Читать книгу Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences - Katherine Bischoping - Страница 32

To what extent do narrators regard themselves as sole authors of their own fates, as members of a collective, or as pawns in others’ games? Where do they think responsibility for the triumphs and disasters of the past lie? Attention to the agents whom narrators highlight in their stories can point to the answers to such questions. Returning to Textbox 3.2, we can notice that Mollie absents herself from her own story between line 1, when she says that she worked as a hostess in the restaurant, and line 10, when she reveals that she decided to quit this job. During lines 2 through 8, other characters are depicted as responsible for every single one of the story’s actions. Others die, sob, are in shock, order beer, say nothing, intubate their patient, eat, or fail to close the dining room. Mollie’s complete self-effacement maintains that the events of lines 2 through 8 were not of her making. It could additionally be read as an indication of their traumatic nature, as she seems to dissociate herself, her thoughts, and her feelings from what was happening around her.

Sociolinguists and literary analysts alike have several additional strategies for identifying how narrators take up questions of agency and responsibility; here, we will give you a flavor of two of them. In English and many other languages, attending to the pronouns that narrators use to refer to the actors in a story can be a powerful strategy for pinning down how they evaluate their agency and responsibility, and others’. An exposition of this strategy is to be found in Timor and Landau’s (1998) study of Israeli ex-convicts who had begun to attend yeshivot (religious academies) for rehabilitation:

 Narrators use the first person singular pronoun, I, to identify themselves as the prime movers of events. Timor and Landau found narrators to speak of their reputable present selves in the first person singular, with its spirit of self-determination: ‘Today if I open a small synagogue, it would be wonderful’ (p. 368).

 Narrators use we, the first person plural pronoun, to present a collective story emphasizing solidarity or diffusing agency and responsibility. Timor and Landau’s narrators tended to recount their criminal pasts in the first person plural, e.g., ‘Before, we used to judge a guy by the laws of crime. […] We didn’t respect anyone honest. In the unwritten law of crime, we considered informers garbage, not humans’ (p. 368).

 Narrators can also use the second person pronoun, you, to diffuse responsibility by maintaining that any reasonable listener would perceive things in the same way and feel the same way about them. For example, one of Timor and Landau’s narrators explains his past crimes with, ‘You see people dressed nicely, then you become jealous. Then you try to steal some money’ (p. 369).

 Finally, when narrators use third person pronouns, describing what he, she, it, or they have done, they portray their own agency as diminished, circumstances as beyond their control, and events occurring willy-nilly.

Narrators also offer interpretations of agency and responsibility for events by means of what’s called the voice of their verbs and by whether actions are described using verbs versus nouns. We give the vocabulary for talking about this in Textbox 3.4, using the title of the Bob Marley (1973) song, ‘I shot the sheriff’ as our example. Applying its vocabulary, we can say that when one of Timor and Landau’s narrators refers to his past with, ‘In general there was violence and people were hurt’ (1998: 369), it is by using nominalization, followed by an agentless passive construction. The effect is that he is blurring over what happened, distancing himself from his actions and eliding responsibility for them.

Pronouns and voice can also be important cues to understanding how narrators experience or represent the degree of agency that they have in institutional settings. Lapum et al. (2010) give the example of an open-heart surgery patient named Joseph, who recounts his experience as follows:

What they did as soon as you enter the hospital, they take all the information, they give you a robe and put you in bed, they want to prepare you … she gave me a pill, she said, ‘Put under your tongue.’ … and she said, ‘Okay we’re going to take you to the operating room.’ ‘Thank god,’ I said, ‘We’re finally going.’ (p. 757, authors’ emphases)

Analyzing this quotation, Lapum et al. emphasize how Joseph experiences himself to be giving over his agency to the medical practitioners and technology surrounding him. By the end of the quotation, he is subsumed into their ‘we.’ The patients that Lapum et al. studied tended to speak of themselves as ‘I’ again as they spoke of recovering from surgery and becoming less dependent on others and technology for their survival. But importantly, Anspach (1988) shows that even medical practitioners, whom we might think of as holding more institutional power than patients, are prone to turning technology into the agent in their talk. She explains that when doctors presenting case histories make statements such as ‘the MRI revealed a growth’ as opposed to ‘the radiologist interpreting the MRI data saw a growth,’ the effect is to transform their, and other practitioners’, subjective opinions into objective scientific fact.

In a strategy that doesn’t hinge on grammar, Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet (1991) recommends that a narrator’s key phrases can be used to analyze how a narrator understands and problematizes the link of self to normative social models, making a micro to macro link that intrinsically involves the narrator’s agency. Key phrases can indicate that the narrator accepts, denies, resists, or is ambivalent about these models. Amber’s grandmother, for example, used to cap off stories of hardships, such as of a family member’s difficulty in obtaining adequate health care, with the phrase ‘That’s just the way it is.’ This phrase would turn stories that could otherwise have been read as outright criticisms of the social model into resigned acceptance of it.