Addicted to Oral

Between the book I’m working on and the pro bono private historical work I do, I’ve been taking a lot of oral histories lately. They can be pretty exhausting; the way I do them (described below) typically takes nearly a day of work per history. They’re even more tiring psychologically than physically, because I try hard to listen with serious sympathy but also a critical mind, so as not to lose the opportunity of posing what could be a really revealing question.

And yet, in spite of how tiring they are, lately I find myself rather addicted to oral histories. In fact, yesterday I was talking to an academic friend, and I found myself absent-mindedly confessing that I’d love to take his history, even though I’ve got no professional reason to do so. And the flip-side happens, too: nowadays often I find myself unintentionally disinclined to ask friends and acquaintances about their histories in casual conversation, even where to them it would be natural, because it seems like it would cause a professional interruption to a personal conversation.

It’s as if questions about personal histories are now a kind of sex, meant to be engaged in only under prearranged, consented circumstances, lest we violate social taboos of what may be legitimately asked, given, taken. Maybe that’s why I always shower before even a phone interview.

Hmm…maybe I’d better move on to methodology and drop that scary analogy.

Many historians do oral histories by recording a conversation in which the subject mostly speaks and by then transcribing the conversation. But I do them differently.

Because I’m dealing with a lot of controversial circumstances, because I care deeply about playing fair, because I’m often interviewing someone who has been burned before, I don’t take histories that way. Instead, I first arrange the conversation with an advance understanding about what it will be used for and how the conversation will work. Then we have the conversation, during which I take extensive notes. (Since I type about 85 words a minute, I can get a near-transcript.) I then give the person back the notes, and ask her or him to change the notes however she or he wishes—add, delete, whatever.

I advise the interviewee that what I want to be given back is what the person wants me to have. It is not meant to be anything like a record of what we actually said—so I don’t call these “transcripts.” Rather, what I want is what they want me to have down on paper.

This process frees up the interviewee, during the conversation, to say whatever she or he wishes at that moment, resting assured it will go “poof” and disappear completely if she or he wishes to remove it later. Additionally, interviewees enjoy the benefit of being able to remove any ambiguous sarcasm, of being able to add qualifiers to hasty generalizations, of getting to insert critically-important “not”s where I may have missed them. In doing their revisions, they can answer questions I should have asked, make clarifications, remove Freudian slips, and sound the way they want to sound.

It’s really fascinating to me, then, that a lot of interviewees don’t change very much of what I give back to them. I think they are often a bit surprised by that snapshot of their thinking, their memories, at that moment, and treat it as more sacred than I do. In any case, it’s a system that leaves me as close to peace as I can be when I’m asking people difficult questions about uncomfortable times.

And what’s also really interesting is how much you learn about a person by the way he or she answers the first question. So often, when a person has been preparing for an interview, he will come up with a story that seems to him to be the most important story for this conversation; it will contain within it the chief moral the subject wants to impress upon me. I used to think of these long, opening stories as attempts at obfuscation. Now I think of them as key (even keys), even when I don’t (at first) understand their relation to my interests.

Sort of coincidentally, this past week I had to write an essay for Atrium about doing “narrative disimpaction” (private history production) for survivors of iatrogenic trauma, and I accidentally discovered the interesting twin idioms of oral histories, that we

         write them down

                    in order to

                                write them up.

This up and down and up and down motion of piecing together histories—I feel sometimes as if I am on a Homeric rowboat, pushing the oars forward, pulling them back, crossing, back and forth, the River Styx.