students against the teaching staff, and so on), and personal courage, professional pride or political resistance in complicated representations (Portelli 1998). Elvira’s story is not an exception. A narrated discussion with the secretary of the Komsomol is just such a classic motif and simultaneously this episode depicts important aspects of life during the Soviet regime and bears witness to the self-identity of a contemporary Latvian:
And then she tried to convince me all night—a person with the highest education of the Party— that I needed to enter Komsomol, did she not. And I, with my collective farm experience, a bit over 20 years and no child anymore, with my Party non-education contradicted her. And, do you understand, all night, and she did not convince me. She is telling me all the time, how it should be, but I oppose her from what I have seen every day. It even went as far as 1937, when Stalin shot two out of three of the Politburo. That was already a national secret. And she admits it all, and in the end I drove her to tears. And she said: “Shoot me today, but I am convinced that it is so.” And I said: “Here, I see the first that is [there] for her persuasion.” Because before that I’d had some unpleasant experiences that when you enter [Komsomol] for career reasons, well—because of some kind of advantage. I said: “If I had met someone earlier, who entered because of conviction, I might have entered a long time ago. But I don’t have that conviction that I must be there out of obligation.” (…) When she cannot convince me ideologically, she says: “It will be of a great importance at the allocation, when you will finish the professional school.” But I have a lot of heart, so I say: “I shall go herd the pigs, but I will not enter just to get a better allocation.” And, please, I have herded pigs all my life. I came to the collective farm, when the boss of agricultural inspection says: “You need an agriculturist in the collective farm.” “That agriculturist”, says the head of the collective farm, “will come to work, who can be a Party secretary.” Maybe then I would have started my career as an agriculturist right after that, wouldn’t I? But now, please, you see how her words fulfilled themselves.

Here, understanding Elvira’s version of ‘standing up to the big man’, or the depiction of the role and functioning of ideology and instruments of control in the Soviet system, becomes a matter of disciplinary training and education. The sociologist and oral historian will probably pay closer attention to the description of events, whereas the folklorist will focus on the cultural aspects. Power relations, the connection between ideology and upward mobility, the consequences of individual decisions in some aspects of Soviet reality are so vividly drawn in the narrative; colloquial speech, linguistic and performance skills are the means employed.

A tentative conclusion
Reality is a confusing term in oral history, the accepted view being that we have no access to it in terms of ‘what really happened’. All we have left are memories, stories, and in many cases, various documentary sources, also invariably coloured by their author’s subjectivity, aims and assumptions. All we can do is to attempt to bring these pieces together, evaluating their construction and the conditions of social use.
Life stories in the Latvian context are seen as authentic testimonies about an obscure or corrupted past. The value of eyewitness accounts is often taken for granted and narratives are considered as imprints of experienced events. In the National Oral History research project we want to collect testimonies of memories but we approach such testimonies as constructions of reality. Memories about ‘what really happened’ on the one hand, and the narrative strategies, genre and language repertoire, on the other, together shape life stories. In Elvira’s story, the figuratively depicted functionaries of the Party or Komsomol characterise the reality of that time, as do the changes that the narrator notes regarding the peoples’ work ethic during the Soviet period. The stories of economic management in post-war conditions, the formation of new labour farmers and the ensuing collectivisation reveal the feelings of the people involved and the details of everyday life masterfully. Almost every episode contains a well-targeted message that throws light on past events. Subjectivity is clearly visible and reality is constructed using tools associated with fiction rather than factual report. Elvira’s story is a typical oral performance, an expressive message to the listeners; the narrator uses anecdotes, expressions, proverbs, as well as nonverbal tools such as intonations, speed of speech, and so on to tell her tale.
The language of life story interviews is an oral language and it depicts reality in a different way than written language and especially scientific discourse. The scientific description of reality is systematic, argument-based, well-ordered, critical and reflexive. An oral life story, however, is made up of vivid dialogue; quite often it is figurative, expressive and it primarily reveals appraisals and feelings, not a neutral configuration of events. Even though the discipline of oral history claims to reveal the view of the events from the vantage point of the witnesses, and, subsequently, the emotional appraisal and symbolic depiction which are an integral part of it, the framework of the academic tradition does not easily provide a corresponding form uniting the emotional, involved, figurative author’s discourse and critical, systematic, argument-based scientific discourse into an organic whole. As genres, life stories and oral history offer different views of ‘what really happened’.

NOTES
 (1). The number of the song in Latvju Dainas (LD), an edition of Latvian folksongs.

REFERENCES
Ashplant, Timothy G. 1998. Anecdote as Narrative Resource in Working-class Life Stories. In P. Thompson and M. Chamberlain (eds), Narrative and Genre. London: Routledge.
Bela-Krūmiņa, Baiba 2004. Dzīvesstāsti kā sociāli vēstījumi. (Life Stories as Social Messages.) Doctoral Thesis. Rīga: University of Latvia.
Bruner, Edward M. 1986. Experience and It’s Expressions. In Victor Turner and Edward M. Bruner (eds), The Anthropology of Experience. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Charmaz, Kathy 2002. Grounded Theory: Objectivist and constructivist methods. In Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Portelli, Alessandro 1998. Oral History as Genre. In Mary Chamberlain and Paul Thompson (eds), Narrative and Genre. London: Routledge.
Riessman, Catherine Kohler 1993. Narrative Analysis. Newbury Park: Sage.
Tisenkopfs, Tālis 1993. Dzīve un teksts. (Life and Text.) Latvijas Zinātņu Akadēmijas Vēstis (Proceedings of Latvian Academy of Sciences) 5 (550): 1–8 lpp.
Thompson, Paul 1988. The Voice of the Past: Oral history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tonkin, Elizabeth 1992. Narrating Our Pasts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, Raymond 1988. Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. London: Fontana Press.

INTERNET SOURCES
Wikipedia. Truth. Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth>. Accessed 19.7. 2007.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus. Truth. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.
Merriam-Webster 2004. <http://search.eb.com>. Accessed 12.11. 2007.

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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