Worked Example V, Narrative, Space, and Place

Part II of this book explores how processes of narrative understanding entail using textual affordances to explore relevant dimensions of story-worlds, including the WHERE and WHEN dimensions that bear on their spa-tiotemporal configuration. In this final Worked Example, in keeping with the larger goals of Part III, I once again invert the direction of inquiry, examining how storytelling practices scaffold efforts to navigate the broader spatiotemporal environments in which narratives are themselves produced and interpreted.

My analysis draws on the taxonomy presented in chapter 3, where I examine structural differences within as well as across the categories of monomodal and multimodal narration (see my discussion of figures 3,1-3.4). Specifically, I explore issues of narrative, space, and place through an examination of gesture use in real-time face-to-face storytelling. As a basis for my study of interactions between narrators' gestures and their verbal utterances, 1 focus on video-recorded narratives featuring two different storytelling situations: one in which tellers recount events "on-site," where the events told about are purported to have occurred, and another in which the events being narrated are "off-site," or spatially removed from the here and now of the current interaction. In comparing these situations, I emphasize the relevance of a further distinction between kinds of narra-tive practice; this further contrast cuts across the monomodal-multimodal distinction discussed in chapter 3. One kind of storytelling practice evokes narrative worlds exophorically, as when a storyteller points at (or uses deictic expressions such as that place over there or / was standing here to allude to) features of the current communicative context. The other kind of practice evokes worlds endophorically, as when a storyteller uses words or gestures (or both) to prompt his or her interlocutors to shift from the here and now to the different spatiotemporal coordinates of earlier situa -tions and events being recounted in the narrative- On-site face-to-face

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storytelling, as I go on to discuss, offers possibilities for exophoric world-making not available in off-site narration or, for that matter, in other sorts of multimodal narratives, such as comics and graphic novels.1

More generally, a closer look at differences among storytelling situations highlights the need to refine the hypothesis, outlined in the research reviewed in my next section, that stories can be used to turn spaces into places—to convert mere geographic locales into inhabited worlds. My anal-ysis suggests that there is in fact a range of ways in which narrative can serve as a resource for transforming abstract spaces into lived-in, experi-enced, and thus meaningful places. My analysis also suggests that, like the study of frame tales vis-a-vis work on distributed intelligence (as discussed in chapter 7), research on narrative, space, and place will require the exper-tise of both narrative scholars and specialists in the cognitive sciences—in equal measure. Here too the question is how specific story structures are imbricated with human sense-making strategies; and to address this ques-tion fully, theorists must move beyond any unidirectional transfer of ideas from one field of inquiry to another, instead working to create what I describe in the coda to this book as a more open transdisciplinary dialogue between traditions of narrative scholarship and the sciences of mind.

Making Places: The Narrative Saturation of Space with Lived Experience

In scaffolding the process by which people chunk lived experience into bounded structures that consist of chains of events (see chapter 6 and Worked Example IV), stories create not just a temporal sequence but also a linked series of spatiotemporal contexts or environments (cf. Bridgeman 2007; Dannenberg 2008)—a series of situated actions and occurrences that, characterized from some vantage point on the storyworld, are connected with one another via the process of narration. At issue is what I termed in an earlier study the spatialization of storyworlds (Herman 2002, pp. 263-299; see also Herman et al. 2012, pp. 98-102). When it comes to interpret-ing narratives, or worlding the story, spatialization entails exploring an evolving configuration of participants, objects, and places in the narrated domain. By contrast, since my focus here is on "storying the world/' the issue 1 wish to investigate is different, namely, how the process of spatio-temporally configuring a narrated world bears in turn on understandings of the larger world—the context or environment in which the business of storytelling itself unfolds.

Relevant here is work in a number of fields pointing up the contrast

between abstract, geometrically describable spaces and lived, humanly

284 Worked Example V

experienced places. In Duncan's (2000) characterization, place is a portion of geographic space, or rather a principle for its organization "into bounded settings in which social relations and identity are constituted" (p. 582).2

In turn, a number of researchers, in fields spanning geography, urban studies, ethnography, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics, have argued that narrative crucially mediates between spaces and places. As Johnstone (1990) puts it, "coming to know a place means coming to know its stories; new cities and neighborhoods do not resonate the way familiar ones do until they have stories to tell" (p. 109; cf. p. 119 and also Johnstone 2004; Easterlin 2012, pp. 111-151; Finnegan 1998; Relph 1985; Tuan 1977). Accordingly, "in human experience, places are narrative constructions, and stories are suggested by places" (Johnstone 1990, p. 134). Hence narrative worldmaking can also be described as a resource for place making—for saturating with lived experience what would otherwise remain an abstract spatial network of objects, sites, domains, and regions.

The place-making functions of narrative can be characterized in another way, via Jakob von Uexkuil's concept of the Umwelt. As discussed in chapter 2, Uexktill used the term Umwelt to denote a lived, phenomenal world (cf. "place"), which emerges from an organism's interactions with the broader environment (Umgebung; cf. "space") that it must negotiate. As Uexkull (1934/1957) puts it, "the Umwelt of any animal that we wish to investigate is only a section carved out of the environment [Umgebung] which we see spread around it" (p. 13), such that as "the number of an animal's perfor-mances grows, the number of objects that populate its Umwelt increases" (p. 48). From this perspective, narratives can be thought of as prostheses for performance, emulations of lived experiences, and narrative worldmak-ing as the coenactment of real or imagined Umwelten carved out of larger environments for action and interaction (see Herman 2011b,d). Thus, in telling you the story of my childhood experiences at a particular location, I give you access to the experiences enacted at the site in question. In turn, thanks to this process of narration, the site has now become for both of us a place and not just a space.

An example of UexkiiU's underscores the relevance the Umwelt concept for research on narrative as an instrument of mind—that is, for the process of storying the world. As Uexkull notes, "the best way to find out that no two human Umwelten are the same is to have yourself led through unknown territory by someone familiar with it. Your guide unerringly follows a path that you cannot see" (p. 50). As indicated in my discussion of Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage in chapter 7, narrative itself can reflexively engage with—and thereby promote the use of—storytelling as a means for tracing

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paths through what would otherwise remain unknown territories. In Wordsworth's text, a narrative transaction is what allows the ruined cottage to be brought with the scope of the primary narrator's own Urnwelt; indeed, a key aspect of the narrator's apprenticeship in storytelling involves learn-ing how to use narrative to reconfigure a geographically locatable site as a particularized experiential domain. It is not just that the poem portrays how stories can be used to create indissoluble connections between locales and experiences;3 what is more, the text also models the way these con-nections can be reactivated, made to live again, for as long as a relevant narrative is remembered and retold.

My purpose here is to outline additional strategies for investigating such emergent relationships among stories, spaces, and places. My claim is that different kinds of narrative practices support the activity of place making— the transformation or mapping of spaces into places—in different ways. In the next section, turning to gesture use in face-to-face storytelling, I draw on gesture research, theories of deixis, and other work to investigate how utterances, gestures, and processes of place making interact in real-time narration.

Utterance, Gestures, and Place Making in Face-to-Face Narration

Defining gesture broadly as "that range of bodily actions that are, more or less, generally regarded as part of a person's willing expression'' (Kendon 2000, p. 47), I focus here on functions of speech-accompanying gestures used in narrative discourse. In McNeill's (2000) account, gestures of this sort can be classified as gesticulations, in contradistinction to emblems (like the OK sign), pantomime, or sign language proper (see also McNeill 1992). The pilot study reported here is based on videotaped data and examines gesture use in narratives told by storytellers from the state of North Caro-lina in the U.S.4 The storytellers produce a range of gestures in narratives told both on location and off site. In particular, they use deictic gestures or "points," among other gestural modes, to refer to situations, objects, and incidents located in the multiple sets of spacetime coordinates orient-ing narrative speech events. To revert to the taxonomy mentioned in the first section, gestures used in off-site narration function endophorically, however many reference worlds they may evoke (e.g., by referring to situ-ations and events in multiple past time frames) in a given act of storytell-ing. By contrast, gestures used in on-site narratives can contribute to exophoric multimodal storytelling, if tellers use points to refer to elements

of the current scene of interaction while also evoking situations and events

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in the narrated domain. More generally, narrated circumstances, entities, and events can be conceived as more or less spatially and temporally removed from the here and now of the current interaction, and storytellers can use both language and gesture to create what I will call transpositions between and laminations of two or more distinct coordinate systems. The coordinate systems at issue are those organizing the past (or pasts) being told about in a given narrative, and those organizing current acts of narration.

These general, structural considerations motivate the analysis presented in the n'ext two subsections, which explore how storytellers, by using points and other gestures to map spaces onto places, saturate space with lived experience.

Points in Context: Building an Inventory of Gestural FunctionsMy analysis centers on the role of points or deictic gestures 5 in narratives told on- as well as off-location; however, points need to be situated in a broader functional classification of gestures—that is, an inventory of com-municative functions served by gestures. A helpful starting point is the model proposed by Cassell and McNeill (1991) and adapted in table V.I; this model distinguishes between two broad classes of gestures: represen -tational and nonrepresentational.

However, as Haviland's (2000) account of "gesture spaces" suggests, the category of deictics or points needs to be subdivided. Haviland notes that like other indexical signs deictic gestures function by projecting a concep -tual space within which they situate a given discourse referent—in other terms, an entity-within-a-model. Thus, rather than interfacing simply and primordially with a world that stands outside language or semiosis, points

Table V.IClassification based on Cassell and McNeiU's (1991) taxonomy of gestures

Representational gestures:A. Iconics: gestures that mimic or iconically represent elements of thepropositional content of what's being said.B. Metaphorics: these gestures, too, are representational, but they represent anabstract idea or conceptual relation as opposed to a particular object or event.Nonrepresentationai gestures:C. Beats: rhythmically timed gestures used to mark the initiation of newdiscourse topics, mark members in a list of subtopics, and so on.D. Deictics: indexically referring gestures, or "points."In Kita's (2003b) account, "The prototypical pointing gesture Is a communicative body movement that projects a vector from a body part. This vector indicates a certain direction, location, or object" (p. 1; see also Goodwin 200x3).

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project conceptual domains of variable scope. One way of characterizing the differences among kinds of points is by distinguishing; ^^h^ytri^gesture spaces in which the pointed-to objects are anchored; these spa can be used to suggest the rionsimple relation between a point ing gestiire and what it referSto. In bthe? words; whenincomesta the ?uh*Qu)adM^ contexts or spaces prpjected by ^points, "where; &e conc^pttairentiti^' 'pointed to' reside" (Havilahcf200(Vp. 220; such spaces, can:be':caiibrM|-iri different ways with the environment lii Which; the speech;"evetitVifefeif-" takes place. Haviland identifies rour;sucn^gesture spaces, incl^dirig^fo^l gesture space wh£re the current speech; event unfolds; a;, tiamttiid-:

:gestur£ space where the situatibnSj entities; or events being told aboutixithe^ri^ rative are located; ah interactional gesture space, "defined by the con&gufa-tion and orientation of the- bodies; oif the- interattarits-' (p:.23); aricta narrated interactional gesture space, in which a narrative interaction,, being recounted within another, framing narrative, is located (see my discussion of narrative embedding in chapter 7).

In light of these considerations, the initial inventory presented in table V.I needs to be expanded so that it provides a fuller picture of, within category D, the subtypes of deictic gestures and the different kinds of conceptual spaces that they project. Table V.2 presents an enriched inven-tory of points.

Gesture Use in Stories Told On- and Off-Site; Simulation versus Computation of PlaceIn my pilot study, I transcribed four narratives by two different tellers who each recounted a story off site as well as on location. I coded the transcripts

Table V.2An expanded inventory of pointing gestures

D. Deictics/Points:1. Grounded deictics refer to elements of the here-and-now environment of thecurrent interaction (see also Rubba 1996); in other words, these are points toentities or locations perceptible to interactants in the here and now.2. Extended deictics refer to entities or locations not perceptible to interactantsbut discoverably available to them in the current environmental surround.3. Storyworld deictics refer to elements of the there-and-then environment(s)—or storyworld(s)-~in which the narrated events unfold. In other words, these arepoints to entries or locations situated in a narrated world; spatiotemporalcoordinates for such elements are established vis-a-vis the deictic center (Zubinand Hewitt 1995) located in the narrated domain.4. Metanarrative deictics are points used to indicate or clarify the status,position, or identity of objects, events, or participants being told about in theprocess of narration.

288 Worked Example V

Figure V.IGesture use in on-site narration.

to indicate the multiple, sometimes layered functions fulfilled by storytell-ers' gestures. I then compared frequency counts for gesture use in the off-site versus the on-site narratives. Figures V.I and V.2 are screen captures of video clips in which speaker x is shown telling a narrative on- and off-site, respectively.6 The Ns or token counts obtained in my preliminary study are too low to provide anything more than directions for further research; nonetheless, extrapolating from my findings, I attempt to outline here some general principles bearing on place-making practices in these two subvarieties of multimodal storytelling.

Figures V.3 and V.4 represent the number of transpositions between and laminations of gesture spaces (in Haviland's 2000 sense of the term) per one hundred lines of text.7 To clarify: transpositions correspond to shifts between gesture spaces over the course of the telling of a story, whereas laminations occur when a point is used to project one gesture space into another, creating a layering or blending of spaces calibrated in different ways with the current communicative context. I determined the number of transpositions by counting how many shifts there were, from line to line, between different subclasses of points. Thus, if a storyteller uses a point classifiable as a story-world deictic in one line and one classifiable as a grounded deictic or a grounded deictic + storyworld deictic in the next, that would constitute a transposition, whereas two successive lines featuring a storyworld deictic would not. Meanwhile, laminations correspond to any line in which a deictic gesture anchored in gesture spaces associated with the here and now

n- Narrative, Space, and Piace 289

Figure V.2

Gesture use in off-site narration.

Deictic Transpositions

04Off-

site, speaker x

Off-site, speaker y On-site, speaker x On-site, speaker y

Stories

Figure V.3

Number of transpositions of gesture spaces.

290

Worked Example V

Deictic Laminations

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20-15-

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Off-site, speakerx

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Figure V.4Number of laminations of gesture spaces.

(i.e., grounded, extended, or interactional spaces) gets superimposed on a metanarrative or storyworld deictic. Accordingly, in the system, of transcrip-tion I used, wherever a "+" sign links points that are tied to perceptually or inferrably available gesture spaces, on the one hand, and points that are tied to gesture spaces anchored in nonproximate storyworlds, on the other hand, a lamination has occurred and can be counted as such.

In figure V.3, apart from the spike in the first off-site story, the number of deictic transpositions—or shifts between kinds of gesture spaces—is remarkably stable across the stories. The higher frequency of transpositions in speaker x's off-site narrative can be explained by the interactional dynamics of the storytelling situation. Because another participant in the interaction initially displayed reluctance to relinquish the floor, speaker x had to negotiate the launching of his story, and in doing so the speaker's pointing gestures shifted between the narrated space of the storyworld and the interactional space where the storytelling act itself was unfolding.

But whereas the number of transpositions between kinds of gesture spaces is relatively stable across the narratives, as figure V.4 indicates, there is by contrast striking variability when it comes to the number of lamina-tions. Here the significant factor seems to be the spatial rather than the interactional parameters of the storytelling situation. Narratives told on-site

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afford considerably more opportunities for laminations—which might alsobe characterized as deictic "blends" (Liddell 2000)~~by means of which thehere and now and the there and then can be layered upon one another. Toput this point another way, narrative navigation of the world can be relatively endophoric, when semantic resources internal to the sign systemused to tell the narrative cue inferences about where things happened whenin a storyworld, or relatively exophoric, when objects and locations in thehere and now scaffold attempts to map out positions, places, and trajectories of motion in the world being told about. And in contexts of face-tb-facestorytelling, the higher the number of laminations cued by gesture use, themore exophoric the act of narrative worldmaking. .......

In turn, relatively more endophoric and relatively more exophoric strate-gies for storying the world support what can be characterized as two methods of narrative place making. Figure V.5 labels these two methods narrative simulation and narrative computation of place, respectively. As figure V.5 suggests, story-enabled simulations and computations of place can be viewed as the poles at either end of a continuum. Narrative simula-tion occupies the end of the continuum where, to grasp the spatial contours of a storyworld, interpreters must relocate away from the here and now to an alternative set of spacetime coordinates (cf. Ryan 1991, pp. 31-47); that is, they must engage in a punctual, more or less permanent shift to a differ-ent deictic center (Zubin and Hewitt 1995). By contrast, narrative computa-tion occupies the other end of the continuum in question; here, making sense of storyworld space entails not an instantaneous, once-and-for-all shift to another deictic center, but rather a durative, ongoing process of juxtaposing and calibrating sets of spacetime coordinates. My pilot study on gesture use in face-to-face storytelling suggests that the extent to which stories can be leveraged to simulate or compute places will be situationally variable. Stories told on-site, supporting the lamination of gesture spaces, likewise favor the narrative computation of place—that isr the use of features of the here and now to support, by way of grounded and extended deictics, navigation of the storyworld. Stories told off-site, meanwhile, accommodate less lamination, and proportionately favor narrative simulations of place. More generally, increments along the continuum displayed in figure V.5 correspond to different mechanisms for experiential saturations of space— that is, different methods of narrative place making.

Concluding Remarks: Narrative Place Making and the Extended Mind

This pilot study of gesture use in face-to-face narration suggests that stories provide a crucial mediating link between spaces and places, but do so

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Simulation("endophoric" strategies for place making)

• less lamination•punctual (and permanent) deicticshift to the storyworld

•more reliance on semantic resourcespragmatic internal to sign contexts

•system used to tell the story

Computation ("exophoric" strategies for place making)

• more lamination• durativej ongoing calibration

of storyworld with here and now• more reliance on embeddednessof interaction

Figure V.5A continuum of place-making strategies in narrative.

differently in different sorts of "narrative occasions" (Herman 2009a, pp, 37-74), or contexts of telling. Further research will be required to deter-mine the extent to which other kinds of storytelling occasions or contexts promote the simulation or the computation of place. Comparative analysis along these lines may confirm the existence of an overarching preference for narrative place making across various occasions—a preference appar-ently governing the corpus I used in my study. In the shift from off-site to on-site tellings, the storytellers could in principle have continued to rely predominantly on endophoric strategies, or simulation. However, when objects and locations in the local and extended environment presented themselves as possible anchors for spatial reference, the tellers demon-strated a preference to use those resources to help their interlocutors compute (and not just simulate) places in storyworlds. The operative pref-erence thus seems to be: Whenever possible, recruit elements from the current environment and use them to help interlocutors compute places, thus reducing the amount of simulation that needs to be done and in effect distributing the cognitive burden of place making across as many components of the material setting as possible.8 This apparent preference accords with research, dis-cussed in chapters 6 and 7, characterizing the mind itself as extended or distributed across material environments as well as social spaces—in other words, as "promiscuously body-and-world exploiting" (Clark 2008, p. 42). But testing the scope and limits of the specific preference just mentioned remains a task for future research. In particular, analysts need to explore methods of narrative place making across a broader range of environments where exophoric storytelling is possible, to see whether tellers indeed tend to opt for computation over simulation in all of those contexts.