The Nature of Meaning of Stories in Conversation

Although everyday stories told in the course of ongoing conversations are as open to multiple readings as many literary texts, the participants in the conversational storytelling situation must assign a meaning to a given telling of a story in order to facilitate the absorption of the story into the state of general talk which normally obtains. In the present paper, work done by the American linguistic school of narrative analysis (as begun by Labov and Waletzky and further developed by the author of this paper) is brought together with insights into conversational storytelling from ethno-methodological conversation analysts (Sacks, Jefferson, etc.) The meaning of a given telling of a story is shown to derive from both the structure of the story as told and the process of interpretation which goes on in the conversation after the telling. Special attention is paid to the «next story» which can follow the telling of a «first story» in a conversation. It is argued that the next story is crucially constrained by the first story, while the first story is assigned its meaning partially from the topic of the following one. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol6/iss1/5 THE NATURE OF MEANING OF STORIES IN CONVERSATION LIVIA POLANYI University of Amsterdam Although the texts of stories told in the course of everyday conversation are as open to variant readings and multiple interpretations as many literary texts, the participants in the conversational storytelling situation orient themselves towards assigning a meaning to a given telling of a story. This process of definitivization is necessary so that the talk following the story can proceed smoothly, with the excursion into the storyworld sufficiently understood so that at least some of those actively engaged in the talk can integrate the point of the story into the conversation. Without such a possibility of integration, the story would function as an obstacle to further talk, since no one would know what it was about well enough to deal with it. Think for a moment, if you will, of the situation which sometimes occurs when someone tells an inappropriate joke. That joke, that chunk of talk, hangs in the air unresponded to, until somehow, awkwardly, socially noticeably, the talk resumes on the «other side» of the faux pas. In order to avoid the tension and discomfort which result from such a misfire in communication, storytellers and story recipients allow their behavior to be regulated, in so far as possible, by a set of constraints which requires the assignment of meaning to possibly ambiguous texts, while simultaneously facilitating the interpretive process. As we shall see, the «meaning» of any given telling of a story in a conversation is socially determined: a story is «about» what it is taken to be about, for that telling as revealed by both the internal structure of the story as told and the talk which follows the telling. Should someone «re-tell» the «same» story in another conversa51 1 Polanyi: The Nature of Meaning of Stories in Conversation Published by New Prairie Press 52 STCL., Vol. 6, Numbers 1&2 (Fall, 1981Spring, 1982) tion, then that telling would be assigned a meaning which might or might not be identical to the interpretation the story was given the first time around. A story told in a conversation is thus not a fixed semantic entity, but is an open text which is «closed» or «fixed» each time it is told by the way it is told and received. Clearly, however, a storyteller and the story recipients are not at liberty to assign random interpretations to stories. What a story can be taken to be about is constrained in important ways by the linguistic and conversational conventions which regulate this sort of verbal social behavior. In this paper, I will outline briefly the inter-relationship between the everyday storyteller, his interlocutors, the text which is produced and the constraints arising from the conversational context which shape both the conversational act of storytelling and the stories themselves. Because it is especially illustrative, much of this discussion will center around the special relationship which obtains between a «first story» and a «second story,» since, in his choice of topic or point of his own story, the teller of the second story demonstrates his understanding of what he believes to have been the point of the first story.'