(Published in Kansas English, an affiliate of the National College of Teachers of English, Winter 1998-99)
Ó Copyrighted Material.
Leaping Into the Personal Narrative:
A Complex Construction of the Past and Present
by Jeffry C. Davis, Wheaton College
In Acts of Meaning, psychologist Jerome Bruner calls for a new way of understanding the human psyche, one that builds upon cultural meaning-making. Central to meaning-making is what he calls folk psychology: “a culture’s account of what makes human beings tick” (13). “It is through folk psychology that people anticipate and judge one another, draw conclusions about the worthwhileness of their lives, and so on,” Bruner explains. “Its power over human mental functioning and human life is that it provides the very means by which culture shapes human beings to its requirements” (15). How, exactly, does folk psychology do this? Human minds, Bruner argues, function according to shared interpretive systems which are culturally situated; these systems—“prosthetic devices”—enable individuals to organize the symbols of everyday experience into meaningful narratives (34-35). Bruner asserts that there are basically two types of narratives: the first coincides with what a culture has established to be normative behavior, what might be called a legitimate or canonical narrative; the second violates what is behaviorally ordinary in a culture, and could be called an exceptional or mitigative narrative (48-49). In each case, the story brings order and understanding to human experience. It aids individuals in sorting through the messiness of meaning and helps them process this meaning in the context of a community; in so doing individuals often become fuller members of their community. “Narrative structure is even inherent in the praxis of social interaction before it achieves linguistic expression,” writes Bruner. “I want now to make the more radical claim that it is a ‘push’ to construct narrative that determines the order of priority in which grammatical forms are mastered by the young child” (77). In other words, Bruner asserts that a child enters the world with an innate drive to construe meaning according to the already apparent framework of story.
The compelling upshot of Bruner's Acts of Meaning is this: narrative pervades all of human experience and must be the basis for a cultural psychology. As a teacher of English, especially writing, I am concerned about narrative’s place in the lives of my students. Despite Bruner's conclusions, my suspicion is that those of us who teach writing seldom convey the elemental significance of narrative structure to our students. While we may begin our writing courses with the token narrative essay, we quickly move on to other more privileged forms of written discourse. As Anne DiPardo observes in “Narrative Knowers, Expository Knowledge: Discourse as a Dialectic,” “Much instruction continues to be aimed toward fostering a sort of ‘grand leap’ away from narrative and into the presumably more grown-up world of exposition” (61). DiPardo comprehensively provides theoretical and historical explanations for narrative’s marginalization and exposition's hegemony. She makes a strong case for a serious reconsideration of the role of narrative in the composition classroom. Drawing upon her insights, those of Bruner, and others, the following expositional narrative will examine a situated incident that occurred prior to my recent reading of these authors: that of a composition teacher (myself) seriously reflecting upon the task of fulfilling an assignment required of his students—a narrative essay. The revelation that lingers from this experience today is relatively simple but salient: the narrative essay proves to be a sophisticated form of discourse and a powerful mode of knowing that deserves more consideration and esteem than it currently receives from those who assign it.
A typical first assignment given to students in introductory college writing courses, the personal narrative essay calls upon students to choose some occurrence from their past, to consider its import, and to recast it in a manner that clearly conveys the significance of the event—as the writer intends—to the reader. Because the personal narrative tells a meaningful story, rather than proves a point, writing teachers often begin with this kind of composing task, presuming it to be easier than other forms of writing which are more critical and persuasive in nature.
Leaping into the personal narrative—as many writing students do—we begin with a writing sample composed by a student in my introductory writing course.
My Sister Did It
For as long as I can remember, friends have occasionally asked me, “So, how did you get that nasty scar over your right eye?” And for as long as I can remember, I have answered, “My sister did it.” To be honest, although obviously present when the accident occurred, I don’t remember a thing: not the fall, not the gash, not the blood, not the water . . . nothing.
My family lived in a huge, red-brick home on Lowell Avenue, near an established west side neighborhood of Chicago called Six Corners. Our house stood out on the block, with white colonial pillars that graced the front porch with solemnity. But almost every summer when those pillars began to peel from the combination of humidity and sun, my father would quickly get out the long paint ladders, scrape all four down, and repaint them again. It seemed that Dad was always repairing something on the outside of his American Dream. And likewise, Mom was ever attending to the inside, decorating, arranging new furniture, and cleaning. Given that both my parents worked full-time in order to keep what they had—Dad as a traveling salesman for Pittsburgh Plate Glass and Mom as a registered nurse on the night shift at Swedish Covenant hospital—my four older sisters and older brother had to help out with the chores around the house. This included taking care of me, the baby of the family.
According to my mother, the accident happened one evening after dinner, while she was downstairs. She was very tired, so Nancy, my second oldest sister, received orders to give me a bath upstairs. I was six-months-old and had grown to be quite plump. In fact, when my parents first brought me home from the hospital, my grandfather shouted, “That boy looks like he's ready to walk!” Weighing in at just over ten pounds, I barely fit into the bassinet.
My sister Nancy recalls that my fat body had strained her arms by the time she carried me up the stairs and into the blue bathroom. So, for just a few seconds, she set me down on top of the closed toilet, stopped the drain, and adjusted the flow and temperature of the water. With the tub slowly filling, she opened the blanket, unbuttoned my shirt, removed the diaper, and picked me up to place me into the water.
After this point Nancy has a difficult time remembering. She isn’t sure if it was her wet hands, the baby powder that was on my body, her tired arms, or my fidgeting. She vaguely recollects bending over the bathtub to lower me into the water. Then her mind goes blank.
From here on my Mother fills in the details, as best as she can. She was finishing a cup of tea at the kitchen table, almost directly below the blue bathroom. The sound of the running water upstairs remains vivid to her, followed by what seemed like a bowling ball being dropped onto the floor above, and then a gurgling scream. Immediately she rushed toward the stairs, only to meet Nancy at the bathroom doorway, frantic. “Where’s Jeff!,” she shouted. “What happened?” But Nancy, now hysterical, couldn’t answer. My mother pushed by her, on into the bathroom, to find me face-up in two inches of bloody bath water.
Nancy went with my mother to the hospital, holding me in the passenger seat, crying as my mother drove. And when she heard the doctor say, “The child was lucky he didn't lose an eye. Just another quarter of an inch lower would have done it,” she cried even harder. The doctor asked my mother what caused the injury. She looked at Nancy, stammered, and then said that she had turned her head while she was giving her son a bath. He guessed, by the size of the gash and the seven stitches, that the side of the head, under the brow, somehow caught on the edge of the faucet. My mother listened silently.
To this day, when people ask me how I got my scar, I fumble. I almost find myself saying, “My mother did it.” But somehow, it always comes out, “My sister did it.” Nancy feels terrible about it still, and I feel sorry for her. My mother doesn't like to talk about it.
In all the years that I have taught college composition, I have routinely begun each semester by requiring my students to compose this sort of personal narrative. Thinking it to be a relatively simple mode of writing, because it deals with some aspect of the life of the writer, I assumed that the personal narrative afforded students immediate access to a topic. Since so many students commonly struggle with finding something to write about, the logic in my head dictated that a personal narrative did not pose a problem with regard to locating a topic and generating draft material. All that my students had to do, I thought, was draw upon the stock of memorable events from their own lives, choose one, and re-present it to a reader. What kind of writing could be easier?
However, these notions were challenged when, on a free weekend prior to the Monday that my students’ first drafts were due for a peer evaluation workshop, I decided to do my own assignment—the sample essay just read. In taking the pedagogical risk of becoming a student in my very own class, I discovered that the personal narrative assignment demands a high degree of composing effort and skill, far more than I had ever imagined. Through the first-hand experience of becoming my own student, I realized then what I later found expressed by Anne DiPardo: “When seen as interpretive acts, the personal experience narratives that initiate so many composition classes need not be regarded as necessarily egocentric and relatively undemanding. A compelling depiction of individual experience, told with insight and conviction, has the effect of drawing the reader in, expanding horizons and striking empathetic chords” (63). DiPardo argues that the rigor of narrative writing should not be overlooked by writing teachers, for it demands the use of a complex form of cognition, one that is foundational to human experience. DiPardo explains: “The narrative urge is as ubiquitous as our desire to understand our condition, and just as important as knowledge gleaned through more systematically rational means” (63).
I began my assignment on a Saturday morning, sitting at my computer, sipping coffee, and thinking, as any conscientious student does, about the professor’s instructions. They read as follows:
Every human being is a creature of action and time. We live each day doing all sorts of things, most routine and forgettable. However some of our experiences from the past have been out-of-the-ordinary, and therefore memorable. John Locke, writing about memory in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, asserts that “Those [memories] which naturally at first make the deepest and most lasting impressions, are those which are accompanied with pleasure or pain.” For this assignment you will recall some pleasurable or painful event (the more particular the better) that taught you something about yourself, another person, or life in general. Choose something meaningful, but not too uncomfortably personal.
The instructions seemed clear enough. All I needed was a memorable event.
I wanted to fulfill all of the expectations that I, the professor, placed upon the writers in my class: this was my goal. So, I decided to do some planning, which I regularly encourage my students to do, but nothing came for a long time. The trick, I then realized, was finding “something meaningful, but not too uncomfortably personal.” I began by scanning my memory, searching for a meaningful event. As ideas came to mind, emerging from deeper and deeper in the past, I quickly wrote them down in list form: Shooting the rapids during a canoe trip to the Boundary Waters; giving the eulogy at my grandmother’s funeral; getting accepted into graduate school; graduating from college; losing a friend to cancer my sophomore year; winning a photography award in high school; dropping my brand new Swiss army knife into the river on a camping trip when I was twelve; getting hit by a car while riding my bike on a Chicago street at the age of eight. Finally, after almost an hour of contemplation about various events in my life, and several false starts, I landed on an occurrence from my early childhood, one that I did not actually remember myself. The question of how I received a scar over my right eye fascinated me when I was a kid, almost as much as the question of how my dad got the huge scar on his stomach, the result of having his appendix removed. That would be the topic of my personal narrative.
I immediately began typing at the keyboard, with bits and pieces of the event slowly emerging on the computer screen. The process of writing the first draft took almost four hours, short as it was. As I wrote, I struggled at first to render an accurate, play-by-play account of the incident; it became apparent to me how much my retelling of the incident was actually a construction of the experience, based upon what family members had told me at special family events and holiday get-togethers. My recollection of their recollections fed my sense of the way things were, or might have been. My composing experience reminded me of something stated by psychologist Frederic Bartlett: “Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude toward a whole mass of organized past reactions or experience” (Qtd. in Sacks 48). Strangely, throughout the whole composing period I felt conflicted within: I wanted to be as true to the experience as I could be to maintain the integrity of my family’s account of the event, as it was handed down to me; yet, I wanted to let my composing energies find shape in words that compelled my audience to ponder some meaning—my meaning—from within, one which I myself wasn’t exactly sure I could articulate in any other way but through a narrative form. As I felt this composing angst, my mind constantly wandered back and forth from my memories, to the text on the screen, to imagined scenes of my students before their computers. I wondered how many of them experienced what I was experiencing. How many of them found it difficult to construct the past in the present, as I did?
As I neared to the completion of my essay, I found myself tentative. How would I end it? What would I put into the last two paragraphs? In the course of writing the body of the narrative, I discovered quiescent feelings I never would have believed present: frustration, even anger, toward my mother for the accident, and pity for my sister. The ironic thing, I kept telling myself, was that I couldn’t even truly remember the accident, but only what others in my family had told me about it. I could hardly make sense of my reactions. I felt turmoil within, even more than before. This seemingly simple assignment raised all sorts of thoughts and questions in my mind. Might I be writing the story, unconsciously, according to the memory and attendant emotion my infant self had stored in what is now my adult brain? Could there be some truth for me in this narrative that my adult self did not want to face? What amazed me was what happened next: I wrote an ending that brought an uncanny sense of aesthetic satisfaction (for lack of a better term), while at the same time a deep sense of grief.
Considering my response, in light of something that Bruner describes in connection to psychiatrist Donald Spence in Acts of Meaning, I can’t help but wonder about the parallels between personal narrative writing and psychoanalysis. Bruner writes:
Speaking from within psychoanalysis, Spence addressed the question of whether a patient in analysis recovered the past from memory in the sense in which an archaeologist digs up artifacts of a buried civilization, or whether, rather, analysis enabled one to create a new narrative that, though it might be only a screen memory or even a fiction, was still close enough to the real thing to start a reconstructive process going. The “truth” that mattered, so went his argument, was not the historical truth but something he chose to call the narrative truth. Such narrative truth, screen memory or fiction though it might be, succeeds if it fits the patient's “real” story, if it somehow manages to capture within its code the patient's real trouble. (111)
This therapeutic explanation of what occurs within the mind of the patient as he recovers the past sounds plausible, though a little disconcerting, as a way of understanding what occurred within me and my narrative presentation of my mother at the end of the story. My own “folk psychology,” to use Bruner’s terms, created an “exceptional” story that I wasn't sure I wanted to accept; it violated my own preference for “canonicality.”
On the day the assignment was due, Monday, I debated before class whether I would make photocopies of my narrative essay to share with my students. Originally, I had hoped that doing this would bring them some sort of encouragement, that it might let them see that their professor values narrative writing himself, that this assignment wasn’t simply “academic.” But by then my initial scheme seemed trivial as I considered the complexity of my narrative text and, even more, the complexity of the process that created it. I felt nervous and vulnerable, even shaky at the thought of distributing my work, of entering into a dialogic interchange with my students. But then my thoughts went back to my students again. How many of them felt nervous or vulnerable because of my assignment? With this question lingering in mind, I garnered some pedagogic courage and, at the last minute before the bell, ran off twenty-two copies and headed to class.
After breaking students into workshop groups of five, I handed out my narrative essay; I had intentionally left off my name when I printed it so that they would respond in an unbiased manner. Immediately upon receiving it, someone asked, “Who wrote this?” I knew that if I hedged in my response, my students might become suspicious and figure out it was me; I was already concerned that they would find me out by the information they had already learned about me on the first day of class, which was also revealed in the narrative: a Chicago native, from a large family, my first name. So, I lied (though later I realized I had told the truth). “A student wrote this,” I said. They all began reading the story quietly.
After several minutes of intent reading and silence, one by one my students finished. Then they began talking, critiquing my narrative according to the expectations listed on the assignment handout, as I had encouraged them to do. I was surprised to realize how uncomfortable it was for me to overhear what they had to say. It was not the technical comments that were hard, but the interpretive ones they made as they identified with the characters in the story, including the “student” author himself. Snippets of conversation were heard at the podium where I stood: “The scar is a symbol for his...,” “His parents paid more attention to their house than...,” “Nancy got blamed, but it wasn't her fault because...,” “The mother feels guilty for...,” “The author seems angry over.…” I realize today that these phrases were artifacts of the class community's folk psychology in action; students were trying to make narrative sense of my narrative. In a bizarre way, it sounded as though they were talking about people who had never lived, people who were literary characters. Equally strange was the sensation that came from hearing some of them articulate perspectives and feelings I experienced while writing the narrative that I lacked words for then.
After about fifteen minutes of lively discussion, we reconvened as a class. Then, after a punctuated pause, I nervously asked, “Do you notice anything unusual about my face?” They were puzzled. I was sure that they would get my meaning, but they didn't. I raised my index finger just above my right eye, as if to rub the brow. One by one, slowly their faces transformed. Someone uttered: “Oh my gosh, it's you!” Others still didn't catch on. Finally someone in the back began explaining to the few left who were confused. The narrative essay in front of them immediately took on a new meaning.
Once the educational ruse became evident to all, I explained why I had stretched the truth in telling them that a “student” had written the essay. All agreed that they would have read the text differently if they had known that I had written it; one person said that she would have viewed it as “a perfect model” rather than “an ordinary paper” written by a peer. Others said they would have been more reluctant to comment so openly and critically about it in my presence if they had known that their professor was the author.
I then shared how difficult it was for me to write the essay, expressed what a surprise it was for me to discover so many associated emotions related to the incident, and asked if any others had encountered similar difficulties in composing their essays. One student expressed how problematic it was for her to find a memory that wasn't too personal, too self-disclosing to an audience she wasn't sure she could trust. Another student said he couldn't seem to manage all of the details, descriptions, and dialog at once; he characterized his narrative as “rambling and disjointed.” Still another voiced the tension felt between reporting on an actual incident versus creating a story; it seemed much easier to this student to tell his story more abstractly rather than, as I had encouraged in class, “to let the reader perceive the meaning of the essay by showing, and not merely telling.” Several echoed this tension for their essays as well. Finally, and related to the concern just mentioned, a few students commented that they experienced uneasiness over what they described as “making up” or “getting rid of” certain parts of the narrative, either in an effort to make it more interesting for the reader or to tame the amorphous and complex nature of the actual incident so that it could be shaped into a manageable essay. Altering the incident from its pure historic context produced a bit of anxiety for some students who felt obliged to “tell it like it was.” Nevertheless, not one student voiced regret over having to write a narrative, despite the difficulties. Most found it to be a challenging, meaningful experience.
In “Imagining History: A Good Story and a Well-Formed Argument,” Andra Makler speaks to the difficulty of rewriting a historical event from some supposedly objective perspective. While supporting the need for credible methods of historical research and argument, she also recognizes the vital role of imagination and creativity in retelling the past. Concerning historical narratives, she writes, “Granted that these narratives are constructed representations of a reality we choose to consider as valid, granted that we make such judgments based on the weight of evidence; still, there is this nagging sense that our relationship to history is a function of distance more than a function of chronology” (45). Makler recognizes that this “distance” causes an inherent difficulty for those who want to write precisely about the past. “History is an attempt to make the strange familiar, to know not just what happened, but why” (Makler 45).
From my present perspective, I think back to the historic event of the whole experience of leaping into my own narrative assignment with a deep sense of satisfaction; though the experience proved more rigorous than I had expected, the knowledge gained from it gave me a new appreciation for the complexity of the narrative form. This paper, a narrative itself, has been a means of ordering my past experience in an attempt to make the meaning of the event richer and more intelligible. As such, it has set out to do a seemingly simple but consequential task: to tell a story.
Works Cited
Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.
DePardo,
Ann. “Narrative Knowers, Expository Knowledge: Discourse as a Dialectic.”
Written Communication 7:1 (January 1990): 59-
Makler,
Andra. “Imagining History: A Good Story and a Well-Formed Argument.”
Stories Lives Tell: Narrative and Dialogue in Education. Eds. Carol
Witherell and Nell Noddings. New York: Teachers College Press, 1991.
Sacks, Oliver. “Making Up the Mind.” The New York Review 8 April 1993: 42-49.