Narrating Space Spatializing Narrative by Marie-Laure Ryan & Kenneth Foote & Maoz Azaryahu

Author:Marie-Laure Ryan & Kenneth Foote & Maoz Azaryahu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Ohio State University
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

This story gives the impression of being well-rehearsed and coherently put together. With a minimal amount of words, Aixia manages to represent a logically and fully consistent sequence of events. At every moment in the telling, the hearer is able to imagine the problems that face the characters: the old woman in need of help and the narrator, who wants to help but who lacks the resources to do so. Both characters are outsiders to society: the old woman is homeless, and the narrator is a new immigrant whose integration in the city is only partial. On one hand, she knows that 911 is the number to call for an emergency, on the other hand, she does not have a cell phone and she does not speak the language very well. The narrative could have been turned into a self-promoting tale of altruism or ingenious problem solving, but the narrator totally downplays her role in helping the homeless woman. If we compare this story to the patterns of oral storytelling described by Labov and Waletzky (1973), we are struck by the lack of evaluative devices—devices that emphasize the dramatic character of the situation and its emotional impact on the narrator. For instance, instead of telling us how she felt when she saw the old women fall, Aixia lets the facts speak for themselves. She describes the old woman lying on the ground, the blood all over her face, and the rain adding to her misery. Similarly, the last sentence of the story entirely lacks what one expects in a coda: a summary of the story, some kind of moral, or an evaluative statement, such as “It was so scary, but I am just glad that I was able to help, despite being a foreigner.” What we get instead is “I went home,” another way of saying “The End.” Rather than building up the story as the recounting of a unique, extraordinary event, this ending presents the events as a routine experience: I went home—as I do every day. The story by itself has a lot of potential tellability, but this tellability is not developed.

While the story is told on-site, the storyteller does not exploit the particular resources made available by her spatial situation. The narration does not use any kind of verbal pointing, such as indexical expressions (“here,” “over there”), and makes no attempt to situate the listener in a specific location. It could just as well have been told in a studio for a remote audience or be part of a written story. For this storyteller, space is not a lived environment—she only evokes the park as a transit area—but the stage of an event whose importance lies in its human significance. The point of the story is to suggest that Grange Park is not only a trendy public garden, a space of leisure and beauty where intellectuals meet to discuss art, but also a space that serves as shelter to the less privileged members of society. For some

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