The Stickiness of Trickster Tales: Strategy, Genre, and Presentation of Self in East German Life Stories

• In Event: 526 - Regular Session. Narrative, Biography and Culture

Abstract

Although life stories told in research interviews are largely extemporaneous, it is shown that certain kinds of autobiographical episodes can display impressive “stickiness,” remaining part of narrators’ storytelling repertoires over a considerable span of time. In life history interviews with former East Germans in reunified Germany, episodes emplotted as “trickster tales” display this kind of stickiness. Such anecdotes tend to persist in storytelling repertoires because they: (1) describe strategies of actions that had possessed practical value for both narrator and audience, (2) display functional congruence with a familiar storytelling genre that enhances its performative utility for the narrator and (3) its entertainment value for the audience, and (4) highlight character traits that aid the narrator’s presentation of self at the time of narration. Five years after the fall of the Wall, the telling of trickster tales continued to deliver symbolic rewards and to reinforce a desired presentation of self, and much the same stories were told in similar ways nearly two decades later. In conjunction with corroborating evidence, sticky stories can shed light on the relation between social practices and storytelling genres in a bygone society, as well as about the way that society is being remembered by those who experienced it first hand.

Author

• Jeremy Brooke Straughn, Westminster College