from Oral History Review, 2010

THE STORY IS TRUE: THE ART AND MEANING OF TELLING STORIES. By Bruce Jackson. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2007. 244pp. Hardbound, $45.00.
A great interdisciplinary master, Bruce Jackson delves into the nature of story in this collection of revised essays. Of course, oral historians are fascinated by oral narratives, whether called "story" or "history" or some other name. In recent years, the distinctions between the "story" studied in various disciplines, or even documented in the popular arena, have become so blurred as to cause disciplinary identity crises. Jackson's book helps clarify the distinctions by focusing on the connections, much as William Schneider's excellent edited collection does, Living With Stories (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2008). In his book, Jackson examines the nature of story in oral history, folklore, literary studies, and film studies. Oral historians will benefit from the insights he gleans from all these fields, for in locating the common landscape that narrative specialists share, he locates common concerns, common passions, common understandings, yet true distinctions.

Seven of the fifteen essays are revised versions of previously published articles, five of them in The Antioch Review. The others derive from conference papers and academic conversations, both official and unofficial. He divides the essays into three thematic sections: "The Personal Story," "The Public Story," and "The Story is True." That last one might need some explanation. The title of the book, The Story is True, comes from Robert Creeley's poem, "Bresson's Movies" (203), but Jackson does not explicate the phrase's relevance through the poem. Rather, he notes that John Coetzee asked him about oral history, "What would prevent people from just lying to him, from making up stories?" To which Jackson, somewhat shocked, replied that the story is always true, in its utterance. It has the "truth of utterance" (4). Jackson may have picked up this phrase somewhere, but I have never heard it before. It is a wonderful phrase. What it means, of course, is that, at the moment of utterance, the person's story relates some truth. The listener's job—and in our case, the oral historian’s—is to figure it out. So this collection's underlying premise is that people's stories inhere truths.

The essays in "The Personal Story" section focus largely on how people construct and interpret stories. It is probably the section of greatest relevance to oral history. A primary point Jackson makes is that people construct stories, oral narratives in whatever genre, so they can make sense of their daily lives. People reinterpret their stories, and accordingly reconstruct them, in every age of their lives, thus imbuing the stories with the distinctive characteristic of forever reflecting the narrator's present, rather than past, conceptions. "In time, how we tell our story depends not so much on what happened then, but on what we know of the world now" (38). The examples he provides make these early chapters extremely accessible and would prove excellent teaching resources, from high school to the graduate level. The essays provide solid advice as well on how to analyze implicit meaning in narrators’ oral narratives and the often subconscious rhetorical strategies the narrators use in structuring their words, phrases, sentences, and narratives.

In this section also, Jackson notes that personal stories typically are personal experience narratives, a narrative genre Sandra Dolby Stahl identified in Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Jackson is interested in the stories’ folk narrative manifestations, providing excellent examples of how to identify and analyze them, what their variable truths might be. With so many people recording personal narratives today and calling them oral histories rather than the significant folklore texts they are, this section is important not only for folklorists but also for oral historians and radio producers as well.

In "The Public Story" section, Jackson focuses on stories that have public importance, as opposed to oral histories that deal with public history. Thus, within the six essays in this section, he analyzes specific public stories, such as the O. J. Simpson trial or Bob Dylan's famous performance at the 1965 Newport Jazz Festival, and he also deals with broader issues, such as official governmental narratives rationalizing the death penalty or the public representations by James Agee and Walker Evans of the disenfranchised during the Great Depression. Interesting for oral historians, he documents the official narratives of public events and then shows how they become transformed within an individual's personal narratives. The public and the personal mutually inform and transform one another, a significant factor oral historians recognize when discerning the history behind a person's narrative in a project. As oral historians, we often try to wed the personal memory to some significant public event—Kennedy's assassination, 9/11, the Challenger explosion, say—so reading through this section can help us understand how the news may inform people, but how people may in turn transform the news to force it to make personal sense to them.

As in most of his writing, Jackson involves his own experiences and narratives in the explication of methodological or theoretical points. In the last section, "The Story is True," he does this masterfully in "The Storyteller I Looked For Every Time I Looked For a Storyteller." Only about halfway through this longish essay does the reader realize that Jackson has been duped by a storyteller, who claimed he was a Vietnam vet. The point of this essay is that, for the "faux Vietnam vet" (58), his self-created history had deep, personal meaning. Importantly, he was able to convince a wide array of people because his story also satisfied a need in them.

Jackson's book is a work every oral historian should read. It shows how stories inform many disciplines, oral history among them. Reading this book, oral historians will come to a greater comprehension of the range of the types of narrative they elicit. In doing so, they will also develop a greater sophistication in distinguishing oral history from other kinds of narratives.

John Wolford

University of Missouri–St. Louis