Polanyi 1981, Text & Talk
Telling the Same Story Twice
Published by: Text & Talk
Volume 1, Issue 4
Pages 315-336
In this article, Polanyi draws on conversation analysis to identify challenges to the notion of telling the “same” story twice, as the text of a story changes on every retelling due to the state of ongoing talk (local occasioning) and understandings of the story recipients (audience design). Examining a story about bad Coca Cola at a highway rest stop, she shows how evaluated events and durative or descriptive information can serve to represent a story through a paraphrase of its underlying semantic representation, or “script.” This analysis demonstrates how a “same” story counts as a revision if it has structurally identical positions for happenings in the script, and that violations of this script must allow the audience to infer the same general point as that of the first script.
Polanyi begins by challenging the impossibility of telling a story twice, introducing her analysis of an oral narrative that demonstrates her perspective on stories. She then introduces her data, a story about eating on the New York Thruway, and several concepts from ethnomethodology (CA) that describe how stories can never be told twice (as a story is always linked to preceding talk in conversation). She uses examples from her narrative to show how the narrators negotiate rights of speaking and adapt a set of events and circumstances to illustrate a point being discussed when they began the story. In this section, Polanyi divides the story into “entrance talk” and “exit talk” to show how the story was locally occasioned by the ongoing talk of the conversation among friends. She ends this section by discussing how the narrator (Carol) recipient designs her story by shaping it according to her beliefs about the listeners’ interests and knowledge of the story world. After giving various examples of the questions and other moves that serve as recipient design activities, Polanyi notes that this approach focusing on the telling neglects the story itself and proposes an adequate paraphrase, or an ‘underlying semantic representation’ as one way to discover the point of a story’s telling. In the next section, the author defines three kinds of information in stories relating to clauses that describe events, communicate durative/descriptive information, or evaluate either. Breaking her story down into clauses along this division, Polanyi argues that this division allows an ‘adequate paraphrase’ that keeps the logical and temporal relations between aspects of the text intact. She presents one for the story of eating on the New York Thruway, consisting of two sentences summing up the story:
”At a restaurant on the New York Thruway, Carol drinks a coke prepared by the restaurant staff which was the worst she ever tasted. She is ‘poisoned’ by the coke and saved by Betsy, who gives her some spring water she has carried along.” Polanyi uses this paraphrase to discuss what elements of it would be needed to count as a retelling of the same story, introducing the concept of script, or an abstract semantic representation of the expected events which make up the prototypical instance of a familiar experience. She identifies a Service Encounter Script in Carol’s story, noting how Carol’s story violates several expectations of this script. Finally, Polanyi concludes that it is possible to tell a story twice, as long as the happenings in the retelling occur in structurally identical positions in the script, and that the general point inferred by violations of the script is the same.
This article reminds me of Paula Deen’s Baked Spaghetti Recipe
While Polanyi’s article asks if a story can be told twice, this recipe asks if pasta cooked twice can still count as pasta, but it’s answer is a delicious yes! This recipe violates the script for lasagna in a few ways, but such violations are a great take on traditional baked pasta dishes. Just as a story may be told twice depending on structural factors, if you structure this dish correctly you will find yourself coming back for more at least twice. Good cooking!
