“Remember when…?”
The symbiosis of memory and family storytelling
By Christine Neuberger
Some family stories evoke fond memories, and others recall drama and pain. Families tell stories to cement their ties and sort through shared experiences. Storytelling has another hidden yet powerful effect: it changes memories.
That’s what UMW associate professor Jo Tyler found when she explored her family’s recollections of a childhood trip marred by an accident. Tyler’s research revealed that storytelling helped alter family memories of her brother getting injured four decades ago.
“Through retellings, each time someone shared their beliefs of what happened, others unwittingly incorporated pieces into their own memories,” said Tyler, an associate professor of linguistics and education at the University’s College of Graduate and Professional Studies. “Family memories became reconstructed from beliefs, not necessarily from facts.”
In presenting her research findings at a recent Georgetown University linguistics conference, Tyler explained that memory is fallible and elusive. It often comes not directly from experiencing an event or having witnessed it. So-called memories are constructed from new knowledge and subsequent experiences, including storytelling.
“With evidence that a story is retold over time, there’s a symbiotic, reconstructive relationship between memory and narrative. Memories are the ‘stuff’ of narrative, and narrative shapes and contributes to our memories,” Tyler said during an interview at the Stafford campus.
All families have their favorite stories, and yarns filled with surprise and excitement are spun many times over. For Jo Tyler and her family, one oft-told story involved a 1964 camping trip. Most of the large Tyler brood was on hand when Tyler’s young brother, Bruce, stumbled over a hot camp stove and was seriously burned.
Decades after the incident, Jo Tyler’s sister decided to capture family memories of it. A physiologist by training, Amy Tyler wanted to create a composite record of the family’s tale. During a 1998 family reunion, she seized the chance to tape-record everyone’s recollections, which she meticulously transcribed into 30 single-spaced, typed pages.
Once Jo Tyler viewed the transcripts, they thrilled her. As a linguist whose graduate work included narrative analysis and as a key player in the event itself, Tyler’s reaction was immediate: “I knew right away that the data was valuable and that I’d have to do something with it. I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to work on it.”
The project stayed in the back of her mind, however. After Tyler joined the Mary Washington faculty in 1998, professional demands filled her schedule. But a spring 2008 sabbatical finally provided Tyler the time to delve into the transcripts.
Once she learned that the 2008 Georgetown University Round Table’s theme would be narrative, she proposed sharing her research results at the annual conference. She began her analysis in earnest after her proposal was accepted. “It was a perfect opportunity,” Tyler said. “My desire to do the project for the past 10 years came together with my sabbatical and the conference.”
During the early stage of her study, what instantly sparked Tyler’s interest was the phenomenon of memory, which Tyler never had explored before. The family recollections were filled with inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and false memories – hardly like live recordings of an actual event that can be replayed and relied upon. As she probed the recorded accounts further, she realized that memories had changed to include details that family members never saw and events they hadn’t been present for.
Some accounts faithfully echoed each other in their descriptions of the accident, the setting, and the circumstances. Several versions consistently describe a chaotic scene with the children playing and paying little attention to each other at the crucial moment when 3-year-old Bruce fell backward onto the camp stove filled with hot coals. Accounts reliably refer to the stove as a five-gallon can or barrel. As nearly everyone recalled, Bruce “tripped.”
“With all of these similarities in the recollections of the different participants in the event, it is easy to imagine that they all saw the same thing,” Tyler said. “But just because their stories are similar does not necessarily mean that they are accurate. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.”
Tyler found that retellings over time contributed to the reconstructed memories. As slim shards of untruth get added during everyday storytelling, it can be impossible to see the difference between reconstructed memory and actual memory.
“Multiple retellings shape people’s memories of an event, and that’s why different people with different experiences of an event end up with similar memories of it,” Tyler said. “Yet the similarity of their stories is no guarantee that their memories are accurate.”
Families typically have a key storyteller, and this person’s often elaborate and convincing versions of events can leave lasting imprints on the memories of others. Jo Tyler’s father, Les, was the storyteller in the Tyler family, and his recorded account is authoritative, articulate, and detailed:
… (Bruce) must have tripped and just fallen over … and Bruce’s bare back just rolled right over the top of this red hot can … Lots of shrieks and screams, not only from Bruce, but from some of the other children drew my attention to what had happened.
Analysis of Les Tyler’s version revealed that he never even saw the accident; his use of phrases such as “must have” and “drew my attention” provided tell-tale clues. His daughter’s research found that attention relates directly to memory: attention determines what is remembered and, therefore, accessible for recovery later.
A goal of retelling stories about accidents is to help decipher what happened and why. Threads of detail get woven in as storytellers develop a coherent account. If the story never fully explains the mishap, the event may be retold frequently.
Tyler combed the transcripts about the family incident for answers to persistent questions. Why did Bruce get hurt? Why did the accident unfold the way it did? Who was innocent and who was at fault? “You want to help the victim, and you don’t want to point the finger. But when it’s serious, everyone wants answers,” she said.
Tyler wanted the answer to a particular question that has haunted her for decades: was she guilty? Ultimately, she found the answer she expected − but didn’t welcome. The transcripts offered no proof that the accident was witnessed by anyone, except Tyler herself. As the oldest child and the only apparent eyewitness, she blamed herself for failing to prevent her brother’s injury. If the young child had been better supervised, he may not have gotten hurt.
“Of all the people there, none described the event in terms of what happened besides me,” she said. “I always harbored this secret, and I still cannot get rid of that feeling. To this day, I still feel guilty for letting my little brother walk backward into the fire and get burned.”
The accident scarred Bruce’s back from his neck to his knees, but prompt medical care ensured his recovery. Now 47, he works as a technician for a cell phone company in Michigan. The scar on his back has faded. But even the faintest scar can serve as a source of memory and an impetus for retellings.
To her disappointment, Tyler never got the chance to discuss her research with her father.
Should he have admitted responsibility or acknowledged his inattention at the time of the accident? A retired chemist and business executive, Les Tyler unexpectedly died in late 2007, just before his daughter began this project. He was 88.
But Jo Tyler has begun revisiting the topic with her siblings, all of whom permitted her to use their accounts in her research. Tyler has talked to Bruce about false memories he constructed, and they concluded that subsequent events and experiences may have merged with retellings to create Bruce’s new memory.
During Tyler’s conference presentation of her findings, “Back Story: Retellings of a Family Narrative,” she shared credit with her sister and admires her for having the foresight to tape the memories. The 10-year-old cassette tapes compare to beloved photographs or other priceless mementoes; they represent oral history and historical documents.
“Artifacts help a family reminisce and recall past, happier times and ways they connected,” Tyler said. “Whether you’re a linguist or not, you can enjoy listening, and each time you listen, you get new insights from what you hear. There’s always something new to find and new to learn.”
Indeed, Tyler expects she’ll find something new when she returns to the accounts to mine them for future research. Next, she may explore another vein that caught her attention: repetitive speech. Repetition gives narrators time to collect their thoughts. Tyler believes the repetition may provide a window into a speaker’s feelings about a memory.
“Repetition fills in for you if you have difficulty remembering. And repetition may reveal stress speakers feel about an uncomfortable memory,” she said. “There’s a complex cycle of talk, memory, and feelings about an event. By looking at language, you can see how memories and feelings play together. Feelings about an event shape how people tell a story.” d
Read More About Memory and Storytelling
Tannen, Deborah. (1989). Talking Voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Linde, Charlotte. (1993). Life stories: The creation of coherence. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Loftus, Elizabeth. (1980). Memory: Surprising new insights into how we remember and why we forget. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.
Ochs, Elinor & Capps, Lisa. (2001). Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
SIDEBAR: REMEMBER MEMORY
UMW professor documents its value
UMW anthropology professor Eric Gable says both historical accounts and social memory should undergo critical evaluation.
“Historians have used memory to talk about public understanding of the past,” said Gable, who presented the keynote address, “Forget Culture, Remember Memory?,” at the annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Association in Staunton, Va., last March. “They tend to dismiss memory as inferior to written documents.”
Gable, whose research focuses on public perceptions of the past, has studied patriotic shrines and historic sites, particularly Colonial Williamsburg and Monticello. He has taught at the University since 1996.
He contends that historical accounts can be just as flawed as personal recollections. They also can prove to be just as valuable. Both suffer some pitfalls and often get refashioned to serve the interest of contemporary society.
For example, in the 1980s, when Gable conducted research at Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, historians dismissed the notion by Sally Hemings’ descendants that Jefferson fathered a child with his slave.
“They called the claims African Americans made ‘oral tradition,’ and while historians wanted to include African American voices in the stories they told of Monticello, they said, ‘Too bad for the black community,’ but evidence did not support the account,” Gable said. “Yet, once the DNA evidence proved that the descendants were indeed Jefferson’s children, the same historians said they knew it all along. Historians are no more or less guilty of being subjective.”
But, neither can memory be counted as undisputed fact, Gable said. Personal experience often is colored by media accounts and school-based history lessons.
In talking to visitors to Colonial Williamsburg, Gable discovered that visitors often failed to accurately remember the historical site, talking about tours that never happened or recalling objects in the gift shop that never existed. In cases where historians attempted to make aesthetic changes to more accurately portray the period, visitors complained about the changes, wanting it to stay as they remembered it.
Still, he said, both memory and historical documentation have value in chronicling the past. Both need to be used with considerable care.
“Culture and memory are parallel concepts, sometimes useful, sometimes not,” Gable said. “Sometimes the terms reveal and illuminate, sometimes the terms obscure and get in the way of our capacity to understand and interpret what people are doing and thinking in this place in this moment in time.”
− Marty Morrison