POSITIONING WITH DAVIE HOGAN

STORIES, TELLINGS, AND IDENTITIES  

Let me begin with something that is simple and (hopefully) common sense: When we speak, we usually speak to others and we speak about something (or about others) – and we do both at the same time, and by use of discursive means (such as lexical devices, syntax, supra-segmentational devices, and gestures). When we tell stories, we do a little more; we signal to others that we are entering, maintaining or handing over the floor to ‘do’ a story, and we order aspects of what the story is about (particularly the characters in the story) in space (there) and time (then) into a plot; again, by use of the same discursive devices. In other words, time, space and characters inside the story-world gain their existence in story performance; they are creations or constructions, and so is the self (in its role as story-teller) as well as the audience (in their role as participants and listeners). Taking off from this very simple but basic orientation as my starting point, I will lay out and demonstrate with an example how we can use the concept of positioning to link not only the creative act of story-telling with the construction of story-content, but both in a fuller and more productive way to the act of constructing identities, i.e., identities of the speaking (story-telling) subject.

            In the following, I will briefly introduce the notion of ‘positioning’ as a way to conceptualize the subject’s identity as impinged by two opposing forces, one with a person-to-world, the other with a world-to-person direction of fit; the first relying on a notion of the unitary subject as ground, the latter on a subject as determined by outside (mainly social and biological) forces. Making the interactive site of story-telling the empirical ground, where identities come to existence and are interactively displayed, I will present positioning analysis as the tool for analyzing the ‘who-am-I?’ (identity) question, and with a brief film clip in which four 12-year-olds sit around a campfire and engage in story-telling, I will demonstrate how this type of analysis operates.

Positioning, Identities, and Positioning Analysis

Current discussions of the concept of positioning draw on two rather different interpretations. The more traditional view, which was very influential for the development of this concept and its current relevance in theorizing identity and subjectivity, explains positions as grounded in discourses (also variably called ‘master narratives’, ‘plot lines’, ‘master plots’, ‘dominant discourses’, or simply ‘cultural texts’) which are viewed as providing the meanings and values within which subjects are ‘positioned’ (Hollway, 1984; Davies & Harré, 1990; Harré & van Langenhove, 1999). The ‘problem of agency’ is addressed by giving the subject a semi-agentive status inasmuch as discourses are construed as inherently contradictive and in competition with one another, so that subjects are forced to choose: They ‘agentively’ pick a position among those available. Thus, positions are resources that subjects can choose and when practiced for a while they become repertoires that can be drawn on.

Elaborating Butler’s (1990, 1995) view of performing identities in acts of ‘self-marking’, a view that is more concerned with self-reflection, self-criticism, and agency (all ultimately orientated toward self-revision), I suggest to draw a line between the ‘being positioned’ orientation with its relatively strong determining underpinning and a more agentive notion of the subject as ‘positioning itself’, in which the discursive resources or repertoires are not always and already given but rather are constructed. As a matter of fact, I have argued (Bamberg  2000, under review) that ‘being positioned’ and ‘positioning oneself’ are metaphoric constructs of two very different agent-world relationships: the former with a world-to-agent direction of fit, the latter with an agent-to-world direction of fit. Of course, one way to overcome this rift is to argue that both operate simultaneously and concurrently when subjects engage in talk-in-interaction and make sense of self and others in their stories. However, the interaction between these two direction-of-fit metaphors may be a lot more complex than that suggested by notions of relatively ready-made resources or repertoires that are employed in talk-in-interaction. Actually, if positions themselves are viewed as constructed in talk by lexical, grammatical and interactive means (and not just ‘expressed’ through them), we may be better off analyzing the process of how such positions come into existence and how they assist the construction of a sense of self and identities.

            Taking this orientation, the ‘who-am-I?’ (identity) question should no longer start from a notion of a unitary subject as the ground for its investigation. Rather, the agentive subject is the ‘point of departure’ for its own empirical instantiation (Butler, 1995, p. 446); however, as a subject that is constantly seeking to legitimate itself, situated in language practices and interactively accomplished: where “world- and person-making take place simultaneously” (Bamberg, 2000, p. 763).  Thus, the pluralization of identities “disrupts the social ontology of the subject itself … as the internal impossibility of the subject as a discrete and unitary kind of being” (Butler, 1995, p. 446), and simultaneously, this pluralization opens a new empirical territory for where and how subjects come to existence, i.e., sites where positions are actively and interactively taken (and explored) for the purpose of self and world construction.

            Our analysis of how speakers actively and agentively position themselves in talk – in particular with and in their stories – starts from the assumption that the orderliness of story-talk is situationally and interactively accomplished. However, since this orderliness is the result of what is being achieved, and therefore inherently oriented to, we begin the actual analytic process with the story as ‘original’ unit, and work from here ‘outwardly’ toward its interactional embedding. In other words, although we assume that stories gain their structure and content from their situatedness in interactional settings, we begin by analyzing the means that contribute to their ‘inherent’ order as discourse units, i.e., we scrutinize first how characters are designed in time and space inside story worlds in order to get an initial hold of the  ‘identity claims’ of the teller (positioning analysis level 1). Thereafter, we scrutinize the interactional means employed for getting the story accomplished (positioning analysis level 2), and finally will be better situated to see how speakers and audiences establish and display particular notions of selves (positioning analysis level 3). The analysis of the first two positioning levels is intended to progressively lead to a differentiation of how speakers work up – often jointly – the construction of normative discourses. It is at this juncture, where we come full circle by showing how subjects position themselves in relation to discourses by which they are positioned. In other words, analyzing stories in interaction enables us to circumvent the aporia of two opposing subject theories – one in which the subject is determined by existing discourses, the other in which the subject is the ground from where discourses are constructed.

Story Data

The data I will use to demonstrate ‘positioning analysis’ come from Stand By Me (1986), a film about four 12-year-old friends who set off into the woods in search of a missing boy’s dead body. At some point, the four are sitting around the campfire and one of them entices Gordie, who is also the narrator in this film, to tell a story.[1] Gordie begins, and at the point where the plot is about to unravel, the camera angle switches into the ‘real’ fictive world of the story, replacing the narrator’s focalization with the story characters who speak ‘for themselves’. In the transcription (see Appendix I), I have replaced this part with two written narratives (Story A and Story B) that ‘tell’ the sequence of events from Gordie’s (the story’s principal narrator’s) perspective, written by two American students who were asked to fill in this piece as part of an assignment of my narrative workshop.[2]

            It is important to note that both the story as well as the camp-fire setting in which this story is shared, are fictional and do not thematize any of the participants of the campfire conversation. While we have an author and director behind the film, we have three tellers (Gordie and two students), we have a narrator who focalizes the story world,[3] and a number of story characters (i.e., those who are acting their parts in the ‘Davie Hogan Story’). So, what looks rather complex at first, simplifies the analysis of positioning strategies: We can focus solely on the written texts of Story A and Story B for Positioning Analysis 1, and since both are available as written texts, we have no clues to any interactive orientations apart from the verbal material. Subsequently, Positioning Analysis 2 can focus on the situational embedding of what has become the ‘written’ story, leading up to Level 3 Positioning, where we will be in a more empirically grounded position to tackle the identity question, i.e., how the four interactants employ the story and display in this setting a sense of ‘who they are’.

Positioning Analysis Level ONE -- The Davie Hogan Story

As previously mentioned, I transformed the contents of the filmed part of the Davie Hogan Story into a ‘told’ (written) story, i.e., one that incorporated a narrator’s focalization in its telling. Since the filmed part of the story did not reveal its focalization point, and since we are interested in this first part of the analysis in how the characters are ‘ordered’ (focalized) in space and time, we needed to transform it into a spoken or written equivalent. In order to even better be able to show the discursive construction of focalization strategies, I chose two contrasting strategies for the analysis at Positioning Level 1. After the pre-negotiation of the stories possible plot, and having secured his story telling rights, Gordie launches in turn 17 into an elaborate preface to the story, culminating in the revelation that this story is not only about a fat kid called Lardass and a pie-eating contest (as he had announced earlier on), but more importantly, about “the greatest revenge a kid ever had” (consisting of Davie causing himself to throw up, and in doing so, causing the watching crowd to throw up over one another – “a complete and total barf-o-rama”). At this point, we start our level 1 analysis with the written excerpt of Story A[4]:

Story A: Davie and the others – ‘flat and shallow’

(A-1)   Davie went out to buy a bottle of caster oil and a dozen of eggs. Then he went on to enroll for the pie-eating contest at the local summer fair. On his way he secretively swallowed these raw eggs and drank up the whole bottle of caster oil. At the fair he registered together with five other guys and entered the contest. In front of the watching crowd, he was introduced by the mayor, who presided over the contest as judge and empire.

Story A continues the strand laid out before by Gordie by use of his first name for the protagonist in subject and sentence initial position, and marking the event in the past tense: The narrator presents him-/herself as being on a first-name basis with ‘Davie’ and sets up a past-temporal perspective. (This is in stark contrast to story B, where the narrator continues with the third person pronoun “he” in the present tense.) The use of full name versus the use of pronoun is typical for shifting to a new character in subject position (which actually does not seem to apply in this situation, because the referent remains the same); or it signals a new topical unit such as a paragraph. If this procedure is in operation, this new paragraph-like unit (A-1) can be argued to hold as long as there is no new fully named character introduced, i.e., the topical unit consists of the subsequent eight clausal structures of (A-1), all keeping the protagonist in the subject slot, mostly as pronoun, with the exception of one null form. The first two activities Davie is reported to have engaged in, are sequentially ordered: first ‘buying oil and eggs’, then ‘enrolling in the contest’, apparently after arriving at the site where the contest took place. At this point, however, the narrator jumps back in time[5]: Swallowing eggs and oil reportedly took place before he got to the contest. It is mentioned further that he does this “secretively”, i.e., he tried not to be observed by anyone around. Then the focalization perspective resumes and catches up with the sequence of actions at the place of the contest: Davie ‘registers and enters the contest’. That ‘the mayor introduced him’ and that ‘a crowd was watching this’ are linguistically configured by use of a passive construction, thereby keeping Davie in subject slot and guaranteeing the thematic flow, and by use of a nominalization (“the watching crowd”), avoiding to move ‘the crowd’ into subject position of a semantic agentive role. Both constructions serve the function to keep the mayor as well as the crowd, although both acting as agents, in background positions. The last clause of this topical unit, a subordinate relative clause, is the only clause in which another character (the mayor) occupies the subject slot (as presiding over the contest).

(A-2)   Davie, together with the other contestants started to gobble the pies down, with their hands on their back, and their mouths in the pies.

The next topical paragraph (A-2) is very short and only consists of one sentence, though assembling at least four different pieces of simultaneous action and state-of-affairs descriptions: (i) Davie was (sitting) together with the other contestants, (ii) he gobbled down some pies (the narrator’s use of the inceptive aspect marker <“started to”> focalizes the continuous duration), (iii) he had his hands on his back, and (iv) his mouth in the pie. All descriptions held true for all contestants, not just Davie.

(A-3)   Davie, who was clearly ahead of his contestants, and cheered by the crowd, stuffed himself with these pies like crazy         and…

The third and last topical unit of Story A (A-3) again starts out with a reference to the main character by first name, establishing a narrator’s perspective that focalizes on all contestants in this contest, concluding and summing up that Davie was ahead, and relating his standing in the contest to the crowd’s reactive assessment: they were cheering him on. Again, the passive construction manages to keep ‘the crowd’ out of subject position, preserving the thematic flow with Davie in thematic subject position. He is reported as simultaneously continuing to eat pies, though from a narrator’s perspective that attempts to highlight his eating behavior as ‘doing something to himself’, using the self-reflexive verb ‘stuffing himself’.  

            In sum, the linguistic forms chosen to generate an action sequence leading up to the accomplishment of a revenge plot create a main character who is focalized as positioned within a pie-eating contest vis-à-vis four other contestants, a mayor, and a crowd. His actions are viewed as brought about by himself, except for the mayor’s introduction and his presiding over the contest. However, the mayor’s actions remain unfocused, or better, they are moved into the background, underscoring the importance of the main character’s action orientation. Nevertheless, we as readers are never fully brought into the main character’s decision-making process. Only on two occasions is the reader given a glimpse of what is on Davie Hogan’s mind, and only minimally: Once we hear that Davie wanted to go unnoticed (the presentation of this event also coincides with the only temporal break in the form of a minimal flash back); the other time the narrator gives us an evaluative glimpse of Davie’s eating behavior. But in general, we just ‘follow’ the character the way the narrator moves him through the event sequence. It is clear that the narrator knows more, but does not seem to be willing to reveal it. The narrative perspective laid out for the reader is straightforward; there is no moving around from narrator to one character to another character. The choice of the simple past assists in keeping the reader minimally involved. There is little tension, the character remains relatively simple. Davie clearly is the main character, but his role as protagonist, i.e., his relationship and position vis-à-vis the others as antagonists are underdeveloped. Why this was a revenge, and what was motivating Davie, are not accentuated. We walk with him, but why we move along and why we should feel for and identify with him is not convincingly or more fully laid out. It is a singular perspective or orientation that is laid out by the narrator. -- All this quite dramatically shifts when story A is compared with story B, the second and contrasting (written) excerpt we analyze as part of level 1.

Story B: Lardass – the ‘round’ protagonist

…he enters this pie-eating contest.

(B-1)    They have it every year. It’s like a parade, everyone is there, all kids from school and all of their parents, The Women’s Auxiliary and Benevolent Order of Antelopes, the school principal, everyone. And all the women in town had baked pies.

As already mentioned, the written account of the event sequence in story B continues by use of the present tense marker and by use of the personal pronoun, the way Gordie had started his turn in the film clip. This marks the transition from Gordie’s oral performance to the narrator’s written account as a ‘continuation’ rather than a new unit (as in Story A).  The first topical unit (B-1) starts with a clear shift into the background: The people who are involved in organizing the fair are moved into the center; however, not as actors, but rather as having had a hand in setting the scene for something else to happen. The narrator clearly steps out into the time before the reported event sequence (note the use of the timeless present “have it every year” and the plu-perfect “had baked”), presenting a focalization perspective from where all this information is assembled as ‘knowing’, ‘authoritative’ and with an eye for details.

(B-2)    So one by one the mayor calls the pie eaters up on stage and introduces them. The crowd cheers, especially for Bill Travis, who has won this contest 4 years in a row. But when the mayor calls up Lardass, they snicker and try to insult him. Bill Travis trips him and everyone laughs

The next topical paragraph (B-2) consists of 7 clauses as information units, all seven shifting back and forth between different agents in subject position: (i) the mayor, (ii) the crowd, (iii) Bill Travis, (iv) the mayor, (v) the crowd, (vi) Bill Travis, and (vii) the crowd. Davie Hogan is mentioned three times, though only in object position, and more relevant, by the name he was given by his tormentors, “Lardass”. Thus, the narrator has crafted a constellation of characters in which Lardass is positioned as the undergoer, and the others as perpetrators who are having fun. It should be noted that thus far the audience or readership does not have a clear grasp of either of the two parties as prot -or antagonistic; all we are confronted with is an antagonistic relationship between two character constellations, Lardass and all others.

(B-3)    But Lardass will be the only one laughing in the end, because – what the crowd didn’t know – before the contest, he had made a plan: He drank a whole bottle of caster oil, and if that wasn’t enough, he ate a half a dozen raw eggs. Lardass could hardly keep his lunch down.

However, this changes quite drastically with the shift to Lardass as the thematic subject in the next topical unit (B-3): “But” signals this contrast, not only between ‘who is laughing now’ (in segment B-2) and in what the narrator foreshadows will happen at the end of the story, but also and more pointedly, between the two character constellations. It is at this point that the narrator moves into the future and then, immediately following, into the recent past in order to back up and give evidence for his/her prophecy. The narrator’s prophecy is constructed as based on some intimate knowledge of Lardass revenge scheme, and this knowledge has been held back thus far. As a consequence of the crowd’s misdemeanor it looks like the narrator is willing to step out of a more neutral space and take sides with the main character of the story. Revealing the sequence of events that had happened before the pie-eating contest, the narrator steps back in time and elaborates. Note that this paragraph has started in the future tense, but it ends in the past tense: As a consequence of his concerted behavior, he hardly ‘could keep his lunch down’. By this point the narrator has ‘moved in’ and become the acquaintance of Lardass, having intimate knowledge of how Lardass feels inside his body.

(B-4)    So when they placed that first pie in front of him, he was ready. Gobbling down one pie after another, he let the excitement build up waiting for the perfect moment. As he bit into his 5^th pie, he couldn’t hold back any longer...

Unit (B-4) moves the focalization point back from where it was in (B-3) ‘back’ to the point in time of the ‘here and now’ in the contest. This is where the narrator had left the scene in unit (B-2) before s/he ‘flashed forth and back’ in unit (B-3). It is noteworthy that this is accomplished in keeping the simple past tense, just as in (B-3). In other words, the narrator does not shift back to the present tense the way it was used for focalizing the ‘narrative here & now’ in (B-2). The use of the ‘shifter’ “so” signals this temporal/topical shift to the ‘here & now’ of the contest. The anonymous “they” as subject in the temporal subordinate clause (in “when they placed the pie in front of him”) only serves to provide the background, against which “he” becomes even more prominent as thematic subject, newly focalized in terms for ‘his readiness’ for what is happening next. Again, the linguistic devices used, clearly orient the listener/reader forward to some high point of the developing action sequence. Commenting on Lardass’s intentions to “let the excitement build up” and “waiting for the perfect moment” further signals the narrator’s proximity to the main character, and at the same time his/her distance from the crowd, who, at this point in the telling of the story, has been stripped of its original active and agentive characterization as Lardass’s tormentor, receiving instead the brunt of the action sequence.

Reflecting on the overall structure of Story B, we see a very different ‘character development’ than in Story A. The narrator begins to present Lardass, but the choice of referential devices focalizes him from the perspective of his tormentors. Lardass, placed in syntactic object position, is the object of mockery and others’ insults without exception. There is no clear index as to where the narrator stands, on Lardass’s side or on the side of those who are ‘just’ having ‘a little’ fun (at the expense of others). The axis of good versus evil has not been demarcated yet. This, however, changes with unit (B-3). Here, the narrator draws the line between the protagonist of the story and his antagonists. Shifting perspective away from the antagonists and promoting the internal viewpoint of the protagonist results in a narrator/reader alignment and positive identification with Davie Hogan, alias Lardass. The secondary characters in this story have been provided with a face, although an ugly one, resulting in the recognition of Davie’s actions as motivated by, and in service of the revenge plot that was announced early on by Gordie in his preface to the story.

In Sum

Having worked in a somewhat detailed fashion through the written excerpts of Story A and Story B as two versions of the same sequence of events (the way they were presented in the filmed Davie Hogan Story), we begin to realize how characters are linguistically constructed and become positioned across time and space vis-à-vis one another as prot- and antagonists, as flat or full, as good, bad, or as ugly. Furthermore, and more important, the perspective from where these values are inserted into the story-order can be from a more or less authoritative position of the (fictional) truth. Signs of a narrator’s reliability and accountability are woven into the relationships that the characters are said to enter into in the story; the characters are invested with the perspective from where they are positioned.

 At this point it does not seem to be much of a difference whether the author has this perspective ‘in mind’ (of what is good and what is evil, or whether the characters referred to ‘are’ – or exist in ‘real’ life as – round or flat) and invests the narrator with the authority to carry this into the narrator’s focalization, or whether we assume that this perspective ‘comes into existence’ (emerges) in the linguistic realization of the text. However, for purposes of doing positioning analysis, we deal with the wording and grammar of the text as our starting point. How the story is bound into a thematic unit and how it is unfolding from the characters’ point of view (here in both cases Davie’s)[6] is a matter of its language, i.e., the discursive devices operating to bring into existence what we have called the focalizer/narrator.

At the end of stories A and B, both storywriters hand back their narrators’ focalizing powers to Gordie, who, back at the campfire, continues to tell the story.

The rest of the narrative (continuing turn 17) resembles a listing of the same kind of events performed by a number of different characters on other characters, whereby it is relevant that the chain reaction originated in and through Davie’s action; he barfed first and as such caused this chain of reactions. The extent and level of details to which Gordie paints these events displays very nicely what Mechling (1980, p. 50) calls “a preoccupation with the disgusting” that runs through campfire texts, particularly in the age bracket of young teenagers.

 Positioning Analysis Level TWO – Story-Telling as Co-Construction

Having analyzed in some more detail the linguistic means that contribute to the ‘emergence’ of a narrator’s perspective or orientation (actually, in our case, two different  orientations), we will turn next to the analysis of the interactional setting between the four boys around the campfire, within which this particular orientation was made possible. At this point we will first work through the sequence of turns, the way they result in the story told (turns 1-17), and then the way the story is picked up and re-negotiated after it has been accomplished (continuation of turn 18-33).

“Hey Gordie, why don’t you tell us a story?” (turns 1-17)

The opening scene finds four thirteen-year-olds sitting around a campfire, smoking cigarettes. Turns 1 and 2 by Vern and Teddy, respectively, are evaluation tokens that employ an adult scenario, in which typically fathers relax smoking after having finished their meal. ‘Cherishing a smoke after meals’ is a ‘token’ that invokes the image that this is a standard ritual, something they engage in at home with other (male?) adults. Chris’ laughter in turn 3 can be interpreted as challenging this attempt at positioning themselves as habitual smokers. This is shown in Teddy’s response “what did I say?”, which indexes that he would like a clarification of Chris’s challenge.

Instead of answering Teddy’s question and explicating his own position vis-à-vis smoking and being adult, Chris changes the topic by inciting Gordie to tell a story, which is followed by Gordie’s hesitation to engage in this activity. Chris, Teddy, and Vern (turns7-9) all seem to interpret this hesitation as an invitation for further pressing, whereupon Gordie takes the floor with what can be seen as a story opening turn (10): He picks up ‘story’ as the referent that has been floated about in the last five turns and elaborates what his story is going to be about: He states the main character to be a “fat kid that nobody likes”, and that the story is going to be about “this pie-eating contest”.

Gordie’s vouching for his kind of story is a response to both Vern’s (8) and Teddy’s (9) suggestions of potential story topics, a horror and a war or battle story, respectively. In contrast to these options, Gordie’s suggestion may come across as very mundane and potentially boring. Vern’s bid to elaborate on some specifics of the given character description in turn 11 challenges Gordie’s bid for a story, but is secured by Chris’ uptake in turn 12. Gordie’s elaboration of the character description is overridden again by Vern (in turn 14) who seems to orient to his own story, only to be cut off by Chris, this time abruptly (“Shut up, Vern!”). Consequently, Vern yields to Gordie’s right to continue his story, and hands over the floor to Gordie (“it’s a swell story” – in turn 16).

In sum, in the first 16 turns, we catch a glimpse of the local procedures that are called into place to occasion a story: Two of the thirteen-year old boys attempt to draw up some adult space, placing themselves as experienced smokers. They are challenged by one of their peers who, instead of turning this the topic into the object of controversy, incites the fourth participant to share a story. After some initial negotiation with regard to what the story should be about, and after two brief challenges to his story telling rights, Gordie comes out as the teller, who works up a preface to his story. Up to this point, the audience has received some details of a description of the main character of the story, and is informed that the upcoming story is about a pie-eating contest. With turn 17, Gordie continues to draw out the character as a kid who is like them, but different: Davie Hogan is a defenseless outcast, who is not at fault, but is ranked out and beaten up at every possible occasion by young and old in his community. At the end of this preface, the teller foreshadows an important frame for the plot to come, namely that the sequence of events will not only follow a sequence typical for a pie-eating contest (where competitors enroll, then compete in a usually gross eating contest, resulting in winners and losers), but that the revenge plot (and it promises to be an exciting revenge) is overarching the pie-eating plot. At this point, the camera angle changes, and the campfire scenario, with Gordie as the teller and animator of the characters in the story, is transformed into the story world, in which the characters are not animated any longer by a narrator, but seem to animate themselves.

“It’s a good story, Gordie, I just didn’t like the ending” (turns 18-29)

With turns 18-20 all three story-recipients document their appreciation and affiliate with the way the story was shared and completed. However, in turn 21, Teddy challenges an important component of the story, its ending. If the revenge plot was central to Gordie’s story, the portrayal of the main character at the end resembles a perfect ending: Davie enjoys his accomplishments. In addition, the fact that Davie was portrayed as not wanting to win the contest, but striving for revenge, gives the revenge plot absolute priority over the contest plot. Thus, within the revenge plot, enrolling and participating in the contest was on the pretext of turning the contest into a ‘barf-o-rama’, i.e., to embarrass and humiliate those who had been persistently embarrassing and humiliating Lardass.

Teddy, in turn 25, requests an ending in which we hear more about Lardass, i.e., what happened after the contest. He had had his revenge, but what then? Lardass couldn’t just go back home and continue life as usual. Although Lardass comes out in Gordie’s version of the story as ‘repositioned’, this doesn’t seem to be enough for Teddy: Teddy pushes for a broader or more radical reposition: He wants Lardass to go home, but not continue as usual. He wants him to ‘shoot his father, then run away to join the Texas Rangers’. But why ‘killing his father and running away from home’, and why then ‘joining the Texas Rangers’?

There are two possible answers, one that seeks (and constructs) some form of coherence between his turns, his life, and his subjectivity, and a second that simply declares him as crazy or a ‘loony’. In an attempt to follow the first track, the killing of Lardass’s father would only make sense if his father had been to blame for the misery that he is suffering, i.e., his father as “being behind” all the teasing, the ranking out and the beating that Lardass had to suffer. Only from this focalization point is the revenge scheme potentially ‘incomplete’, requiring to be followed through with additional ‘actions.’ Although ‘winning the contest’ would have repositioned Lardass in some way (note that the crowd dropped their all-time favorite Bill Travis, and cheered for Lardass), both Gordie and Teddy agree that this would not suffice to reposition their main character in the story world, but Teddy asks for a more radical solution. Killing the ‘real’ tormentor, and seeking a new life, away from home, by joining the Texas Rangers, where he is ‘totally’ repositioned, appears consequent and coherent.

However, Gordie, the creator of Lardass, doesn’t want to follow this route. He wants Lardass to return home, eat a couple of cheeseburgers, and celebrate his triumph. It is interesting here that Gordie positions Lardass not only back where he was before, but moves him into a slot as ‘big eater’, a position he previously had carefully circumnavigated: ‘It wasn’t his fault that he was fat; it was his glands’ (turn 13).

In sum, then, Teddy’s challenge to the principal narrator’s version represents an attempt to position the characters in the story-world so that Lardass as the main character could develop in his alternative plot as a new character: someone who had left his (miserable) life behind and had advanced through his own actions into a newly ordered life world. And it makes sense, from this perspective, to qualify Gordie’s story as a ‘good story’, but express dissatisfaction with its ending.

“Did Lardass have to pay to get into the contest?” (turns 30-33)

Vern follows up on the exchange between Teddy and Gordie, and in contrast to Teddy, he first aligns himself with Gordie by giving preference to the ‘original ending.’

However, when he makes explicit his reasons (because “the barfing was really good”), Vern does not focus on the revenge theme, but picks a detail that was not one of the ‘aboutness choices’ laid out in Gordie’s preface to the story. He picks a new element, one that seems to appear relevant to him personally and individually. Obviously, it is possible to like a story or a story’s ending because of details that are not central to everyone within one’s own community or culture. Other details the story was said to be ‘about’, as offered by the narrator in his preface, were the story’s central character, Davie Hogan, or, the blueberry pie-eating contest. However, Vern chooses to make ‘the barfing’ the central focus of his evaluative stance. His focus on ‘the disgusting’ that was not necessarily most central to the narrator’s perspective matches up nicely with his preoccupation with the concrete details of extreme body-size in Gordie’s orientation toward the story’s topic during the preface negotiations (Vern’s turns 11 and 14).

In Sum

In spite of the fact that there appear to be competing bids en route to the final choice of the principal teller and the aboutness of the story, all four settle on Gordie as the story teller and his right to determine what this story is about. Their joint appreciation after Gordie completed his story, in the form of joint laughter in turn 18, and in turns 19 and 20 as evaluation tokens by Chris and Vern, indexes a high degree of affiliation with the main character as well as the narrator’s ‘focalization’ point, from where the sequence of events came across as ‘ordered’.

However, as the subsequent negotiation over the story’s ending signals, there is more going on: In spite of the fact that there is only one ‘text’ of the Davie Hogan Story <although I have inserted two – for comparative purposes>, presented by Gordie as the principal narrator, and displayed in the film sequence from the angle of the characters, a closer look at the negotiation between the four interactants before and after the story telling reveals that we are dealing with (at least) three different versions: Two of them are typical ‘revenge stories’, one that is challenged by Teddy as ‘incomplete’ and defended by Gordie as ‘complete’, the second promoted by Teddy as ‘more complete’ but not acceptable to Gordie; and a third that is ‘complete’ but belonging more to the genre of ‘barfing stories’ with ‘revenge’ as a subordinate component. From the way we hear Chris inciting Gordie to claim and subsequently maintain the floor for his story, and then not making explicit which elements of Gordie’s story stand out for him personally or individually, we can conclude that he is principally aligned with Gordie’s version.

Thus, what is revealed by a closer look at how the particular story is challenged and secured in the conversational bids that are surrounding it (positioning level two analysis) may be extremely relevant for what the particular story actually means to the teller and his audience. The interactional accomplishment of identity work between the four adolescent participants seems to function as the embedding and ground for the construction of the story, and its personal meanings – not only for the person who is elevated into the teller role but for all participants involved in this elevation in the true sense of what it means to co-construct.

Positioning Analysis Level Three – Who Are We?

Pulling together what we have thus far, and irrespective of whether we take the ‘round’ or the ‘flat’ version of Davie’s character development, Gordie, the teller of the Davie Hogan story, constructed a narrator’s focalization through which Davie became positioned as a male, adolescent outcast, who was harassed by old and young, but who managed to pay them back in the form of a grand ‘barf-o-rama’. Adults, who in the story were initially positioned as agentive characters hostile vis-à-vis Davie, are repositioned at the end of the story as incompetent laughing-stocks, stooped by a 12-year-old. Davie, the representative of a childhood full of heartbreak and hostility, of growing up outcast and unloved, is empowered through the narrator’s lens with a repositioned identity.

Taking this to be the central theme brought into focus by Gordie’s narrative orientation, all four participants of the campfire narrative event can be said to be drawn into the same basic alignment with this orientation, creating a sense of an elevated self that undermines adult authority and struggles to assert its independence.

While the barfing theme was only a sub-theme to the revenge plot of the story, it nevertheless contributes significantly to the general understanding of the story, i.e., for its tellibility and its appreciation by boys. Smoking cigarettes and indulging in disgusting topics are manly campfire activities, partly because they help construct maleness as unruly and uncivilized, but also assist in presenting adolescent selves as rebellious and independent. Thus, the four boys, in their alignment with the story content and in their activities among each other, draw up positions that align them with discourse positions that so-to-speak are out there, on the shelf, used and marketed in genres of kids’ and adolescent films.

            While all four position themselves and each other in relation to the story, and enter into a bond with one another around themes of adolescent independence and manly unruliness, they also draw up their individual territories that help to differentiate between their own identities: Gordie as the one who sensitizes the others to themes of harassment and injustice; Chris as the one who leads them through interactive struggles; Teddy as the one who strives hard for a strong sense of independence, flirting with disaster and borderline disturbed; and Vern as the one who is the scaredy-cat, obsessed with details and insignificant trivialities. In sum, four male adolescent identities have emerged in front of the viewers who followed this five-minute film clip. And although it is possible to argue that all of them brought these identities already fully-equipped to this specific campfire story-telling encounter, they created the sense of how they wanted to come across to each other (and to us as over-viewing audience) as empirical subjects in their (story-telling) actions. In their actions they positioned themselves vis-à-vis the characters in the story, vis-à-vis one another, and in doing exactly that, form a sense of who they are.

Narratives and Positioning Analysis

The situated story analyzed in this chapter is by no means a spontaneous, everyday segment of interaction. The movie-clip in which a fictive story is shared between a few 12-year-olds is staged in the service of the nostalgic characterizations of four film characters, their friendship and coming-of-age. Consequently, the analysis of adolescent and male identity formation is unsuitable to be generalized in these directions. The use of a film clip, nevertheless, has also has advantages. First of all, the clip is commonly available and can be used to develop a transcript from visual material (see footnote 1). Secondly, it nicely exemplifies how stories and story genres are open to negotiations in actual story-telling situations. Third, it removes narrative analysis from the realm of personal stories and self-thematizations that, unfortunately, have become the privileged site for identity analysis, and opens up the territory of narrative analysis to third-person thematizations and generalized accounts. And last, but not least, it attempts to make narrative analysis open to deeper empirical scrutiny by moving traditional narrative analysis and conversation-analytic techniques closer together.

To summarize, positioning analysis starts from the assumption that narratives are situated actions, i.e., they are co-constructed in interactive settings; and their main function is to reveal how what is said – and behind this the ‘I’ and performer of the story – ought to be understood. In other words, narratives, whether they are primarily about the self of the speaker or not at all, are always indexical with regard to the speaker’s subjectivity. Consequently, narratives have to be analyzed as (performed) situated actions that are interactively accomplished, and not transparent windows into speakers’ minds, their subjectivites, or their ‘lived experience’. From this vantage point, it simply is not enough to analyze narratives as units of analysis for their structure and content, though it is a good starting point.

            Positioning analysis is designed as an empirically grounded analysis of how subjects construct themselves by analyzing the positions that are actively and agentively taken in their narratives vis-à-vis normative discourses. Thus, positioning analysis avoids the view of subjects as simply acting out their pre-established selves and identities. It also escapes from viewing selves and identities as taken of the shelf of pre-existing normative discourses. Rather, subjects are argued to agentively construct their situated positions, and in this process both normative discourses as well as their individual sense of self are called into existence. Again, this is not meant to imply the negation of the existence of normative discourses outside of subjects and their interactions; and neither is it meant to imply that subjects do not act on previous experiences or practices and always have to start from scratch in their self and identity formation processes. However, in order to empirically analyze narratives and what they mean to those who are in the process of creating them, it seems to be highly advantageous to bracket assertions encouraged by speculations with regard to both what we think the world is that impinges on the subject and his/her sense-making activities, or what we think the subject is, as someone who is bringing a stock of individual uniqueness to narrative tellings and world-making.

REFERENCES

Bamberg, M. (under review) “I know it may sound mean to say this, but we couldn’t really care less about her anyway.” Form and Functions of “Slut-Bashing” in Male Identity Constructions in 15-Year-Olds.

Bamberg, M. (2000). Critical personalism, language, and development. Theory & Psychology, 10, 749-767.

Butler, J. (1990). Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. In S-E. Case (Ed.), Performing feminisms: Feminist critical theory and theatre (pp. 270-282). Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.

Butler, J. (1995). Collected and fractured: Responses to Identities. In K.A. Appiah & H.L. Gates (Eds.), Identities (pp. 439-447). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Davis, B., & Harré, R. (1990). Positioning: The social construction of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 20, 43-63.

Harré, R., & van Langenhove, L. (1999). Introducing positioning theory. In R. Harré & L. van Langenhove (Eds.), Positioning theory: Moral contexts of intentional action (pp. 14-31). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Hollway, W. (1989). Gender difference and the production of subjectivity. In J. Henriques, W. Hollway, C. Urwin, C. Venn, & V. Walkerdine (Eds.), Changing the subject: Psychology, social regulation and subjectivity (pp. 227-263). London: Methuen.

Mechling, J. (1980). The magic of the boy scout campfire. Journal of American Folklore, 93, 35-56.

Toolan, M.J. (2001). Narrative: A critical linguistic introduction. (2^nd edition). London: Routledge.

APPENDIX  I

TRANSCRIPT of Davie Hogan Story