Narrative Style

The influence of culture on discourse style also becomes apparent in the differential distribution of orate and literate features of speech in story telling. For example, using the short 'pear narrative' film by William Chafe, Tannen asked native speakers from Anglo-American and Greek background to retell the film in their own words. Here is how Tannen tells the film:

It showed a man picking pears from a tree, then descending and dumping them into one of three baskets on the ground. A boy comes by on a bicycle and steals a basket of pears. As he's riding away, he passes a girl on a bike, his hat flies off his head, and the bike overturns. Three boys appear and help him gather his pears. They find his hat and return it to him and he gives them pears. The boys then pass the farmer who has just come down from the tree and discovered that his basket of pears is missing. He watches them walk by eating pears.

(Tannen, Deborah. 'What's in a Frame?' in framing in Discourse. Oxford University Press 1993, page 21).

In comparing the narratives told by American women in English and Greek women in Greek, Tannen reports that each group had a distinctive narrative style. The Greeks told 'better stories', by often interweaving judgments about the character's behavior (for example, the boy should not have stolen the pears or should have thanked his helpers sooner), or about the film's message (for example, that it showed a slice of agricultural life, or that little children help each other). In contrast, the Americans reportedly gave a 'better recollection' of the original sequence of events, and gave all the details they could remember. They used their judgment to comment on the filmmaker's technique (for example, that the costumes were unconvincing or the soundtrack out of proportion). The Greeks seemed to draw upon an interactive experience which was focused more on interpersonal involvement: telling the story in ways that would interest the interviewer, interpreting the film's human message. The Americans seemed to draw on their willingness to approach a school task for its own demands. They were focusing on the content of the film, treating it as a cinematic object, with critical objectivity. Each group made differential use of orate and literate features according to the expectations their culture had prepared them to have of the task at hand.

It would be dangerous, of course, to generalize this example to all Greeks and all Americans, or to suggest that Greeks in general tell better stories than Americans. As we discussed in Chapter 1, every culture is heterogeneous, i.e. it is composed of a variety of subcultures, and every situation elicits a variety of responses, even within the same national culture. The only conclusion one can draw from examples such as this one is that, given the same situation and the same task, people from different cultures will interpret the situation and the demands of the task differently, and thus behave in different ways. Nevertheless, because the definition of what makes a 'good' story varies from culture to culture, we can expect storytellers to conform to those models of the genre that were available to them in the culture they grew up in.