August 1994 — Volume 1, Number 2
James Paul Gee
Clark University
<jgee@vax.clarku.edu>
[-4-]
Why Narrativizing A Wordless Picture Book Is Not Artificial
A Response to Jim Gees review of Relating Events in Narrative, by one of the collaborating authors.
Jim’s characterization of using the wordless picture book Frog, Where Are You? to engage children (and adults) in the activity of narrativizing as artificiala comment that I have encountered several times at occasions I reported my own analyses of the frog-story datagives me the opportunity to briefly address the ideological implications of this misinterpretation.
At the core of the issue seems to be the fact that telling a story from the pictures is not about the narrators own lived experience(s). I assume it is this type of personal narrative that Jim alludes to by narratives that … flow out of their [childrens] … lives. As such, the frog story is typically told from the perspective of a third-person character (usually the boy as the central protagonist), and it requires the linguistic creation of this perspective. Creating this perspective, i.e. the construction of events through the subjectivity of a third person, is an activity that is as natural (as opposed to artificial) as constructing events from a first-person perspective, i.e.in Jims language making sense of satisfying patterns of themes from the perspective of the narrating self. The sociocultural and sociohistorical approach that Jim (and I myself as well) ascribe(s) to strongly argues that there is a tradition of these patterns of themes, and they often come in the form of third-person-perspective language. Thus, neither the construction of the subject of experiences from pictures, nor constructing the self as the subject of experiences, gives grounds for the assumption that one of the two lacks satisfying patterns of themes, while the other one preserves them. So, what could be the source of anyones attempts to privilege the construction of ones own subjectivity over the construction of the subjectivity of others?
It is my suspicion that privileging the construction of events through the subjectivity of a first-person [as (more) natural], over the construction of events from a third-person perspective [as (more) artificial], is a relic of a common view (that has become the shared view in the process of civilization) that celebrates the individualized agent as the originator of sense making in the form of patterns of themes. Though I wholeheartedly agree with Jims general claim (more developed in his introductory chapter to McCabe and Petersons Developing Narrative Structure [Gee, 1991], and possibly well summarized in the statement that traditional psycholinguistic research has not sufficiently been concerned with how subjects have created their perspectives on events and signaled satisfying patterns of themes, but rather, that subjects; creative forces have been canceled out of narrative activities by reducing [-5-] them to reports of a chronological sequence of events), I nevertheless want to underscore that this concern is an issue of how narratives are analyzed, and not whether narrators take (or are led to take) a first-person versus a third-person perspective in their narrative activity. Privileging subjectivity from a first-person perspective [as the (more) natural] over the third-person perspective [as the secondary, derived from the more natural, and as such (more) artificial] gives rise to the serious misinterpretation of an over-powering subjectivity of the (modern) individualized self as the social agent that flies in the face of the sociocultural and sociohistorical approach that Jim has so powerfully put forth in all of his recent works.
Reference
Gee, J. P. (1991). Memory and myth: a perspective on narrative. Introduction to A. McCabe and C. Peterson (Eds.), Developing narrative structure (pp. 1-25). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Michael Bamberg
Massey University, New Zealand
<NMB@massey.ac.nz>
[-5-]
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