Talk about the Past

Abstract

Like the other essays in this special issue, my analysis centers on the interview segment collected in the TRANSMEMO project and discussed in the data workshop organized by Thomas van de Putte at the University of Trento. I argue that collaborative narratives, such as this interview segment, can serve as a model for better understanding and describing the process of shared meaning-making. The production of meaning in collaborative narrative is not a proxy for the phenomenon that we call memory or remembering. Rather it is the phenomenon. Paying close attention to narrative and language as it is practiced in the interview segment, I argue that we should understand collective memory as a relational achievement that is always polysemous, incomplete, and open to ongoing interpretation and reinterpretation.

Keywords

conversation analysis memory narrative narrative psychology small stories social constructionism

Like the other essays in this special issue, my analysis centers on the interview segment collected in the TRANSMEMO project and discussed in the data workshop organized by Thomas van de Putte at the University of Trento (see van de Putte and Hirst, this issue). The TRANSMEMO project, the interview, the segment selected, and the data workshop have all shaped my thinking and the essay that follows. And it couldn’t be otherwise. Methods always open and constrain what we can say about phenomena. In this instance, we should recognize that the close attention to a conversation in a research interview frames what we can theorize and understand about memory.

However, in this case, I believe that there is something fundamentally correct and productive about focusing on joint storytelling in concrete conversations as a model for understanding memory. Focusing on memory in conversations, what Keightley et al. (2019) call the meso scale, becomes a way of understanding memory as a whole, across scales, from the person to culture.

From this perspective, dialogue critically mediates, and re-mediates, the flow of meaning between scales. In dialogue, persons make-present their experiences and interpretations into the social space of the conversation (Schiff, 2017, 2023) and position themselves within larger sets of beliefs and meanings (Bamberg, 2004; Georgakopoulou, 2007). Persons are also relating with others and discovering common understandings, or dissonant ones, that can be resourced and repurposed in other settings such as later conversations. In this view, conversations are sites of meaning-making that thread together persons, small groups, and large groups such as nations, pulling the levers that drive the formation and use of shared meanings. However, this perspective does not discount either personal agency in making sense of self, world, and other or the power of discourses to impose meaning on persons and situations. Rather, the conversation is the meeting point where negotiating between these forces takes place with the potential to uphold, revise, or reject meanings and their various applications.

It is obvious but worthwhile underlining the fact that the meso scale is by and large narrative and linguistic. Indeed, Keightley et al. (2019) evocatively conceptualize this scale as vernacular memory, calling attention to language as it is colloquially practiced in localized social spaces situated in historical time and embedded in culture and social relationships. Of course, memories can be articulated by virtue of other semiotic systems such as gestures or images, but narrative and language are by far the most commonly used, flexible, and extensive in their range of expressive possibilities.

When thinking about collective memory, I want to argue that our most relevant models are narrative occasions of collaborative or joint storytelling—in other words, once again, conversations on the meso scale. For instance, children’s co-narrations with parents have this collaborative character in which both parties contribute to the direction of the conversation and work together to produce a story (Miller et al., 2014; Wiley et al., 1998). But collaborative storytelling is a common fact of social life well beyond childhood. Georgakopoulou (2007) has described collaborative narratives-in-interaction as “small stories” where multiple speakers work together in order to frame narrative accounts and to place themselves and others into an evolving story. Through close attention to conversational narratives, we can begin to understand both how persons come to inhabit more stable socially shared meanings and how these meanings are propagated, revised, and recreated in discursive interactions.

In fact, this is another way I think that the data session in Trento captures an aspect of social reality. Collaborative or joint storytelling constitutes the natural and everyday site for what we think of as remembering. And if we truly want to describe and understand memory at work, I believe that this is exactly where scholars should turn their attention to.

Memory is a relational achievement

In contrast to the other analyses in this special issue, memory is not my point of departure. But I won’t ignore it either. As I describe in the following, the interviewee seems to be drawing upon her personal experience and we can call that personal or individual memory. We can also call social or collective memory the understandings of the past that, seemingly, are negotiated between the interviewer and interviewee. However, this is not where the action is. Rather, it is critical to pay close attention to the collaborative give and take between the interviewer and the interviewee in successive speech turns.

In my view, creative dialogical engagement between the interviewer and the interviewee builds a story where there might have been no story at all. The interviewee draws upon her genuine experience and knowledge, occluded as it is, about her father and family history. Both interviewer and interviewee have had various life experiences and know things about themselves and the world that they bring with them into the conversational moment of the interview. Through the back-and-forth movement of the conversation, the pieces of experience are assembled into a new form and a story of the past takes shape.

In this view, memory is a relational achievement produced in the space of a conversation where thinking, reasoning, and imagining together leads in innovative directions. I believe that this moment of exchange can tell us a lot about the process of talking about the past and creating versions of reality. The production of meaning in collaborative storytelling is not a proxy for the phenomenon that we call memory or remembering. Rather it is the phenomenon. And when we start to understand memory in these terms, we can see that it is messier and more contradictory than we might suppose.

Given this orientation, it should come as no surprise that I pay close attention to narrative and language as it is practiced in the interview segment. My approach is informed by conversation analysis where meaning is understood as building in conversational turns (cf. Sacks et al., 1974). From this perspective, my analysis pays careful attention to who directs the conversation and how certain interventions respond to or build upon one another. I closely examine what is said, by whom, and how versions of the past are jointly worked on and come into focus. But also, taking my lead from discourse analysis (cf. Gee, 1999), I examine how individual speakers articulate meaning linguistically and structure these meanings narratively (Labov, 1972; Labov and Waletzky, 1997 [1967]). In my view, these tools are useful for describing the conversation but also for trying to understand what things mean for the interviewer and the interviewee.

Tentative interpretations

Although the interviewer wants to find out what really happened, in other words the historical nature of the events, I want to probe the interviewee’s understandings. The interviewer wants to know: What was the interviewee’s father’s wartime experience? In contrast, I focus on: What does the interviewee know or understand about her father’s involvement during the war?

Rationally and logically, the interviewer positions the father of the interviewee as a collaborator who joined the Nazi army after Belgium’s defeat and occupation. However, this putative conclusion, found at the end of the interview segment, is much less certain and less shared than one might suppose. It is a narrative achievement, which is brought out by this specific interaction—in other words, how the interviewer and interviewee work together to build meaning. This conclusion must also be understood in light of the interviewee’s frequent and persistent hesitations and hedges.

We need to appreciate both the uncertainties that the interviewee voices and the interview context that leads to this inference. Following the conversational dynamics and interviewee’s words, I argue that the interviewee attempts to portray herself as someone who does not know about her father’s past. Mainly, but not completely, she negates knowledge about her father’s wartime experience.

Of course, we could probe the psychoanalytic reasons why the interviewee might be motivated to resist or deny the implication that her father collaborated with the Nazis. Or as Welzer (2005) has argued, from a more cognitive standpoint, there is a process of narrative cleansing, what he calls cumulative heroization, in order to create a good or usable narrative of one’s family in subsequent generations.

However, I believe that a more prudent stance is to work from the perspective of the interviewee and to try and restore the meanings that the interviewee intends. In other words, if the interviewee says that she doesn’t know, at multiple reprises, I believe that we need to take this explanation seriously. At the very least, the interviewee consistently throws doubt on, relativizes, and hedges firm conclusions about her father. Once again, we could view these interventions as the manifestation of shame, guilt, or embarrassment, especially in view of the cultural stigma of Nazi collaboration in Belgium and across Europe—and it very well may be the case. However, another plausible interpretation is to take these statements at face value and to agree that she really doesn’t know. Uncertainty wins in this interpretation.

In such a way, I’m aligning myself with an interpretive attitude that Ricoeur (1970) calls a hermeneutics of restoration or faithfulness, which attempts to describe and understand the meaning of a text, as close as possible, to how it was written or spoken. Ricoeur (1970) contrasts faithfulness with the attitude of suspicion, which attempts to decipher meanings that are not apparent at the surface level in order to uncover hidden or deep meaning.

I treat this evocative interview segment in the same way that I would treat any other act of collaborative storytelling; essentially, it is a narrative act, heavily socialized and interactive, that attempts to negotiate and fix meaning. My reading of the interview frames the conversational moment as a space of interpretation where each of the participants offers tentative interpretations in order to work on meaning in the exchange. In the process of making interpretations present into the social space of the conversation, we can view each participant as making a bid to direct the nature and meaning of the conversation. In the final analysis, the apparent shared conclusion that the interviewee’s father was a Nazi collaborator, is much less certain than we might suppose. We must take into account both the contribution of the interviewer leading to this conclusion and the interviewee’s abundant hesitations and statements of uncertainty.

Analysis

I divide the 3.5-minute transcript into three moments or acts:

Act I: Orientation. This act begins at Line 1 and ends at Line 11. It is characterized by a negotiation between the interviewer and the interviewee. The interviewer attempts to situate the interviewee’s father in historical time and space.

Act II: Serial Storytelling. This act begins at Line 12 and ends at Line 47. It is characterized by the interviewee relating a series of stories from her life experience. These stories are not fully fleshed out personal experience narratives but two appear to be minimal narratives relating specific episodes in the interviewee’s life. In this act, the interviewee is the only speaker.

Act III: Summation. This act begins at Line 48 and continues to the end of the transcript at Line 64. It is characterized by an interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee, with the interviewer taking the lead. The interviewer attempts to order the previous two acts, Orientation and Serial Storytelling, and come to some firm conclusions.

Taken together, these three acts constitute an extensive and compelling interactional sequence where we move from the unknown (Act I) to grounded experience (Act II) to a higher ordered principle (Act III). However, I want to suggest that the conclusions drawn (in Act III) are indefinite and that ample ambiguity remains. In my view, this exchange is illustrative of the fragmented nature of meaning-making in everyday life where uncertainty reigns and the negotiation of meaning is always incomplete, partial, ongoing.

These acts follow a logical sequence where one thing seems to lead to another. There’s a kind of seamlessness between the three acts. The negotiation between the interviewer and interviewee sets the stage for the articulation of certain kinds of personal experience. The interviewee obliges and provides details that would suggest a connection to what actually happened. However, one should note, these recollections systematically carry with them consistent doubts and prevarications made by the interviewee. Although, in the final act, the interviewer tries to sew together the loose ends, I don’t think that we should be satisfied with the conclusion.

Act I: orientation

“ So your dad was a prisoner (.) during the war? ↗ (1.7) ” [Line 1] is the first line of the 3.5-minute interview segment. The interviewer’s rising intonation at the end of the sentence marks that she is asking a question. Her voice is gentle and inquisitive. One should remark that the interviewer briefly pauses before asking the sensitive element in the question and pauses for a longer period after “ (.) during the war? ↗ (1.7) ” [Line 1] The identical pattern is repeated in Line 3.

At first, the interviewee’s voice is rather flat and low. The interviewee’s falling intonations seem to be the perfect counterpart to the interviewer’s rising intonations. “I imagine ↘ (.) I imagine ↘ (1.1).” [Line 2]. After the pause, she provides the critical information “at the end of the war (.)” [Line 2]. In the language of conversation analysis (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973), Lines 1 and 2 represent an adjacency pair. The interviewee responds to the question but shifts the focus by correcting “during the war” [Line 1] to emphasize the end of the war instead. In the give and take between the interviewer and interviewee, meaning is jointly constructed.

At this point, the interviewer enters, talking over the interviewee, to decisively counter by saying “ = Rather yes ” [Line 3] seemingly as a corrective to the interviewee’s hesitant “I imagine ↘” [Line 2]. The interviewer continues by asking “ but a prisoner then (.) of the Germans ↗ ” [Line 3]. Here, the interviewer offers a choice. Was her father imprisoned by the Germans or “ in relation to these stories [of collaboration] by the Belgian State ” [Line 4]?

The interviewee, now talking over the interviewer, takes back the floor in order to reflect what she knows: “the hospital was in Germany ↗ (.) and so he stayed in Germany for a long time after the war ↗ (2.1)” [Lines 6–7]. The intonation here is now rising to match the intonation of the interviewer. And once again there is the rising intonation for “the Belgians ↗ (0.6) well of the Allies (.)” [Line 8]. Although it is impossible to know exactly what her rising intonation means, it could indicate epistemic insecurity.

The interviewer continues to try to orient the interviewee’s father, by virtue of his age, “ I imagine that he was too young to have uh (.) [been part of the army] ” [Line 11]. The interviewee doesn’t continue down the path that the interviewer has laid out. She doesn’t fix her father’s age or exact participation during the war. Rather, she makes a conversational move and takes an extended turn in order to tell what she does know, linking it directly to her personal experience through storytelling.

Act II: serial storytelling

Act II begins with the words, “[But uh (.) so the story] (.)” [Line 12]. In this act, the interviewee takes the floor to tell three consecutive stories. I’ll use the covering term story because the first series of past events does not meet the criteria for Labov’s (1972) definition of a minimal narrative—a telling of two connected past actions, typically using past tense verbs. However, the second and third episodes are personal experience narratives and minimal narratives in Labov’s terminology. Indeed, the first story condenses, what seems to have been, recurrent experiences that have made their way into the family memory, while the next two are, apparently, retellings of specific conversations on a single occasion.

Shrapnel

The first story, the shrapnel story, beginning on Line 12 and ending on Line 22, recounts what appear to be multiple incidents when the interviewee’s father explained to his grandchildren why scratching his eye makes a strange sound. The interviewee’s children “had said <: “but what on earth is wrong with your eye”” [Line 18] and her father “had answered th(h)em: (.) “Ah but that it is when there was a shell that exploded and I was hit by shrapnel” (.)” [Line 19]. This response, the interviewee says, “made my children laugh” [Line 20].

If we didn’t realize the potential meaning of the injury, the story would be endearing or humorous. There is something innocent and playful about the children’s questions and the intergenerational memory would be heartwarming—a funny quirky thing about grandpa. Perhaps there is even something heroic at the heart of the story—after all grandpa survived some injury apparently during wartime. As noted in the transcript, there seem to be two moments when the interviewee is smiling: “£that my kids rem(h)ember very well£” [Lines 13–14] and “£‘shrapnel’£ ↗ .h (.)” [Line 21].

Conversation with father

The shrapnel story leads directly to what appears to be a structural narrative, according to Labov’s (1972) definition of a minimal narrative, about a conversation that the interviewee had with her father about the shrapnel in his eye. A line-by-line analysis is revealing for understanding the interviewee’s evaluations of the narrative. Here I am following Gee (1999) in breaking down the narrative into theoretical lines or how I read one unit of meaning. The following exchange is found on Lines 22–27:

and so uh (.)

I know that

at a certain moment

I said: “well jeez but where did you get that then” (0.5)

and he said to me: “ah well ↗ (.) when I was wounded uh↗” .h (.)

and so it was afterwards

that I said to myself: “wounded (.) the eye (.) shrapnel (.)” .h

so that’s it

but is it false is it true (.)

I couldn’t tell you (0.4)

I couldn’t tell you (1.8)

The interviewee marks that she is shifting from the shrapnel story to another episode with “and so uh (.)” [Line 22]. As an orientation, she then indicates that the following conversation happened “at a certain moment” [Lines 22–23]. In other words, she seems to be reporting about a specific conversation when she asked her father “well jeez but where did you get that then” [Line 23] and he responded “ah well ↗ (.) when I was wounded uh↗” [Line 24]. In my reading, these two lines are complicating actions recounting past conversational turns in direct discourse. It is a minimal narrative that appears to report on a conversation.

As a resolution to the narrative, the interviewee says “and so it was afterwards that I said to myself: “wounded (.) the eye (.) shrapnel (.)” .h” [Line 25], which seems to indicate that she is putting the pieces together. However, one should note that the external evaluations, statements, which, for Labov (Labov, 1972; Labov and Walezky, 1997 [1967]), give us a clue to the meaning of the narrative, put any conclusions in doubt, or at least, at arm’s length. The key words are: “so that’s it but is it false is it true (.) I couldn’t tell you (0.4) I couldn’t tell you (1.8)” [Lines 26–27]. I believe that it is most prudent to interpret this narrative sequence, following the interviewee’s evaluations, that she truly does not know. She repeats twice, “I couldn’t tell you” [Lines 26–27], giving this appraisal special evaluative weight. Certainly, one could read these statements as motivated by an unconscious desire to not know what she knows, a kind of defensive denial from a psychoanalytic perspective. Although that might be true, the more parsimonious conclusion, when following her interpretations, is that she simply does not know.

Conversation with brother

The interviewee tells a final narrative in this sequence—Lines 27 to 47—which recounts a conversation with her brother about translating a letter into German for her father’s pension. The interviewee orients the narrative by saying “afterwards u::h (1.1)” [Line 27], meaning that what she is about to recount happened after her conversation with her father in the above narrative. She continues by introducing the other character in the narrative, “so my brother” [Line 27] and to the fact that, since her father’s death, her brother has cut off all relationships with the family. Also, as part of the orientation, the interviewee locates the conversation around the time of her father’s death. As she says, “at the time of my father’s death u::h (0.8) we were still seeing each other at that time (0.4)” [Lines 29–30].

The narrative, like the previous one, is an exchange told through direct speech. In the first few lines, when the interviewee begins to describe what she and her brother said to each other, we recognize that the exchange will be awkward. The interviewee recounts [Lines 31–33]:

I say: (.) “but do you know this story

about dad’s pension from Germany” (.)

and uh (0.5)

uh he says: “I I I I I send a letter saying that” (0.5)

This last line, ““I I I I I send a letter saying that” (0.5)” [Line 33] is a peculiar turn of phrase. It is even more peculiar in the French “”je je je j’envoie un papier comme quoi“” [Line 33]. Exactly what “comme quoi” means in this context is difficult to decipher.

The interviewee recounts that she pressed her brother for more information about her father—without specifying exactly what kind of information she was interested in. But, her brother only states that he helped translate the letter and did not ask their father any additional questions. But the interviewee continues to press [Lines 38–39]:

and I said: “but you you know some things ↗” (.)

“ah no

I don’t know anything ↘” (1.8)

so that’s it ↘ (1.8)

At this point, the interviewee seems to be positioning herself close to her brother. Like her, he is also someone who doesn’t know. But the interviewee continues and evaluates the narrative, “but he is apparently someone °who would know more things about the family” [Lines 42–43]. So, then, perhaps, unlike her, he does know things about the family. She states that “he knows we might have (0.4) a half-sister some::where and (0.6)” [Lines 43–44].

However, the interviewee’s final word in this rather long external evaluation does not end in certainty. Rather, she ends by casting doubt on what her brother might or might not know and the certainty of her own knowledge. The following quote is found on Lines 45–47:

is he also in a kind of provocation .h (.)

and that all of this isn’t true (.)

I don’t know either (.)

°I don’t know° (2.3)

This is where the evaluation to this narrative ends–in uncertainty and ambiguity. What the interviewee knows from her personal experience is relativized and marginalized. Simply put, in Act II, not knowing trumps knowing.

It is interesting to note that the three stories—Shrapnel, Conversation with Father, and Conversation with Brother—all employ the device of direct discourse to recount certain conversations, seemingly, in the words of the participants. The interviewee represents the speech turns as if her father or her brother are speaking in her stories. Thus, these lines were given quotation marks in the transcription. Although it is unclear why the interviewee chooses to structure the stories in this way, one possible interpretation is that she is calling attention to the singularity of these episodes. However, the interviewee also uses direct discourse in the Shrapnel story, which is apparently a condensation of repeated episodes.

My preferred interpretation is that the interviewee is calling attention to the epistemic grounds for her knowledge. She knows this information because others have told her as such and in the interview she reenacts these situations so that others can “hear” from her father and her brother themselves directly—so to speak.

Act III: summation

But this isn’t where the segment ends. Remember, this is a three-act play. And in the final act, there is a plot twist. Although, as I have argued, the interviewee, in multiple reprises, claims uncertainty, the interview segment ends in relative certainty.

After the interviewee closes Act II by, softly, saying “°I don’t know° (2.3)” [Line 47], there’s a long pause. At that moment, the interviewer enters back into the conversation. Indeed, in this act, the interviewer plays the lead role. She takes the floor with the words, “And so if we put all the pieces together ↗ (1.0)” [Line 48]. Then, she makes a series of logical deductions.

The interviewer estimates the age of the interviewee’s dad at the beginning of the war, surmising that he would have been “ too young to fight ” [Line 51] in “ [the 18 day campaign with Belgium] (0.3) ” [Line 53]. She says, “ Thus (.) he might (.) potentially have maybe sided with the German army ” [Line 54]. and “ But you don’t know if he might have left for the Eastern Front (.) or if he might have stayed somewhere else (0.7) ” [Lines 56–57]. And, the interviewer deduces that “ there would have been (.) a moment ” [Line 57] when “ he would have been in combat” [Line 58]. This conclusion is based on the fact that he “ received some shrapnel (sic)” [Line 60] as the interviewee has already related in the above narrative.

Although the interviewer removes most of the uncertainty, it is important to note that, at moments, she hedges too. “Might,” “potentially,” and “maybe,” are key words, which work to soften the certainty of her conclusions. The interviewer, rightly, tests her hypothesis about the interviewee’s father’s possible collaboration. And, the interviewer is more active than the interviewee in putting “the pieces together.”

However, it is important to note that the interviewee is not passive. She responds with multiple and repeated “yeses” and other indicators of agreement as well as her own statement “= Yes (.) there would have been at a certain moment a stance on his part in this regard” [Line 62].

Still, and importantly, it is unlikely that we would have arrived at this understanding in other circumstances. The interviewee’s story is indecisive and inconclusive. If this play were to have ended after Act II, we would have concluded that the interviewee is uncertain about the nature of her father’s collaboration. However, there is a third act and the conversation continues. In this act, the interviewer directs the flow of the conversation. Like a detective, she deduces a story through her pointed questions. This moment of clarity is only reached by virtue of the interviewer’s intervention. It is the interviewer who puts “all the pieces together ↗ (1.0)” [Lines 48], leading the conversation to this particular conclusion.

Memory dynamics

What can this interview segment teach us about the workings of memory? I think quite a bit. In my view, focusing on collaborative storytelling can serve as a model for understanding the dynamic process of meaning-making that is often conceptualized as memory.

First, as I have shown, making sense of the past is a relational achievement. The meanings that emerge in this conversation are not the product of one person but stem from the specific interaction between the interviewer and interviewee. Both actors are essential in producing the form and content of the past which materializes. Meaning emerges and develops over the course of the conversation with each intervention building on the previous one. It is this specific conversation that produces the story told. In another context, I believe that we would have a different story or even no story at all.

From this point of view, conversational storytelling mediates—in the sense of standing between, translating, modifying, and connecting—personal meanings with larger, more or less stable and shared, social meanings. In highly localized conversational encounters, what Keightley et al. (2019) refer to as the meso scale or vernacular memory, persons test out various interpretations drawn from their experience but also from their knowledge as actors in the social and cultural world. And, as I have shown above, meaning is built in the give-and-take of the conversation, with each move adding to, amending, or revising prior interpretations.

Part of this give and take is the negotiation of authoritative narratives or discourses. Giving voice to norms, standards, or obligations, interactants can, and do, attempt to position one another as a kind of person or category (Bamberg, 2004). In our example, I have argued that, based upon the evidence as she understands it, the interviewer attempts to position the interviewee’s father as a Nazi collaborator. And, as I have detailed, the interviewee prevaricates and mitigates, positioning herself, mostly, as a person who does not know her family’s history.

In my view, no matter how authoritative, meaning is always activated and encountered in dialogues in which persons can resource different interpretations in potentially novel or creative ways that can nuance or even subvert coercive meanings. The attempt to resist, or soften, authority is not always successful but I believe that the possibility is always present.

Finally, closing the loop, the meanings that emerge within conversations can become resources for future conversations; once articulated, they have the potential to be recycled and recirculated into diverse situations. Indeed, they have the potential to become new standards and norms, in other words, the language of authority in subsequent interactions.

In short, conversational storytelling is the pivot point in the transaction between persons and social meanings. Established cultural and social meanings are “pulled down” and articulated in a concrete conversation, and, likewise, drawing on prior conversations, meanings are “pulled up” to be reused in subsequent interactions (van de Putte, 2024).

The dialogics of memory-making observed in this interview segment are not usual but part and parcel of the normal and natural fashion in which memory comes into being in our everyday lives. Although Bartlett (1995 [1932]) famously described memory as the “effort after meaning,” it would perhaps be more accurate to say that memory is the joint effort after meaning.

Second, it is important to note that we can never pin down what things mean with one hundred percent certainty. Rather, meaning always retains a polysemous character, remaining indefinitely open to different perspectives and interpretations. Persons offer interpretations to one another in the joint effort after meaning but what truly happened or what persons really understand remains a matter of interpretation and dispute both for the interactants and for observers.

This is not an absurd or perverse quality of this particular interview segment but another way, in my opinion, that it approximates reality. In our everyday interactions, we can usually disregard such conflicts of interpretation by writing off the other person as motivated by their own interests, culturally different, or simply ill informed. However, under the microscope of analysis, it is impossible to ignore multiplicity. Once again, in our case, the interviewee both states that she doesn’t know and, under the sway of the interviewer, knows.

Even after my analysis, there are necessary unknowns. First, we don’t really know what things mean for the interviewee. Above, I’ve made the argument, following her persistent denials and prevarications, that the interviewee does not know what her father’s participation was during World War II. I find this to be a convincing argument—and I hope that the reader agrees with me. But, can we be definitively sure about that—beyond any semblance of doubt? I don’t think so. It is a rational argument warranted by the evidence at hand (cf. Toulmin, 2008 [1958]). Second, we don’t know if a common meaning emerges or not. Although the interviewer pulls loose ends together (in Act III), which is met by consistent affirmations by the interviewee, how does this accord with the interviewee’s denials (in Act II)? Once again, we can only make an interpretation, which better accounts for the evidence that we have or less so.

We don’t truly know what the interviewee believes, just like we don’t truly know if a shared meaning emerges or not. Rather, at least, we can’t be perfectly certain. Both are evidence-based interpretations. And we should recognize that they are our interpretations, that is, they are the interpretations of the interpreter within the realm of the “double hermeneutic.” Or, as Meretoja (2014) writes “they are interpretations of experiences which are already interpretations” (p. 98).

I am not arguing that making such interpretations is illegitimate. This is an entirely reasonable and necessary endeavor. But I am calling attention to the fact that we are making interpretations and that we can never, one hundred percent, get beyond those interpretations. Even if they are logical and fit the evidence, they remain interpretations.

One might ask, what does this have to do with memory? The social world is messy and complicated—impressively so. Rather than a single voice, or a single interpretation, on the ground, the act of making meaning in conversational storytelling is ambiguous and oftentimes confusing and contradictory. When we look closely at memory in action, like in the above interview segment, we discover polysemy. But, when making sense of this complexity, theorists often posit singularity and coherence, which is only possible if we take a bird’s-eye view rather than observe meaning-making in localized contexts on the ground (Schiff, 2023). And, we mistakenly argue that memory is one clear and tangible thing without recognizing that we are making an interpretation of a phenomenon that is multifaceted, disorderly, and, oftentimes, uncooperative. In order to make our theories more attuned to the nuances of the social world, we should be attuned to the multiply layered interpretations made present into conversational narratives. Such a descriptive approach approximates more faithfully the phenomenon at hand and, I believe, allows for more nuanced theories of social memory.

Finally, as our interview segment abundantly shows, meaning changes over and through time. It isn’t fixed but the next moment always allows the opportunity for revising, reworking, or negating previous understandings. Once again, I would consider this to be a higher ordered principle of the dynamics of memory uncovered in the above analysis. Although the concept of memory would appear to connote solidity and permanence, fluidity and flexibility are the rule. Act II revises Act I and Act III modifies the conclusion of Act II. Each act builds upon the previous one.

And, we must remember that the opening of the interview segment at Line 1 and the closing at Line 64 are artificial markers. Talk preceded and followed these boundaries. The interview began someplace and continued after; at the very least, one would suppose that the interactants greeted each other hello and goodbye. Each might have spoken about the interview with others. And certainly, this chapter and the others in this special issue are part of the talk following Line 64. And, meaning is still being worked on. Even the reader is participating in this process of continuous meaning-making. There is an ongoingness to the interpretive process that is unending. Meaning is never fully or sufficiently settled. Any unit of talk that we might focus our attention on is not a beginning or the end but somewhere in the middle of a continuing flow of interpretive activity, which moves and changes (Brockmeier, 2015). Therefore, determinations of meaning, such as the exercise that we are engaged in, can only be partial and fragmentary. Such is the process of memory.

Footnotes

Author’s note

This article is part of the special issue Micro-Memories, edited by Thomas Van de Putte and William Hirst. Readers are advised to read the introduction to the special issue first to understand the exercise individual contributors were asked to conduct.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: I received no funding for this publication. Funding was received by the TRANSMEMO project (see ).

Ethical considerations

Ethics approval was received by the TRANSMEMO project (see van de Putte and Hirst, this issue).

ORCID iD

Brian Schiff

Data availability

The full translated and transcribed interview segment that I analyzed is available in .

Author biography

Brian Schiff is the Esmond Nissim Professor of Psychology, and Director of the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights, and Conflict Prevention at The American University of Paris. Schiff is author of A New Narrative for Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is co-editor of Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience (Oxford University Press, 2017) and editor of a special issue of New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, Rereading Personal Narrative and Life Course (Jossey-Bass, 2014), and Situating Qualitative Methods in Psychological Science (Routledge, 2018). Schiff is the 2016 recipient of the Theodore Sarbin Award from the American Psychological Association’s Division 24 (Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology).

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