Ron Grele's Lifelong Passion for Conversational Narrative

Ron Grele's contributions to the field of oral history could be summed up by simply counting the years of his tenure at the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, the hundreds of interviews he has conducted, or the thousands of students and scholars his work has touched. What would be missing in that accounting would be the quality of passion that drove that work: a passion to develop oral history as a practice and a passion to enlarge and sustain oral history as an intellectual field. Both ambitions are revealed in Ron's book, Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History. In chapter 4, "Movement without Aim: Methodological and Theoretical Problems in Oral History," Ron offers a critique of the bourgeoning popular oral history movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and argues that—properly conceived—the oral history interview can become a unique source of historical knowledge and a tool of narrative analysis.¹

Oral history, Ron claims, is a "conversational narrative" that contains within it clues to the individual's relationship to history, myth, and ideology. In a well-constructed interview the interviewer asks questions to reveal how social and political power shapes personal narrative and also explores the individual's impact on the wider world. This is a dynamic view of the practice of interviewing in which the interviewer and the narrator share similar goals of telling and listening to construct a narrative jointly. There is a beautiful synergy in this chapter between the intentionality, knowledge, and skill required to create a conversational narrative that is a portal into historical consciousness and the idea that oral history will flourish as a movement as well as a practice, if those principles are followed.

The intellectual enthusiasm for oral history that emerges in the 1970s through Ron's and also Luisa Passerini's work and their ongoing friendship (written about in this special section) is important to remember at a time in which new popular oral history movements and technology converge. As Alexander Freund warns us in his courageous article, "Under Storytelling's Spell? Oral History in a Neoliberal Age," popular oral history enterprises such as StoryCorps and its clones risk diluting the sociohistorical roots of oral history and the integrity of the field itself, allowing oral history to evolve into a technology of the self. He writes:

With its focus on the individual, the new kind of storytelling tends to atomize society, proposing the narrator as a protagonist who overcomes seemingly personal challenges in a world of inexplicable circumstances such as poverty, discrimination, and oppression. It is motivated by liberal beliefs in individual autonomy, freedom, and rights. Inadvertently, however, it supports neoliberal values of consumerism, competition, and free market solutions to all economic, social, and cultural problems.²

In the face of a new turn towards commercial and highly personal approaches in oral history, it is comforting to recall the political passions that drove our early leaders: Ron Grele, Luisa Passerini, and Alessandro Portelli, as they use and write about oral history to interrogate political and collective power.³ Ron, in particular, argues that the goal of a well-constructed conversational narrative is to render the structural relationships of the individual within history, politics, and culture transparent:

It is at the level of this problematic—the theoretical or ideological context in which words and phrases, and the presence or absence of certain problems and concepts is found—that we find the synthesis of all the various structural relationships of the interview, as well as the particular relation of the individual to his version of history. What we are here discussing is not simply a Weltanschauung, but a structural field in which men live their history and which guides their practice or action.⁴

For Ron, the ideal oral history interview is a triple act of construction, deconstruction, and analysis. When thinking about the origins of our field, and its future, such historical considerations are as relevant now as they were in the 1970s, when this chapter was first written and published.⁵ Will we align ourselves with the short-form...