The Life Story

Abstract

A LIFE STORY IS, simply, a person's story of his or her life, or of what he or she thinks is a significant part of that life. It is therefore a narrative, a story of experience, and, as it emerges from conversation, its ontological status is the spoken word, even if the story is transcribed and edited for the printed page. The storyteller trusts the listener(s) and the listener respects the storyteller, not interrupting the train of thought until the story is finished. That is not to say the listener is passive as a doorknob; he nods assent, interposes a comment, frames a relevant question; indeed, his presence and reactions are essential to the story. He may coincidentally be a folklorist, but his role is mainly that of a sympathetic friend. This essay is directed to folklorists whose fieldwork, like my own, involves talking to people and finding out about their lives. My intention is to define and develop an approach to the story as a self-contained fiction, and thus to distinguish it sharply from its historical kin: biography, oral and the history (or life history, as it is called in anthropology). Among the dimensions of folk culture which Richard Dorson observed during his 1968 field trip to Gary, Indiana, and East Chicago, was something he called personal history. In the 1970 article which resulted, Is There a Folk in the City? he told folklorists to cast aside worries over whether the history is a traditional oral genre, and urged them to collect the thousands of sagas created from experiences that deserve, indeed cry for, recording.' Dorson caught the documentary spirit of the times. The following decade witnessed a rebirth of interest in the experiences of ordinary Americans, especially blue-collar workers, racial and ethnic minorities, and