A Narrative Jag

A Narrative Jag

This story begins, like any really good road trip, by turning the car, and heading down an unknown highway. Like so:

You get out of the old school and move into the New South. You drive the U-Haul, wife and cat follow in the Renault. You turn off the interstate in lower Tennessee onto a two-lane blacktop that without mercy drops into northern Alabama’s cankerous lip. For the next thirty miles you glance eagerly into rearview mirrors to see your wife’s expression turn from hopeful optimism into a struggle for control over a basic instinct to flee . . . (Goodall, 1994, p. 1)

And since that fateful day in late 1995, when my own drive toward ethnography began—as soon as I first jumped in the car, riding shotgun through Casing a Promised Land—I have been awestruck by Bud Goodall’s deft driving. It came to us, sometimes in the form of story, sometimes in the form of simple directions, sometimes in trenchant observation, sometimes as a play on words, or a knowing aside, or a scholarly riff on the deep background of the story at hand. No matter how it came, however, I always found myself caught up in the narrative highways he drove and imagined and sometimes even built himself. And there I was, and remain, sometimes jarred by a bump in the road, but most often smiling my way through his (our) long, strange trip. And often thinking, “Aha!” Or “Hmmmm.” Or “Yes . . . ”

This road trip, in its own winding “blue highway” way, takes us from the “cankerous lip” of northern Alabama, to the land of rocket scientists (literally), through rock ‘n roll mysteries, past divine signs and weird signs and communities of spirit, into redacted CIA files, through ethnographic methodland, across the rough terrain of counter-narrative, to his ultimate parking place in “cancerland.” I have, as I rode along, been inspired to craft my own storied version of the drive, from shvitzing to 9/11 to teaching to family secrets to spiritual breakthroughs to finding my father to locating my capacity for joy. I’ve sometimes written manically, trying to keep up, but knowing I would always be passed by Bud. He was a more daring driver, perhaps a little faster, likely more skilled, certainly more disciplined. (Besides, I’m a Honda guy, not a muscle car man.)

Bud and his Jag would drive just about anywhere. And he would always carry a single passenger—you, the reader. He was always hospitable—welcoming the reader, warmly, into his narrative Jag, inviting you to ride shotgun in his fast, powerful vehicle, with its sleek, crystal clear, if slightly tinted, windows on the world. Together, we traveled many roads, Bud and I. I always felt, as I read, that I was in an intimate conversation—the kind that sometimes happens on a long drive. And these roads—oh, these roads!—so intriguing, so stirring, so mysterious, so open . . . dotted with signs, and troubled by curves, and, sometimes, forks. Some were poor country Alabama roads; some were big, crowded main drags emblazoned with big, orange Clemson Tiger Paws; some were winding and potholed and dangerous; and some were wide and smooth and open. And, occasionally, we would come to an ambiguous intersection and stop to read the signs, or dart down a dark alley, in search of a clue. But the ride was most often smooth, and strong, and confident.

When you read (and I mean, really read) the way my first philosophy professor taught me to read—which is to read, reread, repeat, and then seek to uncover not just the meaning in the words but the meanings between and underneath and around the words—when you read the written works of Bud Goodall, you will find yourself on an incredible journey. What he offers, in his unique voice, is his own unfolding story of the life of an organizational detective, a wannabe rock star, a diviner of signs, a new ethnographer, a shocked witness of 9/11, a deep playing Ferraristo (for a day or two, anyway), a son of a spy in search of his father, a latter-day Mark Twain in a casino buffet line, a man with a toxic narrative inheritance, a scholar of terror, a producer of counter-narrative, a writer about writing, a reluctant inhabitant of cancerland . . . a writer—always, always, a writer.

First and foremost: A writer.

He was a writer of stories. And he was also a reader of them. He always appreciated—and he often invoked, sometimes even channeled—writers of great stories. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Walker Percy. Mary Karr. Tobias Wolff. Raymond Chandler.

He was, too, a philosopher of stories, a scholar of the narrative arts, a narrative investigator, a seeker, and a student of the drama of everyday life, writ large in story, always taking up a narrative line, a narrative turn, and a narrative tune. He was, as Walker Percy’s Binx Bolling put it, on a search. The search was a search for the meanings beneath the appearances, for the dramatic and narrative structures underlying events in the world, for the living, beating heart of meaning. And, naturally, being trained in literature and biography and literary criticism, and an avid reader of sociology and anthropology and all manner of ethnography, he did not hesitate to summon the likes of Kenneth Burke or Erving Goffman or Herbert Blumer from the grave to help him with his task. He could summon just about anyone, from Socrates to Mead to Malinowski to Bateson, from the land of dead White guys—or even from the world of living, breathing, writing Black women, from Toni Morrison to Robin Boylorn—summon the writer he needed, summon her with an easy hand, if only to invigorate his story through the alchemy of, say, the dramatist’s framing mixed with the poet’s spirited pass, or the symbolist’s vision stirred by the ethnographer’s eye.

And then he would drive on, always on that search, seeking, driving toward his destination, but paying close attention to every sign and every turn he passed along the way.

Bud was an alchemist, combining everyday observation with literary force with trenchant wit with communicative spirit—an alchemist making narrative gold. Like this:

“If the cure for boredom is ineffably rooted in the psychic seat of desire yet bounded by the fear of actually satisfying the desire, how can desire be unbound from the fear which helps evoke it?” (Goodall, 1996, p. 67). Or this: “For those who have lived among, and have themselves spun, the intricate webs of secrecy and legend, role-playing ceases to be a second nature. Instead, it becomes one’s only nature.” (Goodall, 2006, p. 348).

And there you have it: Gold. Why do I call these sentences narrative gold? It’s simple, really. These are sentences that make you want more. And more. And more. And so, you floor it through the text, always wanting to know what’s just around the bend.

As you read, you’ll realize this: Sometimes the narrative Jag would take over, seemingly driving itself. Or maybe the brakes just got mushy. It seemed that Bud, the ostensible driver of the text would, so to speak, get on a roll.

And he could hardly contain himself.

I always knew when he was on a roll.

You could feel the narrative heat of it all (Goodall, 2002).

His words would leap, passionately, or wryly, or fearlessly, or even tunefully, off the page, sometimes hitting you between the eyes, pulling you up short, forcing you, against your will, to consider something you had never thought of until now.

He saw his task as, quite simply, to achieve excellence in storytelling, to craft narratives that advance understanding and speak to both public and academic audiences. He worked very hard, especially during the last two decades, to write in ways that could reach an audience beyond just his colleagues and students in the academy. He truly believed that academics have a broader responsibility, beyond the walls of the so-called “Ivory Tower,” to bring our scholarship, our words, and our works to the broader citizenry. So, he dedicated his life to writing great stories, informed by research, sparked by the ethnographic imagination and the power of observation and participation, animated by a direct and dialogic engagement with the reader, and set on fire by the power of character, dialogue, action, movement, and authorial voice.

He asks, “What is our destiny?” . . . and we find ourselves caught up in the question, wondering at the mystery of being, trying to read the signs—yes, even the “divine signs”—in our world, searching, always searching, always engulfed in wonder. He goes on: “Life is too sudden, too short, too important not to speak to possibilities, or at least attempt to. It is context and imagination that create the available intersections . . . ”(Goodall, 1996, pp. 151-152).

In the seeking, we find that the ethnographic quest is inherently a journey of fascination; in the intersections, we find the possibilities we seek. On the road, we find our way, and when we arrive, we know that the ride was a worthy one indeed. So, follow me now, reader, on this road trip through the work of Bud Goodall. I promise it is a worthy ride.

Driving With the Mystery

You think you know where you are going, and what you are doing—until you get there. Then you find out how clueless you are, and you start poking around, searching for clues. Being naturally amiable, and anyway, the kind of guy who wants an audience, and needs a friend, you invite us along for the ride. But you have a pressing problem, of course. You have a clue deficit, so, naturally, being the detective that you are, you seek signs that might lead to clues, clues that might open doors, and so on. And, along the way, you discover that organizations, and the communicators who inhabit them, are very different from what you thought they were. And you follow more clues, and you stumble across something—a new idea. It is the idea that looking at organizations through a new lens, the lens of culture, you may yet discover how the symbols work, how they fit together, how they, along with the traditions and rituals and stories that animate organizational life, actually might be interpreted in ways that are useful—useful not just to organizational scholars but to organizations too, and to publics beyond the walls of academic and organizational life.

And you know you are onto something, so you turn your attention to the reading of a self engulfed in the mysteries of life in a rock ‘n roll band. But before you go there, you realize that you may well be the first ethnographer in communication studies to write a book in the second person. Reflecting back, you know you made this narrative choice for a reason, because it made sense to put the reader in the driver’s seat, drawing Burke’s notions of identification and consubstantiation directly into the structure of the narrative. And it worked, or, at least, you got away with it. Not that it was easy. All that imagining of self as other can be, after all, rather exhausting.

And then you hit the road with a rock band, because you can, and because you are there at this moment in your life. As you explore, you realize, again, that “mystery” is the center of your search, rather than the traditional problem to be resolved or phenomenon to be explained. And you stumble upon the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, and you note that the rituals of “carnival” and the lexicon, the lyrics, and the rhythm of rock music have much in common, as they both speak back to the dominant order. And you see much creative action here, and many parallels between good rock and good ethnography, at least in the practices of composition and practice and performance and “speaking” to audiences, and, well, rebellion.

Besides, you figure a rock band must have a culture, of sorts, or at least must sort of be in a process of “organizing,” so you figure it’s all about “organizational communication,” and you are off and on the road again. And you find yourself embroiled in conflict and trying to make sense of it all, but before you know it, you’re “jamming” (Eisenberg, 1990), and now you are trying to figure out how you got there, and how it all works, and why it sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t, and why, in the end, it’s all a mystery. But you know that a good mystery is like anything good. And it may be much better to embrace the mystery than to “figure it out.”

And you drive on, until you find yourself at a particular intersection, where you simply must stop and look around. And you write:

Intersections, like political elections, force you to look left and right, to make choices based almost entirely on what you imagine you see in light of what you believe. To the right, toward Anderson, are familiar signs of God-fearing, gun-toting interstate existence. Here are the popular corporate icons to fast self-service gas to which are now attached square two-color convenience stores specializing in the open sale of sugar-coated high-calorie nothings displayed seductively in brightly colored plastic wrap . . . To the left—toward Clemson—is an authentic, perfect white southern mansion fronted by a small private pond and surrounded by a highly ornate iron fence and naturally intoxicating magnolia and oak trees. You can use it to momentarily imagine a gone world that probably never was, fill in the imaginary blanks with movie scenes and heavily accented dialogue, just as you always have. (Goodall, 1996, pp. 27-28)

You’ve written this intersection, this place, with the help of your usual keen eye and deft hand, and it intrigues you, so you stick around a while, and explore the place, because you have a job here anyway. You discover that there are signs wherever you look—literal, physical signs, and the other kind of signs, too. There are the ones that you read to learn about the place and what some of its people want you to think about them (most of this courtesy of church marquees), and the ones you learn to read to get the lay of the land, so to speak (most of them traces of communicative undertones). Then there are the ones you read that are signs between the lines—the tones and inflections and accents of things said and things left unsaid. And, meanwhile, you discover that, all along, you have been reading all these signs for a reason, because you really want to understand—or grasp, or touch upon, or at least evoke, or feel, or maybe make a pass at—the spirit that animates this community. You find yourself “thrown” into this place, immersing yourself in coming to grips with its essence, even as you know all along that you can never capture or even trace the lines of its existence, much less its essence, or fully understand any of this. And you know, as all writers do, that words fail to capture what you are trying to express, because you are, really, trying to “eff” the ineffable. And that just can’t be done, but you, of course, writer that you are, simply can’t say, “f” it, so you find yourself compelled to try, even as you wink knowingly at God or spirit or life itself, knowing that the search must continue, and the mystery will largely remain, and you are thoroughly aware that you will come up short, but you forge ahead anyway.

And, besides, you know your life will drive you to another intersection, where you will have to choose which direction to look and in which direction to travel. But, after all, it is the search that matters anyway, not the finding, nor findings, nor any result. As an ethnographer of spirit, you are playfully—and painfully—aware that the deep mystery of communication—that traveling of spirit made manifest in voice and gesture and tone and context and history and engagement—must ultimately remain a mystery. But, anyway, as your friend Eric Eisenberg once remarked, “Mystery loves company” (www.hlgoodall.com). And you think that this is perfectly O.K., because practicing and honing your disciplined ethnographic imagination is far better than not doing it, and because, after all, mysteries are cool. So you continue down the road to the next phase of your journey, writing your way through the mystery that engulfs you.

And, along the way, believe it or not, you have changed the conversation, and transformed ethnography in ways that will always be with us. Your work, in this beginning phase of your career as an ethnographer, matters. It matters because, thanks to you and other pioneers like you—people like Norm Denzin and Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner and Ruth Behar—ethnography as a monolithic practice divorced from reflexivity is now a thing of the past, retreating into the rearview mirror of time. And it matters because your “way with words” has now transformed countless readers and students and colleagues in very concrete ways. But it matters most because it is an invitation—an invitation to your readers, offered in the hope that we will follow you down this road. And we do, and we find ourselves writing differently, thinking differently, hoping differently, working differently, and teaching differently. And we find ourselves, if we are honest, trying to imitate you without making it look too obvious, hoping against hope that one day we will write like you, at least a little. And that, my friend, is something.

And so you move on to the next town, and it turns out that this community of writers needs direction, so you start writing directions, gathered from your years of experience. And one day Art Bochner, at an NCA (National Communication Association) panel, refers to your book, Writing the New Ethnography, as “The little red bible.” And that brings a smile to your face, but, after all, you were just trying to help all the students who found themselves wanting to write their stories of encounter, their stories of ethnographic participation, their stories of lives lived and lives imagined, in ways and in forms that people would actually read, and maybe, just maybe, respond to. Or change because of. Or . . . well, the possibilities were endless, and you were willing to share what you knew about the writing process, about turning field notes into stories, about so many issues—some quite small, some always looming large—that confront anyone who tries to “represent” experience in written form.

And the mystery continues . . .

As you travel down the ethnographic highway, you find that an old mystery resurfaces, and begins to haunt you. A simple but perplexing question nags at you: “Who was my father?” This question is not so uncommon for men of your generation, but yours is a special case, and an especially mysterious one—a case that begins with a gift and ends in a cipher. So your next book comes your way, and, as you put it, you write this book because you can “no longer not write it.” You write this one because you have, gradually, discovered that you can no longer evade the questions about this man you “grew up with but never knew . . . who died mysteriously at the age of fifty-three” (Goodall, 2006, p. 9). Besides, there are perfectly good—though enticingly ambiguous—clues before you, clues that your detective self cannot resist. Clues such as a copy of The Great Gatsby, and a bible, and a diary, and a key, and the odd places you lived in while growing up, and vague memories, and, well, those nagging questions that keep coming up—like the fact that you never really knew what your dad did for a living—clues that tell you that you simply must explore, and discover, and, of course, must write your way through this strange, troubled, secretive, mysterious relationship, write your way into and through your narrative inheritance.

So you set off on yet another road—a road into dark alleys scattered with CIA files, and vague clues, and Cold War intrigue, and family secrecy, and “insane asylums,” and mysterious diseases, and mysterious deaths and near-deaths, and redacted realities. And your “need to know” morphs into a need to engage, a need to organize, and a need to piece together the scattered puzzle pieces. And that morphs into a need to come to grips with the fact that your father’s life will always be shrouded in mystery, but also a need to offer, to the world of readers, an interpretation and an exploration and a lively conversation about what it means to be a father and a son and the father of a son, especially when one of you is a spy. In the end, you write a book with big implications—about family, about secrecy, about government and its limits, about diplomacy and espionage, about brutality and anxiety, and about the sacrifices some people make in the name of country and duty, and about the impacts these sacrifices have on the families and communities they sacrifice for.

This road turns, sometime after 9/11, into a four-lane highway, a highway of terror and counter-terror, of narrative and counter-narrative. And, again, you turn your attention to instructing us, and to enlightening us, about the process of writing qualitative inquiry (Goodall, 2008), and constructing and writing counter-narratives (Goodall, 2010). Here you turn a corner and head straight down “politics lane,” driving the Jag British style now, the way it was intended, on the left side of the road, diagnosing the extremist right lane paranoia that seems to have engulfed our political world, and arguing for a progressive embracing of a long view, and a vision in which progressives—and most especially academics—regain the power of the narrative that has been stolen by the Tea Partiers and their mouthpieces (Glenn Beck, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, et al.). In the end, you implore your most prominent audience, your fellow academics, to take charge, and to rewrite the meta-narrative of our nation:

Those of us in academic life have been more or less content to stay home and attend to other things in the hope that someone out there would do something about it. In this way, we progressive academics resemble our country in the lead-up to 9/11. We ignored the signs. As a result, we have been careless about surveillance and negligent if not dismissive of attacks threatened against us. The image of the liberal, of the progressive, has been the subject of humor and ridicule in the public sphere. More worried about our own mortgages, our jobs, our families, our own institutions, and our comfortable lives than about the steady erosion of our national narrative, we have simply persevered. Unwilling to do the hard emotional labor of connecting the dots for ourselves and for others, we Doctors of Philosophy and others of similar ilk have been largely irrelevant to the ongoing war of ideas . . . But that time is over. It must be over. (Goodall, 2010, p. 169)

The End of Time

True. Too true. Enough said. We hear the call.

And then, one day, you went to the doctor. You knew you were sick, but you had no idea it was this bad. And suddenly, you find yourself writing your way through “Cancerland” (www.hlgoodall.com). Certainly not how you, or we, expected your narrative Jag to end. Definitely not the ending we wanted. Not now. Not yet.

And I, always riding along with you, made it my job to read your Cancerland blog, to ride with you to the bitter end, riding, and hoping against hope that something could be changed about the trajectory of this narrative. Or at least slowed, or delayed, or something.

And yet, I knew that one day that unwelcome news would come. Braced myself for it, wrote toward it, sighed a lot, cried a bit.

Along the way, I found myself thinking—thinking deeply—about the impact you have had on me, and on my students, and on your other colleagues and their students, and your students, and your readers, and all the practitioners of ethnography I know. I thought about you holding forth at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, about your masterful voicing of your work before packed rooms. And I thought about how you—your presence and your passion and your wit and your intelligence and your writing—yes, your writing, always your writing—have changed the world forever.

It is simply, and unequivocally, true that, because of you ethnography will never be the same. As I hope I’ve demonstrated here, that is a good thing.

What has this long, strange road trip wrought? What has your narrative Jag done for us? To put it simply, you transformed a need to know into a storied practice of inquiry (narrative inquiry), which itself became a brilliantly storied way of knowing. And that, my friend, is a good thing.

A very good thing, indeed.

We are all, in fact, better because of your narrative Jag.

And now, all too suddenly, the car stops, and we find we have arrived at our destination, the place where we must turn back and look across the miles you’ve covered, and attempt to make sense of the trip. You have left us now, left us to unravel the mystery, left us in mid-sentence, so to speak. And we find ourselves needing to take up the conversation, to unpack its meaning and its import.

The depth of your impact on ethnography, on us, on your readers, is difficult to estimate. It seems to me that you changed the conversation. You pushed us all to be more reflexive. You pushed us to engage the power of story. You showed us how to invoke the storied voice of the author to make a stand. You invited us to embrace the mystery of being and the power of the ethnographic imagination, to shift the energy of inquiry. You showed us how to read the signs. You showed us how to imagine that writing our way through this world might actually allow us to gain “a higher state of scholarly consciousness” grounded in a “transformational vision” (Goodall, 2000, p. 198).

You showed us that “to communicate is divine” (Goodall, 1996, p. 226).

Indeed.

And to write—to write the way you write—is to divine. You taught us how to divine the signs, how to read the mystery swirling about us, how to open doors to new meanings, how to build a story from the raw fragments of chipped/partial memories, how to build roads to new understandings. You showed us how to drive through it all ethnographically, with spirit, with voice, with passion, with care.

But, of course, for me, the end of your earthly ride was so much more personal than that. So I found myself, on the day you made your final turn down the great blue highway of inquiry, leaving the Jag behind for another, fresher mystery . . . wondering how, on earth, I could possibly say goodbye. I wrote you a letter, one I could never deliver, but one I found myself writing because, thanks to you, I could not not write it:

Dear Bud,

When I heard the news, I was stunned. I just about fell over. I had no words, no wind. My breath was gone. I was, for a time, struck numb. Then the sadness came, surfacing in waves, receding in waves too. I sometimes felt I was drowning in sorrow. And that was just the diagnosis. When I learned that your long battle with cancer was over, I was, again, struck numb. I did not know what to do. I wanted so badly to talk with you, to talk about life, about writing, about politics and narratives and the academic life, about reading and the power of ethnography, about so much that we had never had a chance to talk about. Yes, we had some great conversations over the years, but we did not manage to cover everything. We did not, in fact, have enough conversations. Is there ever enough time with friends?

And then there was this thing, looming large in my consciousness, but standing just shy of my words. Perhaps it is a thing that is understood, or implicit, as friendships develop over time. It is a thing that, as a guy in our culture, I find myself stumbling over from time to time, something I wasn’t trained to do early in life, something I’ve only lately come to grasp. This thing, this feeling that you mean something to me, something beyond words, something that I can only call brotherly love, surfaced from time to time as I knew you. But when I found out you were leaving, I felt compelled to tell you how much you and your friendship have meant to me over the years. When you emailed me to tell me about your diagnosis, I was, as I said, struck mute and numb. But a day or two later, I wrote,

Dear Bud,

For these past few days, I have been struggling with words. I do not know what to say, really. My heart aches for you, and for your family, and for all of us who know and love you. I cannot quite grasp this news, nor can I estimate what it means. Like Pete said (yes, we talked), I cannot imagine a world without you. You (your presence, your support, your work) have meant so much to me I cannot begin to calculate the impact you’ve had on my life. As I told you recently at QI, you are the reason I’m an ethnographer, and the reason I even have a Ph.D. Your work saved me first; then you hired me; then you supported me in my wacky tenure case. But it’s more than all that. You befriended me immediately, and for that I will always be grateful. Of course, your magnificent writing has inspired so many of us . . . but it’s YOU and your (big) presence that I feel very fortunate to have experienced in my life. You are a rare, amazing person

Peace,

Chris. (Personal communication, June 9, 2011)

That’s what I wrote, but somehow it immediately seemed that words fail in situations like this. Words fail, and we are left, only, with our tears. Sure, we can write our way through the tears, as I am doing right now, but . . . can words capture the true meaning of friendship? Can I ever repay the debt of friendship? Can the words even come close to reaching the feeling of the friendship, or its impending loss?

What do you say to someone who is dying? What do you say to reassure him, to make sure it’s not about you, to step away from the self-centered sense of loss you feel, to reach out in comfort and compassion? What do you say? And I could only think, maybe, you knew what I wanted to say. You were, after all, a master of reading signs, of locating and reading clues, of deciphering the undecipherable.

I wanted to say “Thank you.”

I wanted to say, “I love you, my friend.”

And now all I can say is this: Adieu. I commend you to God. Go with God, my friend. Surely we will meet again someday.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll read Divine Signs, or A Need to Know, or Casing a Promised Land, or Counter-Narrative again. Maybe I’ll pluck “the little red bible” off the shelf in my office, and thumb through it, looking for a sign. Maybe I’ll read all of your work again. Maybe you left a sign somewhere. Man, I need a sign. Maybe I’ll read it all, and feel the narrative heat again. What is the meaning of it all? Maybe I’ll read it all, and hear your voice. I know, as I read it all, I will find your heart in those pages. And I will be a better person for it.

Adieu, my friend.