Been a Heavy Life: Stories of Violent Men (review)

In Been a Heavy Life, Lois Presser, a sociologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, investigates how men who have murdered, robbed, raped, and assaulted others narrate their personal identities. Rather than focusing on what her narrators say, she is more interested in how they say it—their narrative structure. She argues that narratives of violent selves lay the groundwork for harmful action. These narratives, however, are not inherent to individuals and are not a product of thinking “errors”; rather, they are shaped by dominant cultural norms that lead to violence (154). Narratives, in her view, do not reside in the individual but are socially constituted and enacted. The state, the criminal justice system, and the criminologist all play a role in coproducing these criminogenic stories.

In the first chapters of the book, Presser lays out her methodology and positions her work in relation to theoretical debates in the fields of criminology, ethnology, psychology, and narratology. Her discussion of symbolic interaction, reflexivity, and the coproduction of narrative data will be of interest to oral historians. Presser seeks to establish a basis for how narrative shapes action—particularly, harmful action. She contends identities and narration are fluid, intertwined, and produced through social interaction. As a result, any narrative produced in a research setting is coproduced—a fact that demands she adopt a reflexive approach that recognizes the social processes from which these narratives emerge.

Presser does not, however, posit that social behavior is reinvented from one encounter to the next. Rather, she sees her influence on her interviews as one among many. Presser also avoids engaging in excessive self-revelation or what she terms “confessional ethnography” (42). Her work suggests that one can be attentive to the dynamics of the research situation and still keep the focus on the topic of research. She examines her role only where she sees her presence significantly shaping the narratives of the men she interviews in ways that are relevant to her larger analysis.

Presser bases the bulk of her work on the open-ended life story interviews she conducted with twenty-seven violent men. The stories themselves are never fully developed, as snippets of the interviews are intertwined to make a larger argument about their shared narrative structures. She identifies three themes that indicate for her what the stories are about—reform, stability, and elastic narratives. The reform narrative distances the present self from the past self and emphasizes a plan for desistance that is necessary to maintain the current moral self. The stability narrative presents a persistent and steady moral character throughout. Elastic narratives creatively integrate the two forms, offer a weak commitment to desistance and lack a strong sense of personal agency.

The majority of interviewees, regardless of which of the three types of narrative structures they embrace, present their stories as tales of heroic struggle. They depict the autonomous self as one under siege. This threat requires “a momentous gesture of agency” to overcome the potential of being overpowered (106). Presser argues that these narratives draw upon the dominant model of Western masculinity and vary significantly from the stories women in prison tell. This gender gap is suggestive that narratives of heroic struggle play a role in the production of violence—behavior men disproportionately participate in.

Presser inductively concludes that narratives of powerlessness and difference tend toward violence. The narrative of heroic struggle, where the hostile other is externalized, is a narrative that establishes a stark difference between the self and the others. Meanwhile, narratives of victimization lend themselves to stories of heroic struggle that seek to overcome a sense of powerlessness. These narratives are not inherent to those with criminal natures but are shaped by dominant cultural forms. Presser maintains that the normative structures of storytelling, within a context of structural deprivation, offer the building blocks for narratives that foster violent action.

One might conclude that Presser is pushing for the adoption of cognitive-therapeutic measures designed...