Telling Tales out of School

Indeed, some informants acknowledged the mythical quality of the story:

PH The reputation I always had of Beal was that it was a tough school and there were tough people that went there. And there were lots of stories. For example I remember there was one story about how some students had taken the principal, Fallona - I don't know when he was the principal there. There was a story about how somebody had held him out of the window, upside down, banging him by his ankles sort of thing, for some reason. So there was sort of like stories like that about Beal... and the kids that went there.

CA I've heard that same story with the same central figure told by a student who was there in the '30s.

PH Interesting... well when was Fallona the principal, I wonder?

CA Well he wasn't principal at that time.

[...]

PH But it was generally that kind of reputation - you know tough students. Now I never saw any evidence of that when I was actually physically there, but this was sort of always... There was a historical tinge to that, you know like it was the "old days" (Heidenheim).

The presence of this school myth, buried in the oral testimony of independent historical witnesses, poses a challenge to accepted techniques of oral data collection. Interview methodology has recently been subject to the same sort of fundamental critiques that have thrown light on so many areas of inquiry (Manning, 1991; Scheurich, 1992). Norman Denzin (1992) provides a summary of the positions taken by many critics:

Consider some troubling alternatives. The ethnographer's text creates the subject; subjects exist only insofar as they are brought into our written texts. Language and speech are not direct mirrors to thought, for language only distorts what it represents. Furthermore, subjects may not know what they think, change their minds, or deliberately mislead an investigation. In addition, the statements a subject offers may be influenced by other forms of textuality and interaction, including cultural standards already established, folklore, characters in novels, advertisements, and myth, as well as other filmic, literary, and scientific representations of their experiences. Flesh-and-blood individuals are copies of already reproduced cultural standards and identities. Consequently we can never get back to the flesh-and-blood individuals who live in the real world; we can only encounter their representations in our ethnographic texts.

Finally, assume that an event is inscribed multiple times on the memory disk and that each inscription is but another version of the event; hence there is no original, only multiple inscriptions (depictions, pictures and so on), each with as much validity as any other (pp. 124-5)

In these terms, then, the collection, transcription and use of oral evidence is fraught with peril.

Bringing the Historian Back in

Memories - whether expressed as rhetoric, argument, or description - are in essence stories that people tell about themselves and their experience of reality. Left unattended the babble can be deafening. Yet if one accepts, in the words of the Popular Memory Group (1982), "that there is indeed an objective social world which has changed, historically, in ways that are potentially knowable, but does not reveal its secrets by simple observation or the testing of hypotheses" then some process of examination must proceed before we can speak with any confidence about any aspect of that objective social world. But who makes the examination? Who can claim the right to determine which version of reality prospers? Here is the crucial question. For the moment, let us clothe the historian in judicial robes.

History as a discipline has a core belief in a transcendent reality. While the study of urban myths is properly the domain of the folklorist, the removal of every fixed marker would render all history myth. The debate in history, then, focuses on the extent to which that reality can be recovered or reconstructed. While experiential approaches to historical knowledge argue that the best we can do is recover the perceptions of people from the past, more positivist approaches seek intimations of reality (Buhle and Buhle, 1988; Harlan, 1989; Spiegel, 1990; Kelly and Kelly, 1992; Stone, 1992).

Without challenging the principle that all constructed realities may have real consequences, the historian/judge seeks to disentangle the multiple meanings and messages surrounding any oral account. While an instinctive methodology might start by accepting traditional "hierarchies of credibility," Becker (1970) reminds us that the terrain of research involves not only differentiated voices but stratified voices:

The hierarchy of credibility is a feature of society whose existence we cannot deny, even if we disagree with its injunction to believe the man at the top. When we acquire sufficient sympathy with subordinates to see things from their perspective, we know that we are flying in the face of what 'everyone knows'. The knowledge gives us pause and causes us to share, however briefly, the doubt of our colleagues (p. 129).