Other People’s Stories is an extended exploration of the benefits and dangers of the inevitable de- and re-contextualization of personal narratives. Revolutionary and foundational in refusing to make a blanket moral statement about such re-use/appropriation, Shuman’s important book may frustrate those hoping for clear-cut evaluations based on the theory she elaborates.
Folklorists’ study of personal narratives tends to tread a narrow path between the apparently opposed notions of the individual constrained in formulating her experience by cultural models and the individual enabled to create a self by mobilizing cultural resources. Shuman dramatically widens our purview, arguing that the more encompassing tension is that between what she calls “entitlement” and “the allegorical,” with its promise of generating empathy. To quote what I suspect will be an oft-cited passage:
“Storytelling is pushed to its limits both by the use of a particular story beyond the context of the experience it represents and by the use of a personal story to represent a collective experience… It is the intersection of the two limits that produces what I see as the greatest complexity and the greatest source of both the promise of storytelling and its condemnation. We ask, who has the right to tell a story, who is entitled to it? And we ask, is this representation a sufficient, adequate, accurate, or appropriate rendering of experience?” (3)
Shuman goes on to offer radical challenges to sacrosanct notions—that the exposure of previously unheard voices can stand as a corrective to dominant discourses (11) or that empathetic understanding of another’s situation based on hearing their story is a sufficient and desirable response (18). She advocates a “critique of empathy” as “a place to begin to see narratives as a relationship between tellers and listeners and their cultural, political, and historical contexts” (25).
Succeeding chapters explore individual issues exemplified by distinct sets of stories. In Chapter 1, revisiting adolescent fight narratives she collected in the 1970s, Shuman demonstrates that debates apparently about accuracy actually encode contestation over rights to know and share information. Sadly, she observes, the students rarely gained sufficient self-awareness to replace he-said-she-said bickering with diplomatic overtures (50). In Chapter 2, a preview of a book on the memory culture of marble carvers in an Italian town, Shuman draws on Walter Benjamin to argue that the possibility for critical practice lies in the tension between personal and collective stories. Again, tragically, she suggests that the carvers’ investment in the town’s collective story of a past golden age precludes their moving forward (69). In Chapter 3, analyzing stories supplied by other collectors, Shuman shows how an Orthodox Jewish woman teacher and an undocumented Mexican migrant position themselves and their listeners to move from untenable to productive alignments. And in Chapter 6 she cites the autobiography of autistic author Temple Grandin to interrogate the very possibility of experience separate from a report thereof.
Throughout the book Shuman’s theoretical meditations and dialogues with other theorists exceed the examples to which they are applied. While I grasp her choice of emphasis intellectually, in the remaining two chapters I find it troubling. In Chapter 4 Shuman brings together disparate “small world” stories, from merely curious chance encounters to a Jewish adoptee’s heart-rending discovery that his mother, as she was forced onto the train to Auschwitz, threw him into the arms of a mercifully sympathetic policeman. Shuman shows that “happy coincidence” stories reveal a world more perfect than the narrator suspected, even for those not inclined to credit divine intervention, but that such a vision is inaccessible to someone like Ned Lebow, whose meeting with the French rabbi’s wife who helped save children from the death-camp trains revealed what is probably his own horrific story. Yet (surprisingly, given the extent to which the untellability of Holocaust survivors’ suffering haunts this book) Shuman leaves this argument scattered and does not interrogate the (in this case Christian) social privilege that underlies popular books celebrating miraculous coincidence.
In Chapter 5, similarly, Shuman examines what she pointedly calls political junk mail, noting how (apparent) personal narratives are used to evoke empathy, induce identification with a cause, and raise money for organizations like Amnesty International. Yes she is again explicitly unwilling to evaluate:
“Although [the promotional mailings] are vulnerable to charges of privileged misappropriation and of silencing the very voices they present, they defend that charge by claiming to speak in the interests of the people they represent. I am not interested in either defending their claims or condemning their appropriations. Rather, I find these uses of personal narrative in the name of political causes useful to expand our understanding of how claims for incontrovertible realities are located in the ‘real experiences’ of ‘real people.’” (132)
While I respect Shuman’s methodological emphasis and her postmodern refusal to oversimplify, I cannot help asking why she develops these minutely differentiated typologies of narrative technique if she does not want to use them to argue with subtle precision that some uses of other people’s stories are more acceptable than others.
For those engaged in narrative analysis, it is well worth the effort required to understand Shuman’s carefully built but complex argument. She devises and exemplifies detailed typologies that others might profitably apply to their own materials, suggesting problematic features to look for and questions to ask. She offers lucid explications of work by sociolinguists and literary theorists upon which folklorists could draw more extensively. She destabilizes folklorists’ often romantic faith in the narrative construction of a coherent self or the reality of first-hand experience. Her profound argument that making oneself absent at a crucial juncture in a story or collectively forgetting unpalatable events is just as significant an accomplishment as being present or remembering (53 and 70) will shape many people’s thinking. The Introduction will be a centerpiece for a graduate seminar I am developing on narrative and globalization.
Still, the work has weaknesses, even taken on its own terms. The book builds up to a crucial distinction between empathy (which Shuman says mostly empowers the listener) and witnessing (which is what she says narrators of traumatic stories really need) (145), but she refers readers to her sources rather than explaining the difference fully herself. I would argue that Shuman’s greatest contribution is to make us pay attention to listeners’ response to a story, that is, in a Bakhtinian vein, to see the story as that relationship. Yet except in Chapter 1, she never reports on, still less analyzes, her own or other recipients’ responses to the stories.
Shuman explicitly distinguishes her own concerns from Anthropology’s crisis of representation (which she characterizes as focusing on “the validity of stories as evidence” [18]) and similarly mentions but does not engage the debates in cultural and feminist studies over the ethics of purporting to speak for another (120). One of the most significant applications of her insights, however, will be precisely in folklorists’ and other ethnographers’ decisions about how to represent, frame, and transmit the stories we collect and study. Again, Shuman ironically neglects or refuses to position herself relative to any of the narratives she analyzes and thus to interrogate her own entitlement claims to share and base her argument upon them. (Such positioning as she provides is relegated to the Acknowledgments.)
Shuman cautions us not to confuse the promises of narrative with its functions, yet argues that “this failed promise, or in positive terms, the almost fulfilled promise, nonetheless provides a compelling process for making meaning of everyday life experience” (1). Similarly, while this book does not go as far as I would like in applying (rather than exemplifying) Shuman’s analytic approach, I commend it to readers for the way its almost fulfilled promise provides a compelling process for making meaning of the complex circulation of personal narratives in everyday life.
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[Review length: 1292 words • Review posted on June 14, 2006]