Still, the Small Voice: Narrative, Personal Revelation, and the Mormon Folk Tradition

Chapter 4: The Building Blocks of a Narrative Tradition

192 Chapter 4 THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF A NARRATIVE TRADITION Pattern in performance begins with pattern in experience. The similarities in stories of people who have shared experiences such as natural disasters, biological processes, and holiday airline travel all begin with similar circumstances . The same is true of personal revelation. While different types of revelatory experience lead people to ask different questions and construct distinct narrative performances, there remain broad commonalities across types. Of course narratives are not only descriptions of events, they are interpretations of those events, and interpretation begins with the senses. We see, hear, feel, smell, and taste. Through our senses, we attempt to assess experience . Concurrently, we process those stimuli according to cultural patterns and norms. We tend to focus on those images, sounds, and smells that fit a particular pattern, searching to fit this new experience within existing paradigms and past experiences.1 Narration introduces additional guidelines for interpretation. Cultural and social norms coupled with narrative demands for performance favor some experiences over others and shape how personal revelation is shared (see chapter 3). Further, once stories move beyond personal experience and begin to be narrated by family, friends, distant acquaintances, and perhaps even unknown strangers, narrative patterns can become a heavily relied upon resource for the performer. Personal beliefs, gaps in memory, or the desire to inspire a particular reaction in an audience can encourage storytellers to employ these patterns in the act of performance. In any case, the aesthetic and rhetorical power of common patterns is never the sole explanation for their use. The nature of divine communication, human fallibility, cultural norms, and accurate reporting all help explain the existence, power, and appeal of these patterns. The Building Blocks of a Narrative Tradition 193 Narrative Patterns Personal revelation narratives exhibit a number of recurring patterns that can be usefully called motifs. A motif is a distinct, recognizable, and recurring element found in artistic works. Motifs can be identified according to specific objects, characters, phenomena, actions, behaviors, or relationships.2 Many are tied to theme and will be addressed in the following chapter. Others, however , are primarily structural, helping to provide part of the skeletal framework for narration. Discussions about motifs occur most often in the analysis of fictional stories , where storytellers have full license to imaginatively create new stories. The master storyteller is often one able to not only perform stories learned from others but create new stories, drawing upon the resources of motifs and other formulas and structures from other stories. Applying this process to the narration of nonfiction is understandably problematic. To suggest that people recounting their own sacred experiences are borrowing motifs and formulas from other stories can be offensive. People sharing their revelatory experiences are reporting, not creating. Nonetheless, as experience is interpreted and translated into narrative, generic norms prove valuable tools for narrators. Patterns in experience become patterns in narrative . The use of these patterns in sharing memorates does not undermine their truth; it merely suggests that people have worked out a way of communicating effectively, efficiently, and expressively with their peers. As stories move from memorate to legend, however, there is a greater chance that these patterns are relied upon for more than reporting, by filling gaps in narrative or memory. In narratives of personal revelation shared among Latter-day Saints, a number of motifs and patterns appear, evidence of shared experience as well as shared aesthetics. They include quoting the Holy Ghost, ignoring initial promptings, repeating the number three, and proving fulfillment.3 Quoting the Holy Ghost The promptings of the Holy Ghost are most often discussed as the still small voice. This voice is quiet, subtle, whispering. Some people talk about physically hearing a voice, but for most, the voice is inside the mind or heart, arriving as thoughts or feelings, abstracted from direct speech. Despite this, it is common for people to talk about receiving a feeling or a thought and in the course of describing their experience, quote the spirit directly. Elder Spencer Bourgeous recalls a prompting that “wasn’t like an audible voice,” yet he quotes the voice repeatedly throughout his narrative (see chapter 5 for complete narrative). Pauline Clayson Still, the Small Voice 194 receives revelation about her ailing mother and describes receiving an impression and a thought but quotes a voice (see chapter 2 for complete narrative). Her husband Paul mentions a “distinct thought” but quotes the Holy...