Abstract
Stories make harmful actions both plausible and compelling. They provide a lot of what qualitative researchers consider data, but as a discursive form have received only scant attention in criminology. From interviews with imprisoned drug dealers in Norway, this paper identifies three forms of narrative: first, life-stories summarizing and reducing the immense complexity of individual lives; second, stories about particular events such as narrative turning points in life-stories, but also less significant episodes; finally, tropes that only hint at familiar stories. These different narrative forms are crucial in understanding the manifold and central role of stories in society. They can only be understood as part of the interactional context of storytelling, and as proposed by narrative criminology, their effects are essential for understanding crime and harmful action. In this paper I argue that tropes are the most salient forms of narrative. They are indicative of that which ‘goes without saying’, and can be used to identify both ambiguity and hegemonic discourse. In such efforts narrative criminology needs to move beyond interpretation of full narratives, to include reconstruction of stories from tropes.
Introduction
Cultures and subcultures are created, upheld and crumble through the telling of stories. Myths, folktales and canonized stories of organized religion have systematically arranged meaning and enabled people to explore the differences between right and wrong. Barthes and Duisit (1975: 237) famously stated that ‘there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative’. Stories have always been important, but now, life is fitted in a reflexive modernity (Giddens, 1991) fostering a particular culture of storytelling (Weeks, 1998). As opposed to traditional storytelling, contemporary stories are often personal narratives. The sources of insights and truths seem no longer to be gods and magical creatures, but instead personal experiences. People are motivated to tell their stories about suffering and success so that ‘others can learn’, which again has influenced the idea of ‘giving voice’ in contemporary social science (Mazzei and Jackson, 2009).
Offenders are eager and often highly competent storytellers. What makes up street culture, for example, is a wealth of stories, myths and anecdotes (Lauger, 2014). Convicts meet the demands of storytelling in prisons, halfway houses and rehabilitation programmes (Ugelvik, 2014; Wieder, 1974), and many have grown up in institutions and foster care where they were trained in telling personal narratives (Andersen, 2014, 2015). Crime, harm and deviance have a particular role in storytelling. Storytelling has been used to transmit values and norms by drawing boundaries between a moral us and a deviant them, but also to entertain and to pass time. Illustratively, crime stories make up most of the popular culture in television and the film industry. All these stories are vital resources for narrative criminology. With all this storytelling going on, it is surprising that criminology has not taken more interest in it.
In this paper, the aim is to elaborate on different narrative forms: life-stories, event-stories and tropes. I discuss their importance for criminology in general, and for a framework of narrative criminology in particular. Tropes are often not considered to be stories, but I argue that they are the most salient ones. They are modal manifestations of stories, their ambiguity a social resource and their taken-for-grantedness pivotal for understanding hegemonic discourse.
Forms of narrative
Narratives are not easily defined, but narrative scholars tend to emphasize some kind of temporality, one event following another, and causality, one event caused by another. These two components create the plot that gives a narrative meaning (Polletta et al., 2011). Narratives have many forms, but were early on described as having a particular structure (Labov, 1972), set of characters (Propp, 1968) and genres (Smith, 2005). Structure includes such parts as orientation and evaluation, characters can be common figures such as heroes or helpers and genres are categories of narratives with similar form and/or content. Elements, characters and genres are only some of the many structures found in narratives (Bal, 2009). In this study the emphasis will be on life-story, event-story and trope.
Life-stories refer to the ways people ‘provide their lives with unity and purpose by constructing internalized and evolving narratives of the self’ (McAdam, 2001: 100). The life-story model of identity (e.g. McAdam, 1985) emerged in psychology as a response to increasing interest in the narrative patterns in which clients talked about their life. The underlying idea was that life-stories reflect the individuality of a person (Thorne, 2000). The psychological approach was the first narrative approach in criminology, initially described as a study of ‘inner narratives’ influencing criminal action (Canter, 1994). These studies of the life-stories of offenders often assumed a direct relationship between an individual story and maintenance of a criminal life-style or desistance from crime (e.g. Canter and Youngs, 2009; Maruna, 2001).
Event-stories in this study are closer to the classical understanding of narrative in narratology and socio-linguistics. Put simply it is ‘one way of recounting past events, in which the order of narrative clauses matches the order of events as they occurred’ (Labov, 2010: 546). The emphasis on stories as accounts of particular episodes has been the dominant approach in the emerging framework of narrative criminology. Most of the empirical studies in the newly released edited volume Narrative Criminology (Presser and Sandberg, 2015a) relate to event-stories. The main difference from the life-history approach is that the unit of analysis (the story) is concrete stories about particular events, not summarizing attempts to go to the core of all the different stories told by an individual. In that sense the focus is not on the essence or individuality of each study participant, but instead on key stories in a social and narrative environment.
The final form of narrative is the trope. The concept of trope is used in a variety of ways in literature studies, but I use it to describe agreed-upon stories referred to in words or phrases through ‘commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices’ (Cuddon and Preston, 1998). In an argument for ‘small stories’ (everyday stories and narrative fragments) over ‘big stories’ (life-stories), Bamberg and Georgakopoulou have emphasized ‘allusions to (previous) tellings, deferral of tellings, and refusals to tell’ (2008: 381). They use detailed analysis of oral language use to show how small stories can be windows to pre-existing systems of interpretation. Identifying tropes can be part of grand historical and societal analysis. Foucault’s archeological approach, for example, identifies tropes to reveal the underlying discourses or systems of meaning in a particular time in history (e.g. Foucault, 1972).
Life-stories, event-stories and tropes are closely connected and in conversations and interviews they will all appear intertwined with each other. However, whether we look for life-stories, event-stories or tropes in the analysis has crucial impact on conclusions and insights (see also Sandberg, 2013). Searching for life-stories will support notions of individual essence, self and identity. Event-stories will lead the analysis towards studies of particular key episodes in research participants’ lives, and studies of tropes can point towards ambiguity and dominant discourses.
Narrative criminology
Narratives, in any form, are only one out of many discursive forms, but in narrative analysis and theory they are considered particularly important. Self is seen as a product of our telling (Bruner, 2003) and “autobiography structures our living” (Eakin, 2004: 122). Stories can integrate lives, entertain, illustrate, instruct, envision alternatives, comfort, dramatize, help people live with contradictions and grasp temporality (Polletta, 2006: 11). They also draw symbolic boundaries and assist understandings of who ‘we’ are by making clear who ‘we’ are not (Copes et al., 2008). The immense effects stories have for shaping and upholding cultures and identities, and resolving everyday and tricky situations are probably the main reason why stories are so widely told.
Stories are captivating and persuasive, but they also give grounds for suspicion (Polletta and Lee, 2006). The phrase ‘it’s just a story’ is common, and there is particular skepticism about stories coming from offenders. Influenced by neutralization theory and the focus on justifications, excuses and accounts (Maruna and Copes, 2005), criminology has often emphasized what people do with stories. Narratives, however, are seldom the outcome of conscious strategies by storytellers, but more a kind of practical sense learnt through socialization (Bourdieu, 1977 [1972]). People generally do not engage in storytelling to excuse themselves. Through storytelling they explore existential issues, construct identities and understand themselves and others. They also respond to what is the appropriate thing to do. Replacing the instrumentalist perspective on stories in criminology, stories can therefore be seen as something people ‘live by’ (McAdam, 1993), and life as enactments of stories (Frank, 2010). Storytelling is not a strategy separable from life itself.
Narrative criminology is both a theoretical (Presser and Sandberg, 2015a) and methodological approach (Presser and Sandberg, 2015b). Influenced by traditions ranging from narrative psychology, ethnomethodology, structuralism and postmodernism, it refers to any effort to the study of how stories motivate, maintain or restrain harmful action. Narrative criminology views stories as criminogenic because they motivate and restrain crime and harm, and it studies, in detail, how this is done. It also explores the role of stories in desistance (Maruna, 2001) and abstinence (Joosse et al., 2015) from crime. Narrative criminology studies both societal stories about crime and the stories of those labelled as criminals by the judicial system. Inspired by narrative ethnography (Gubrium and Holstein, 2008), narrative criminologists study the social context of storytelling, for example how time, place, social context, narrator and audience shape the interpretation and effect of storytelling (Fleetwood, 2015; Ugelvik, 2015). They also study how stories are produced by social, spatial, ethnic and economic structures. Narratives are both gendered and classed, but stories also contribute to form these social structures (Fleetwood, 2014; Sandberg and Pedersen, 2009). Narrative criminology has a fundamentally social-constructivist approach to stories: they do not only retell or interpret events, but contribute to making and shaping the world.
My main aim in this paper is theoretical, presenting different forms of narratives and the work they do. The most important are life-stories, event-stories and tropes, and I will demonstrate that they are all important to understand the narrative universe of offenders. The latter is arguably the most important, but tropes have only been briefly mentioned as part of more standard narrative analysis in criminology (e.g. Fleetwood, 2015; Sandberg, 2010; Ugelvik, 2015). I will argue that tropes can reveal what Bourdieu (1977 [1972]) describes as doxa and Laclau and Mouffe (1985) term hegemonic discourse – or that in a society which is taken for granted. I also explore the ambiguity of stories and address the complex relationship between events and story, a core interest for narrative criminologists. In all these efforts, I draw on examples from a recent study of incarcerated drug dealers in Norway.
Method
The stories in this paper come from interviews with 60 incarcerated drug dealers aged 20 to 50 (mean age 36) in six prisons throughout Norway. Twenty-eight were women and 32 were men. All participants had experience with drug distribution, ranging from lower-level heroin dealing to large-scale, international trafficking of cocaine, amphetamines or heroin. Combining interview data with the guidelines of the Norwegian Director General of Public Prosecution, 12 percent of the sample can be categorized as low-level dealers, 65 percent as mid-level and 23 percent as high-level dealers (for more details see Shammas et al., 2014). Most participants had long histories of drug use, typically involving several drugs. The main drugs sold were amphetamines (38 percent), cannabis (25 percent) and heroin (23 percent). The dealers also had troubled backgrounds typically involving abuse, parental neglect and contact with child authority agencies.
The incarcerated dealers were socially marginalized in Norwegian society and heavily influenced by what can be described as street culture. Ilan (2015: 8) defines street culture as the ‘values, dispositions, practices and styles associated with particular sections of disadvantaged populations’. He argues that rather than being fixed, street culture should be seen as a cultural spectrum from ‘street cool’ to the culture of organized criminals. Participants in this study did not possess forms of street culture appreciated by mainstream society (music, dressing style, attitude etc), but instead identified with the more extreme points of the street cultural spectrum, for example emphasizing toughness, violent potential and criminal business. Participants’ attachment to street culture was closely connected to their marginal status. Status frustration made crime and violence ways of gaining the respect and recognition they did not experience in mainstream society (Cohen, 1955).
Interviews focused on participants’ life-trajectories and the social world of drug dealing and violence in Norway. They lasted between 1.5 and 2.5 hours, and were carried out by a team of five researchers with previous experience in qualitative interviewing with hard-to-reach populations. The researchers’ earlier knowledge of the street and prison culture of the inmates may have influenced the use of tropes. Sharing a narrative repertoire makes this more frequent. At the same time interviewers tried to act as the ‘naive researcher’. Most interviews were done in closed visitor rooms in the prison, thus inviting privacy but still being limited by the prison setting. The author and three male researchers interviewed the male dealers and a female researcher interviewed the female dealers. Using an interviewer of the same gender as a participant was intended to increase resonance between them. There was a tendency for more laughter and masculine showing off in the male-to-male interviews and more display of emotions and crying in the female-to-female interviews. Women described very different drug market roles from the men (Grundetjern, 2015), but interviews did not differ greatly when it came to descriptions of particular drug market mechanisms, for example the use of credit (Moeller and Sandberg, 2015). Stories are tailored to storytelling occasions and narrative environments (Gubrium and Holstein, 2008). This will be mentioned when particularly relevant for the analysis, but unfortunately there is not enough space in this paper to go into details on each storytelling occasion.
We used a general semi-structured interview guide, but interviewers were permitted to follow up themes that emerged in the course of interviews. The participants were not asked to retell their lives as a life-story (e.g. McAdam, 1993) nor did the researchers explicitly probe for stories. Narratives – understood as events presented in a sequential order where one event causes another – still appeared throughout data, and were easy to recognize. Interviews were coded extensively in an attempt to identify different narrative forms. Three of these codes were particularly relevant for this study: life-stories (one dominant narrative in each interview); event-stories (lengthy stories about particular episodes); and tropes (words or phrases that hint towards a familiar story). Together these codes reflect the main forms narratives take in interview data and the results from this coding make up the main part of the analysis below. These narrative forms and results are analyzed in detail, exploring their uses among incarcerated drug dealers.
Stories and harmful action
Narrative criminology is struggling with the same issues as mainstream criminology – what causes crime or harm, or desistance from it – and is therefore particularly concerned with the constitutive effects of storytelling (Presser, 2009). Stories do not only have effects on cultures and identities, but also on particular episodes of harmful actions. Many stories in mainstream society are about acts considered criminal. Offenders often imitate these stories and engage in harm to enact particular self-stories. Like hunter stories in traditional societies (Rosaldo, 1989: 129), crime is sometimes sought out to get a life worth narrating.
In street culture, actors need a repertoire of stories that establish their position. Marthe, a 25-year-old mid-level dealer and opiate-user, explained that it was part of her ‘education’ to ‘stand up for herself, and not let anyone step on her, no matter what’. This socialization had been a long process and took many forms. When she was 16 a guy had hit her on the head with a bottle. Her brother, a well-known criminal and Marthe’s mentor and primary inductor into street culture, got involved. He tracked the guy down, but instead of beating him up himself, prepared everything so that she could retaliate.
Without me knowing it. He came and got me, and was supposed to drive me to town. And suddenly I end up in another place, and I’m told to use a number of bottles and take revenge. Right, so. And this was talked about right after, and builds up in a way, right, and people in a way get a little … [respect] yes.
The use of the same weapon (bottle) in the retaliation indicates a sensibility for storytelling potential at the point of using violence. The outcome and primary motivation of the violence was a story of retaliation and violence that boosted her reputation on the street. The story that came out of it was that if you mess with ‘us’ (first event) worse will happen to you (in the second event), implying both temporality and causality between a set of events. While stories are often considered after-the-fact interpretations, they also motivate and shape practices. Note also how the word respect does not need saying, it is taken for granted because the interviewer and the research participants share the narrative repertoire of street culture.
The emphasis in narrative criminology is on crime and harm towards others (Sandberg and Presser, 2015a), but many also do harm towards themselves, for example using drugs that come with great risks. Drug use can be seen as self-medication and reaction to pain and trauma, but it is also an enactment of stories – e.g. response to difficulties – and subsequently a story to tell. Kristian is a 49-year-old mid-level dealer who used both amphetamines and opiates. He was in custody when a priest came and told him that his brother had died: I remember that I got out of bed and screamed: No! And then I fainted. Then they came afterwards and said: Now you can pack your cell, you are released. Then I went to the apartment where it had happened. (…) Then I went right across, to the liquor store, bought me a bottle of vodka, and took the Metro to the city. When I got to the city I had drunk the bottle of vodka, so I bought myself a gram of heroin, and so I got down to the dock, hid among some containers, cooked up all of it, drew it up, shot it up. So then I say: Yeah, we’ll see each other now, brother. Afterwards I came back to myself. Then there are all these white coats around me. The first thing I ask is: Am I in heaven? No, you are not, he says. You are very lucky, because the older guy here saw what you were doing, was coming around the corner just as you were taking the overdose. So he made the call, he saved you. Then I jump right at his throat. Do you know how much this cost me? I was so busy with taking my own life, because I was going to where my brother was.
Kristian was closely attached to his brother and the attempted suicide was a reaction to his death. He might also have been motivated by similar stories about suicides, and enacted a pre-given story (Mattingly, 1998: 33). A suicide attempt is a powerful, symbolic act that creates a story. More powerful than verbally expressing sorrow, the overdose enacted a dramatic episode fit for storytelling. It made it possible for Kristian to express his grief through an authentic story. Stories are ongoing processes: Events are motivated by stories, and create new stories in constant and intertwined cycles of storytelling practice and lived life.
Isaac Babel proposes that a ‘well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life’ because life ‘itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story’. 1 Exceptional forms of crime, such as school shootings, serial murders or terrorism, emerge from an established repertoire of stories that motivate harmful acts. Stabler forms of crime such as gang-related violence or the use of illegal drugs are continually upheld through stories. The dramatic and unexpected nature of crime is perfect material for storytelling—and thus also for life. Offenders enact familiar stories and strive to make their lives similar to life-stories they are intrigued by. Stories motivate acts by making them available – one had not even considered the possibility – and attractive by associating them with particular cultures, identities or life-stories.
Forms of narrative
Narrative criminology is particularly interested in the relationship between stories and harm (Presser and Sandberg, 2015). In the rest of the paper I explore three different forms of narratives that motivate, maintain and restrain crime and harm.
Life-stories: Integrating lives
Western society trains its citizens to relate their life in the form of one coherent story, and people generally seek to be coherent. What are often described as life-stories help people bring together bits and pieces of lived lives and put them together into a larger unity. In life-narratives that are more fragmented, there may be certain stories and turning points that play a key role for individuals and their sense of being one (Linde, 1993). Life-stories integrate the past with the present, provide direction and purpose and integrate different aspects and events of life. Qualitative researchers often study ‘psychologically rich and detailed autobiographical stories, often derived from interviews of people who present some sort of problem or question for the researcher’ (McAdam, 2012: 17). In criminology, the problem – some kind of ‘crime’ – is given and the question is often why the offence was committed. 2
In this research project the use and sale of illegal drugs was an important theme. Anette is a 23-year-old mid-level dealer and opiate-user. When asked at the start of the interview about her upbringing she presented a ready-made life-story that answered what she assumed to be the main research question:
Could you start by talking about your upbringing, your childhood and your family, just a brief outline?
I was born in Oslo, and before I turned 18, I was sent to a children’s home, right here in the city. From the shelter, I was sent into foster care along with two older brothers, and we were all sexually abused, and there was a lot of abuse. For four years. And after that, when it became known, about the sexual abuses, we were sent back to mom. And we lived at home with mom for a couple of years. My mother is a drug addict and an alcoholic. So that didn’t work out in the long run. So then one of my brothers and I moved out to the youth shelter again. And I’ve been living in juvenile group homes and shelters since then, until I turned 18 years old. I started getting high when I was 12 years old. I started on amphetamines when I was 13. Then I started using heroin when I was 15. And when I was 19, I took a break, or I quit, because I got pregnant. So I was forcibly sent to drug rehabilitation in a secure facility for pregnant drug addicts. And I was there for 8 months, and then I got my daughter and lost her at the hospital. The child welfare services took her away from me. And I stayed clean for nine months after that. I kept fighting in court, handed in urine samples and stuff to prove I was clean. And then after nine months I couldn’t handle it any longer, then I fell off the wagon.
This narrative has the characteristic temporality and causality: that is events follow a particular order (the order in which they are told) and one event (e.g. losing custody of a child) led to another (use of heroin). Most offenders’ stories are told in the genre of comedy, romance, adventure or tragedy. Tragedy characterized Anette and many hard drug users’ life-story. The essence is ‘the futility of human striving, the fall from grace, the missed opportunity and the horror of suffering’ (Smith, 2005: 25). Fatalism is a recurrent theme in tragedy, for example when the solution to a problem is another problem. In Anette’s case, the solution to the loss of her child was to take up again the use of a drug that, in the end, further increased her troubles. The tragic story evokes empathy and makes her otherwise hard-to-understand drug use comprehensible. It is a ‘sad tale’ (Goffman, 1961) about the outcome of several tragic and interlinked events in her life.
Not only parts of conversations and interviews, but also entire interviews can be seen as having the features of a life-story. Some researchers explicitly search for this kind of unity in stories by asking interviewees to relate their life in the form of a book with different chapters (McAdam, 1993). The idea is that every person has one story, or at least can be triggered into telling about their life in the form of a story. Other researchers conduct their studies less systematically for coherence, but still end up with identifying one story for each person they talk to (Maruna, 2001; Presser, 2008). Hankiss (1981) has suggested that all life-stories can be divided into four: dynastic (a good past gives birth to a good present); antithetical (a bad past gives birth to a good present); compensatory (a good past gives birth to a bad present); or self-absolutory (a bad past gives birth to a bad present). In this study, 27 of the 60 life-stories were self-absolutory. The idea that the present condition was a poor one and that past life events could be blamed for it was widespread. This reflects the social and economic marginalization and drug problems of most participants. It also reflects the dominance of the tragic genre in this narrative environment.
The importance of the tragic narrative is further illustrated by the 17 life-stories that could be categorized as compensatory. These claimed that their present condition was a poor one due to use of drugs and involvement in crime, but emphasized having had a good upbringing and childhood. Their present condition was a ‘fall from grace’. This was sometimes a fact of life, and sometimes parts of the narrative worked to protect significant others, particularly parents. Still, there were variations, as there often are in storytelling, and some of the participants concluded that they enjoyed life as drug traffickers. Eleven of the life-stories collected were either dynastic or antithetical, indicating a positive evaluation of the present condition. 3 They emphasized that drug dealing had provided them material resources and power they could otherwise only have dreamt of, and that the drug dealing lifestyle came with excitement and pleasures.
Nonetheless, the main impression when analyzing the entire interviews in this study was ambiguity and incoherence rather than the easy identification of life-stories. This was best seen when coding life-stories for Presser’s (2008) reform narratives (change from criminal past), stability narratives (no change) and elastic life-narratives (shifts between reform and stability narratives). While 12 participants in our study related relatively coherent reform narratives, and nine related stability narratives, 35 life-stories could only be categorized as elastic. 4 Participants were torn over whether they wanted to stop dealing drugs when they came out or not, and evaluated their drug-dealing lifestyle differently throughout the interview.
Life-stories contain a multitude of sometimes contradictory stories. The importance of some kind of coherence is still revealed in the narrative work often put into trying to construct coherence, as seen in the dynastic, antithetical, compensatory and self-absolutory self-narratives among interviewees. Rather than being a characteristic of life-stories, coherence and unity should be seen as something storytellers strive for (Linde, 1993). What are often described as life-stories are complex, ambiguous collections of multiple and contradictory stories. If pursuing one particular story (when interviewing or analyzing) it is possible to develop one, but the degree to which people have one life-story – or even one story (Sandberg et al., 2015) – should be questioned. Life provides a pool of events and experiences that under the right circumstances can be combined to form a coherent life-story. These attempts at coherency are still important for storytellers and, therefore, also important for researchers trying to understand them.
Event-stories: Accounting for episodes
Unlike life-stories constructed actively by researchers drawing upon vast amounts of interview data, event-stories refer to limited and clearly identifiable extracts of text. Presser (2008: 157) describes stories as ‘accounts of a particular episode in one’s life’. These have a ‘beginning, middle, and an ending’ and are ‘held together by recognizable patterns of events’ (Sarbin, 1986: 3). The temporality and causality implied is one between a few tightly knit episodes, not entire lives. Event-stories have many of Labov’s (1972) narrative elements and often include several of Propp’s (1968) narrative characters.
In the same way as life-stories, event-stories have integrating capacities. Some drug dealers told otherwise innocent stories about wrecking the neighbor’s garden or escaping kindergarten, which became stories about ‘how it all started’. One research participant told about being forced to the ground and held there by a group of six employees in a closed psychiatric facility and explained how that started his violent career. Another participant told how he at some point realized that if he continued being violent he would probably end up killing someone, and yet another explained how seeing someone getting killed changed him. Many told about the importance of having a baby or getting a new partner and how that, at some point, had changed their life. These stories reflected particular episodes, but were also narrative turning points in the life-stories the participants continually struggled to put together.
One frequent event-story was that of violent revenge. Stories of retribution for insults, fights and unpaid drug debts are common in hard-core street cultures (Jacobs and Wright, 2006). This was common in this sample as well, but there were also stories about avenging maltreatment in romantic relationships and childhood/adolescence. Some female dealers indicated that they had retaliated against abusive boyfriends, and several participants told about getting back at abusive parents, stepfathers or others. Sigmund, a 23-year-old amphetamines user and high-level dealer, was one of these:
If we did crazy things then we’d get a beating, we’d get locked up down in the storage and stuff (laughter), and things like that, so I guess that’s what affected both my brother and I most of our lives, because we both ended up in the criminal world.
How did you come out of it in the end?
It was my mother that started to realize what was going on, so she threw him out.
Have you had contact with him since then?
This went on from the time I was four, five years until I was nine, then I moved to an orphanage. Then I met him up in the north of Norway, I must have been 17, 18, I guess. Then it just happened automatically. I had to go and hit him a few times. My mother said he became a total nervous wreck after (laughs), I was a little satisfied (rubs hands together).
Sigmund linked the abuse he had experienced as a child to his criminal career, thereby integrating separate events in a self-absolutory life-story. He continued to describe the abuse he and his brother experienced and described gaining revenge as having reached his ‘goal in life’. Later he went more into more detail on the episode where he retaliated, and elaborated on the point of the story:
At that point, I wasn’t little anymore, and he’s not so big, so now I can take him (laughs carefully), now I had the chance, so then right out and just like bam (makes punching motion) (…) I just gave him a little beating. I was a bit bigger and stronger than him now. So then he saw that it wasn’t cool at all when there was a bigger person (laughs carefully) standing over a smaller one laying on the ground and not being able to do so damn much.
Did you talk to each other?
No, no. I just stood and screamed in his face, ‘Yeah, how does it feel now, is this cool?’ like that, ‘now you watch out, I’m going to come and get you’ I said. After having hit him a few times, I asked him to go the fuck home, and then he scurried away with his tail between his legs.
The retaliation was a key event in his life and established Sigmund as someone who stood up for himself. As a forceful social-movement narrative, it ‘transformed a too-common story of humiliation into one of triumph’ (Polletta, 2006: 42). It also made it possible for him to talk about the abuse he had experienced throughout this life without taking up the degrading position of the victim who is so often looked down upon in street culture (Copes et al., 2008). The story conveyed critical and degrading experiences in early childhood and combined them with his present self-understanding as a tough man.
Stories of violence establish and maintain hierarchies, convey values and clarify ‘the meaning of manhood’ as understood on the street (Lauger, 2014: 2). Needless to say, the stories of street culture are highly masculine, portraying a very particular image of masculinity (Mullins, 2006). For the female participants in this study the street cultural context meant they continuously had to negotiate their position, by either playing up masculinity or taking advantage of traditional femininity when dealing drugs (Grundetjern, 2015). The stories of street culture were omnipresent, but sometimes combined with other narrative genres. Kjersti, a 35-year-old mid-level dealer and amphetamines user, told about an episode using a drug she called ‘Die Metal Triptamin’: I was gone for 19 minutes and almost 20 seconds. My friend was almost positive that I was dead. What happened was this: I take a drag from the pipe, and then just like puff then I’m gone. I experienced that I had to, like, accept dying. And as I accepted it then there came that thing where everything got totally dark, and then just like puff! And then, I was out in one thing or another that I can’t describe. When I came back to myself, then ahhh (gasps for air), I got a second chance.
The episode was clearly memorable and important. The experience of being about to die and getting a second chance had many similarities to redemption narratives (McAdam, 2012: 22), but the evaluation was tailored to the cultural context of the street.
It is because I know that it doesn’t hurt to die, it’s actually totally fantastic. And I know that there is a lot afterwards. And then when I die I’ll just do like this, good-bye, because I know that I’ll just be moving on.
(…) You weren’t afraid of anything anymore?
If someone puts a gun to my head, then I just say ‘wouldn’t you mind’ (laughs). Because I know that dying doesn’t hurt.
Kjersti tells it as a life-changing experience and narrative turning point. Religious connotations are present in ideas about going to another place after death, but they are combined with absence of fear in violent confrontations more fit for the cultural logics of street culture. This story can be seen as making a point about being fearless and depicts the fatalism typical for marginalized at-risk populations (Ilan, 2015: 16). Further, not fearing death is a way to live as a drug dealer with the constant risks of violence.
Many stories have strong codas or evaluations. Other stories recapitulate events without having any wider implications. This can confuse audiences who expect some kind of moral or larger point. Responding to a question about how he was discharged from the military, Olaf, a 42-year-old mid-level dealer and amphetamines user, told a long story about how he got drunk and threatened an officer with a weapon. Expecting him to reach a point, the interviewer probed several times for significance:
Could you just say a few words about that episode, it’s a long time ago. It sounds like quite a special episode?
It was the booze, you know. And really kind of innocent, if you ask me. (…)
Yes. But did the episode do anything to you, would you say? Afterwards, even though … Did it change how you looked at yourself?
No, I don’t think so. Everything was just cool back then.
This lack of evaluation or coda is the case with many stories. It can indicate a point widely shared, or acts so naturalized that they need no evaluation (Presser, 2013: 66). At other times, points are missing because stories are told to recapitulate particular events, or just part of ‘making conversation’. Reporting can be described as a separate discursive genre (Riessman, 2008), but reporting often takes place through the telling of a narrative. Stories without a clear point are still of great importance since they provide the audience with an opportunity to take part in the dialogue and add their own evaluation.
Tropes: Stories untold
Narrative scholars have emphasized that narratives are dialogical, containing multiple voices (Frank, 2010; Sandberg et al., 2015). Stories tend to be ambiguous, and often the ‘impossibility of logically explaining events compels us to tell stories’ (Miller, 1990: 72). Tropes are single words or short phrases that only hint at familiar stories. Providing only fragments of stories is a crucial feature of this openness. Per Ole, a 37-year-old mid-level dealer and amphetamines user, told a story about his imprisonment for abusing his girlfriend: On Christmas Eve we’d been around with gifts for our kids. So I was driving and she was drinking GHB [Gamma hydroxybutyrate], and she’d been around to see her daughter and then. She’s lost her daughter before because she was using drugs, so the whole thing is a little sensitive to her. So she took an overdose of GHB by the time we came home. She was all the way up here (indicates, moving arms), if you’ve ever seen a GHB overdose, then you would know what I mean. So she jumps out of the car. So I start running after her because she was lying in the road back there. So I tried to grab hold of her and pull her back into the car, along the road. Didn’t want a lot of attention. And she completely lost it, an overdose. So I suppose it didn’t look quite the way it should have, pulling this lifeless body along the road. So of course somebody called the police. She was screaming, ‘Aahhh,’ on the side of the road, so I just had to throw her into the car and go, you know. I had a couple of things in the car that shouldn’t have been there (laughs). That wouldn’t have been good to … yeah. A couple of grams of cocaine and a couple of things lying around the car, I think. I only got about as far as a couple of hundred yards down the road when they stopped us (imitates siren).
At the surface this is a regular event-story, but there are several voices present making this a rather complicated narrative. The full story is spelled out in detail and accounts for and justifies his imprisonment by explaining that he was only trying to save her after an overdose. He also takes responsibility for what happened; it was his drugs in the car. The two more hidden stories respectively teach about the consequences of drug use (i.e. you can lose your children) and entertain (the absurdity of the situation). While the first story is laid out in full, the last two are present only in tropes (‘lost her daughter (…) because she was using drugs’) and gestures (laughter and imitation of siren). Spelling them out would ruin the rhythm of the narrative, making it too long and hard to follow. The multi-voiced character of many stories is made possible by tropes being intuitively understood by the audience. Ambiguity often comes from differences in interpretation of these tropes, as well as the possibility for the audience to ‘choose’ which story to ‘hear’. This openness increases the potential resonance (Polletta, 2006) and dialogical character of narrative (Frank, 2010).
However, tropes can also indicate hegemonic stories where there is little ambiguity and everyone agrees on meaning. Good stories are frequently retold. The more skilled the storyteller the easier it is to enjoy a story told many times before. There are still limits. Telling the same story can be seen as boring (‘that old story once again’), manipulative (‘rehearsed stories’), insignificant (‘just a story’) or just meaningless (‘we know the point’). Less skilled storytellers can be unable to tell the story or worried about managing to keep the attention of the audience. Tropes can solve all the problems mentioned above and be a way of securing the effects of stories without having to tell them. Vidar, a 39-year-old mid-level dealer and amphetamines user, was asked a question early on in the interview:
Could you talk a little about your childhood, and your adolescent years?
It was turbulent, Child Welfare Services, foster care, group homes, that sort of thing.
Even though the interviewer probed several times for more elaborations and details, Vidar stuck to this short account of his childhood. He only hinted towards the commonly occurring story that the other interviewee presented in full: a troubled childhood involving Child Protective Services (parents that were deemed unfit to raise and care for their children), foster care (indicates that problems at home were severe) and institutions (probably because he misbehaved at his foster parents’ home). It could be that he did not connect enough with the interviewer to tell personal stories about suffering; or, that he did not have a twist that made the stories fit his present street identity. Maybe he even got the sense that the interviewer had heard these stories several times before and wanted to spare him the details. Detailed knowledge of the interactional context and of both researcher and interviewee is necessary to understand narratives in general and tropes in particular.
We ‘say what we say by not saying countless other things’ (Presser, 2013: 53). The tropes in Vidar’s story are metonymies or phrases that stand for more than what they initially indicate (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Polletta, 2006). Whatever reason Vidar had for not providing more detail, he achieved a lot by using these tropes. He revealed that he knew his story was not an original one, and opened it up for interpretation by the audience. Vidar also protected himself and close relatives by focusing on the presence of official institutions instead of the more complex situations, including his own behavior and his family.
A trope is what Barthes describes as a minute form that ‘can serve as a signifier to a concept filled with a very rich history’ (Barthes, 2009: 144). Another example can be seen in the interview with Knut, a 33-year-old mid-level dealer and amphetamines user.
But you feel that he, the kid restricts you.
(interrupts) Which is my driving force, yes.
That makes you hang on …
Yes, definitely.
There are two familiar stories here; that having a child confines a wild and fun lifestyle and the other, that children change your life for the better (‘driving force’). While the interviewer hints at the first one, Knut prefers the other. When he comes up with another trope the interviewer is fast to respond. Both stories are so well known that they do not need to be spelled out and the conversation about it ends here in the interview.
These stories of change were common in the interviews with imprisoned drug dealers indicating the presence of reform narratives (Presser, 2008), but the street rationale was similarly present. The importance of both can be seen in the absence of full narratives. Knut said this about a fellow prisoner:
No! Tommy is not insane at all.
He’s not?
It was Tommy who killed that policeman.
Is that something which is counted as …?
Among the hard-cores it probably is.
The interviewer’s cue is actually not even a trope, but an ellipsis or a missing phrase. The words respectable, tough or hard (whatever it might be) are never spelled out, but the interviewer and Knut both seem to agree what is implied, indicating the importance of the street cultural logic in this social environment. The fact that they shared a lot of knowledge about the norms, values and language of street culture made the use of such ellipses possible.
Dominant stories often need no spelling out. They can also be more effective when just hinted at. At the same time stories are generally ambiguous, and tropes are particularly open. Comprehensive knowledge about social and situational context is crucial to understand them. For Vidar, the use of tropes made it possible for the audience to imagine the details that he wanted and, for example, to choose between a sympathetic story emphasizing his difficult upbringing or one underscoring how these experiences made him hard, or maybe both. Leaving out detailed evaluation can make a story more creditable, because the audience experiences it as being their own and not one forced upon them by the storyteller. For the interviewer and Knut, for example, leaving out an exact word made it easier to agree.
One could argue that tropes are just examples of poor interviewing technique. Interviewers are trained to appear ingenuous to let the interviewee explain things in detail. In fact, that is probably the main difference between regular conversations and interviews. Researchers probe and follow up more than would be natural in conversations. Still, to follow up every trope, missing word and metonym makes meaningful dialogue impossible. Communication relies on a multitude of shared cultural references and stories taken for granted. Revealing stories not told can therefore be a way to illuminate the most important cultural influences in a society or subculture. They are the cultural elements that establish and reproduce the status quo. The most important stories in a society are often only hinted at, not fully told. Paradoxically then, when a narrative has become a trope or even completely silenced, it can be at the height of its societal importance.
Conclusion
What is narrative then, and what should narrative criminologists do? Many are skeptical, some for good reason. Not everything can be a narrative. Characterized by temporality and causality, it is only one out of many discursive forms. Still, narrative is present in many forms not readily accepted as such and their relationship to action is a complex one. It is not their nature to be discrete. I have revealed how they can be nested together in ever-changing life-stories, shaped and reshaped by the audience in interactional processes and sometimes merely a construct of a researcher’s analysis. Narratives can also be long and intricate accounts of particular episodes or can appear in short forms or tropes.
The narrative analytical approach taken will significantly inflect the insights generated. Searching for life-stories highlights individual coherence, and the larger cultural interpretations and narrative identities that motivate, maintain or restrain crime. Event-stories can open up for study the stories that influence crime in particular situations, adding more flexibility and more focus on the symbolic interaction of crime and storytelling. Identifying and analyzing tropes can be fruitful in two different ways: Some tropes indicate ambiguity in stories and are crucial parts of what make stories multi-voiced. Other tropes are less open and can be used to identify hegemonic discourse or dominant stories that motivate, maintain or restrain crime.
Life-stories, event-stories and tropes are separate narrative forms, but are still closely connected; life-stories are a collection of event-stories that also include many tropes, and frequently told life- and event-stories can be alluded to for audiences that know the narrative environment. Life-stories, event-stories and tropes are intertwined, overlap and sometimes even depend upon each other. They are still closely associated with very different narrative traditions and forms of analysis. For good reasons, narrative analysis in criminology and elsewhere has concentrated on complete narratives, but this risks leaving out situations and statements where narrative is important. Many utterances rely on narrative structure to be understood and even events have narrative structure (Mattingly, 1998; Sandberg et al., 2014).
People are drawn towards narratives because they are ambiguous (Barthes, 2004), and interpretative openness is a particular characteristic of narrative fragments. In tropes, for example, the full narrative is not in the text, but produced by the listener in a dialogical process of meaning-making. This openness invites the audience into the storytelling by opening up a space for dialogue. The fact that researchers need to recognize and reconstruct these narratives makes contextual knowledge pivotal. Narrative ethnography can be one way forward. It expands research ‘beyond the narrative itself to the context of its production’, and explores not only the what, how, where and when of storytelling, but the broader storytelling environment (Gubrium and Holstein, 2008: 261). Much like Foucault’s (1972) order of discourse, narratives rely on a shared repertoire of cultural stories to be understood. An important task for narrative criminology is therefore to identify the repertoire of stories in a given society or (sub)culture.
Studying tropes connects narrative criminology to visual criminology (Carrabine, 2015; Copes, 2016), in efforts to find the stories audiences mobilize when hearing a trope or seeing an image. I have argued that cognitive cues or tropes that only hint at familiar stories are important resources for narrative criminology. Some can say that these are not stories, but that is limiting the scope and importance of narrative analysis. If we only study complete narratives, we lose sight of the most influential stories in a society. Narratives exist as abstract and over-arching life-stories, as accounts of specific episodes explained in detail and as tropes that rely on narrative structure to be understood. My argument implies that narrative analysis, if taken seriously, needs to move beyond interpreting de facto narratives to actively reconstructing them.
A hegemonic culture is best identified in the unspoken. Narratives that are so taken for granted that they need not be spoken are indicative of hegemonic discourses (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985), and are decisive parts of doxa (Bourdieu, 1977 [1972]) representing experiences, values and norms that are self-evident. Parental neglect, poverty and street culture were taken for granted among the incarcerated drug dealers in this study. Similarly, and even more subtly, a capitalist logic of maximizing economic benefit, and a liberal idea that they themselves were responsible for the position they were in, were assumed. Exposing these untold stories – and interpreting them in light of social and economic contexts – is crucial in revealing the dominating cultural influences in a society. Taking tropes seriously is thus an important task for any kind of critical endeavor in criminology, and narrative criminology in particular.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Sébastien Tutenges, Lois Presser, Thomas Ugelvik, Heith Copes, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments to earlier drafts of this paper.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.