Tales of Transgression: Negotiating the Moral Order in Oral Narratives

As indicated by the variety of perspectives included in Storyworlds, narratives have been studied by scholars from a wide range of disciplines. For linguists, the study of informal oral narratives provides an opportunity to study many different facets of language ranging from textual structure, coherence and cohesion, and syntactic structure (the form of sentences) to intonation and prosody (the melody and rhythm of language).¹ On the strength of work in two subfields of linguistics—sociolinguistics and discourse analysis—narratives have become an increasingly broad and diversified focus of study. Scholars in these subfields analyze what is said (and how it is said) to learn about social identities as well as relationships of power and solidarity, distance and familiarity, at both micro levels (negotiated during face-to-face interactions) and macro levels (sustained or resisted at institutionalized levels of authority). Also under investigation are ideologies concerning social, cultural, and moral issues: What is right or wrong? Who should be praised? Who should be blamed? And because stories are always told by someone to someone else, somewhere, and sometime, linguists also analyze how a story reflects, and is coordinated within, the ongoing social interaction in which it is told.

In this essay I explore how morality is demonstrated and evaluated in oral narratives, a topic that might also be of interest to scholars working on literary narrative or narratives conveyed in other media. It is common for oral stories to be prompted by a break in schema: what is supposed to be a routine activity or event is disrupted in some way. Some disruptions are accidental and occur independently of the protagonist’s (or anyone else’s) intentions. Others arise from misunderstandings: an action is well intended, but its negative consequences are a surprise.

The stories analyzed here convey intentional breaches of moral protocol. Three narrators (middle-aged, middle-class white men) create storyworlds that intentionally disrupt or challenge official and valorized expectations of (in order of the stories) education, family, and law.² In addition to creating characters, actions, and evaluation within the storyworld, the morality of the disruption is also bandied about by narrator and audience: me, the narrator’s wife, and in one case a nephew. Subjecting the events of the storyworld to scrutiny in the interactional world is not surprising. Echoing Jerome Bruner’s (1990) observation that narrative is a fundamental resource on which people draw to make sense of others’ and their own transgression of canonical norms and values, Ochs and Capps (2001: 46) suggest that “recounting the violation and taking a moral stance towards it provide a discursive forum for human beings to clarify, reinforce, or revise what they believe and value.”

Pivotal to each narrative is a command. Two are direct quotations within the storyworld: “Don’t you play the piano, when he plays elegies!” and “You’ll carry me in the house.” It is the violation of these orders that provokes audience assessment. The third quotation—“You better stay out of there for seven years!”—is a warning that appears three times and has several functions in both the storyworld and the here and now of its telling.

At its best, linguistic analysis of narrative requires both sequential and distributional accountability. Put simply, the former means that the linguist examines each and every line of a transcribed narrative, plus the speech of the interlocutors, as it emerges from moment to moment. This sequential approach is combined with attention to choices among options within each line. For example, where does the narrator use the historical present instead of the past tense to report prior speech (Schiffrin 1981)? Since space prevents exhaustive sequential and distributional analyses of the narratives to be analyzed, I concentrate on features, and sections, that are most pertinent to the study of the moral orders in relation to which the stories are told and interpreted.

Story 1: “Don’t you play the piano, when he plays elegies!”

In this story Jack recounts how a childhood friend played a light-hearted jingle during a school recital in which his friend was supposed to...