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Voices and Memory: Australian Oral History: 8 March 1997

Why Oral History Matters: Understanding Through Listening / Mark Cranfield

This paper focuses on two particular aspects of oral history work:

1. the role of the interview, and

2. oral history recordings as sound recordings.

The interview is generally regarded as the stock-in-trade of oral history. Certainly most guides, handbooks and manuals are written from that point of view.

A standard definition of the interview, as offered by the leading American oral historian Willa Baum (and B. Hardwick), posits that interviews are conducted:

... in question and answer form; they are guided by a skilled and knowledgeable interviewer and they are reviewed by both interviewee and interviewer to verify that the statements are as accurate as possible. If not quite in the class of legal depositions, they are nonetheless carefully framed and verified accounts, not spontaneous conversations which are better suited, perhaps, for a folklore collection. (1988, p. 95)

British historian Trevor Lummis has taken a similar view, claiming that:

The great advantage of the retrospective interview is that it enables historians to intervene directly in the generation of historical evidence ... [It] should be a good deal more informative and precise than even various forms of autobiography and personal testimony ... The verbatim evidence given to [parliamentary] inquiries is frequently indistinguishable from the sort of testimony given in an oral history interview. (1987, pp. 11-12)

This rigorous and tightly controlled approach to interviewing represents a very respectable school of thought. However, if we look at what many oral historians actually do, rather than what handbooks and manuals and guidelines say they should do, we find that the very formal interview concept championed by Baum and Lummis is frequently jettisoned in favour of much more informal (and sometimes very indirect) ways of eliciting and evoking recollections.

For example, some historians prefer the term 'discourse' to 'interview' and 'interlocutor' to 'interviewer'. It is worth noting that in its original Latin form the word discourse means 'running to and fro' or 'to run to and fro'. The obvious suggestion here is of flexibility, of being less tightly programmed, of speaking more freely and a little more personally.

Other historians have substituted the word 'dialogue' for 'interview'. The American Richard Evans is an advocate of this technique. He has argued that his recordings, made mainly, but not exclusively, with distinguished psychologists, convey 'through the extemporaneousness of the dialogue style a feeling for the personality of the contributor'.

Writing about a 'dialogue' that he taped with the playwright Arthur Miller, Evans elaborated on his technique:

In his writing, Miller [says Evans] has the opportunity to rewrite and to polish until he deems the finished product satisfactory. In our discussion however, he was called upon to develop his ideas extemporaneously. I hoped that this element of spontaneity would assist in penetrating to 'the man behind the playwright' while losing none of the ideas central to Miller's unique creative process ... the naturalness of communication is essential ... and the dialogue duplicates the tenor of the exchange as it actually took place. (1969, p. 7)

He goes on:

I would like to reiterate that the questions presented to Mr Miller were designed to allow his views to emerge as coherently yet as spontaneously as possible. This was a situation far from ideal for him to be expected to produce a polished presentation of his ideas, yet ... he was able to organise his thoughts in a most communicative manner. (1969, p. 9)

Moving now from the dialogue style to the concept of 'conversation', numerous oral history works have been released in recent years based on the conversational approach. Key words that arise when this approach is used include intimacy, trust, disclosure and self-revelation. The South African writer Laurens van der Post, recorded at length in this style during the 1980s, described the results, in poetic fashion, as 'words, caught on the wing of recollection ... a subtle living substance of special value' (1988, p. xi). A local Australian historian who seems to have mastered what we might call the 'art of conversation' for the purpose of field recording is Klaus Hueneke, in works such as People of the High Country (1994) which have been acclaimed in terms similar to those used by van der Post. There should be little doubt that Hueneke's work is premium quality oral history.

At this point in my brief survey of approaches to oral history through terminology we cross a line where conventional notions of interviewing are left well behind. The idea of interview is replaced (by some historians) with the idea of 'story' where the person being recorded assumes the role, not of interviewee but of narrator.

The leading Italian oral historian Alessandro Portelli, one of many who work in this style, has coined the phrase 'history-telling' to indicate his shift away from standardised concepts of interviewing to produce more deeply meaningful, and more structurally complex, orally narrated life histories.

A different perspective yet again can be found in the work of an American historian named John Neihardt who was responsible for producing a very well-known book called Black Elk Speaks, subtitled ... as Told Through John Neihardt (1961). In this case the interviewer has been almost entirely effaced in the interests of achieving a sense of direct communication, or even of communion between the speaker, Black Elk, and those who would come into contact with his words at some later time.

This particular approach has similarities locally with the pioneering recording work of the Australian oral historian Hazel De Berg . Her work, for those who might not know it (almost 1300 recordings made between 1957-1984) forms the foundation of the National Library of Australia's Oral History Collection .

De Berg was influenced deeply by the concepts of 'spoken word autobiography' and 'spoken word biography', which were developed during the 1950s by the Australian poet and special features broadcaster John Thompson. They believed that it was possible, using a sufficient degree of empathy and skill, to capture a deep sense of the 'personal essence' (or inner self, or authentic self, or true self) of the people they recorded. And they have not been alone, these two 'artists with tape recorders'; a similar perspective is evidenced in the work of one of the great English oral historians, George Ewart Evans. Writing in 1973 about the rich potential of field recording, he described the forceful impact on him of the combined power of voice and memory. He said that it created in him:

a kind of osmosis [which works] through your skin so to speak, to give the feel of history, the sense of the past which is such an essential ingredient in the best historical writing ...

He went on:

we should go to the interview not only for the historical information, but hoping to be given or to acquire that little bit extra-that enlightenment, a trace element of imagination, a little supererogatory grace ... call it what you will. (p. 71)

Essentially, historians of this type are interested in working with what we might call 'the music of voice'. They place a very heavy emphasis not only on voice as a rich source of information about an individual, but also on listening to the voice, that is, on the aural or acoustic dimension of oral history and its impact on consciousness. They believe that to move from tape-recorded sound into word-processed print is to lose touch with the real energy source of oral history materials.

Although that position might seem obvious to some, there are one or two related points that perhaps are not so obvious. Probably most people attending this seminar are familiar with the vernacular expression of 'seeing something in the mind's eye'. I wonder, however, how many are familiar with a parallel expression of 'hearing something in the mind's ear'? Putting it simply, these two phrases actually refer to two of the different ways in which the brain processes information. Recent research has shown that we actually possess, as human beings, several separate forms or domains of intelligence including, for example, a 'literary intelligence', a 'visual intelligence' and an 'auditory intelligence'.

From an oral history perspective, it will interest you to know that auditory intelligence-concerned with speaking and listening, with the intellectual and emotional connections between voice and ear in the mind-is claimed to be the most deep-seated and fundamental of our modes of communication.

Once we become more aware that sound operates as a discrete form of consciousness, we are more likely to be more sensitive to it and to be more discriminating in the way we think about it. We will see the differences between tapes and transcripts in a new light. We will be less likely to blur the lines between the spoken word and the printed word. We will realise that oral communication and literary communication represent different paths of understanding.

Let me give a couple of simple, everyday examples that show why we need to maintain this distinction.

I refer to the following (which are what they say they are):

1. Robert Kennedy in His Own Words. The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (1988)

2. Eric Clapton in His Own Words by Marc Roberts (1993)

I contrast these with the following (which are not what they say they are):

  1. Five Voices for Lionel edited and introduced by V.G. Venturini (1994)
  2. 'A child's frail, insistent, lingering voice'. Book review by Christopher Bantick of Fragments. Memories of Childhood 1939-48 by Benjamin Wilkormiski. Canberra Times 22 February 1997.
  3. Review by Yvonne Preston of Diane Giese's book Astronauts, Lost Souls and Dragons, in the Canberra Times 1 February 1997:

Slowly the Chinese are being put back into history they helped to create. The particular value of Astronauts, Lost Souls and Dragons is the way it permits this collection of Chinese Australians, whose voices have long been silenced, to speak for themselves at last.

The point is that these latter works do not have the properties that are being claimed for them. We hear nothing when we read them; or a least we hear nothing authentic. We can only imagine the sound of their voices.

We need to pay more attention to our sound recordings. We need to increase our skill levels in this sphere. We need to remember that, in oral history, sound recordings are not only primary source materials, they are the primary means for experiencing oral history in its richest and most authentic form.

I would like to conclude with the ideas of an American scholar, Raimundo Panikkar, on the significance of spoken word materials:

We have two forms of speaking. One is to chatter, to gossip, to go on repeating learned things and previously conceived opinions, generally of others. The other is when we inhabit the words we say, when language is the very house of our being, when we live in the very words we utter, when we create each phrase out of a concrete experience in time and place-an experience which we allow to crystallise, as it were, in the very words which flow spontaneously out of our whole being. We do not think such words beforehand, we do not calculate them, nor do we arrange them, trying to make an impression on our hearers ... we simply say them; we inhabit those words; they are a revelation of what we truly are ... [they are] sacraments. They create a space ... which encompasses both us and our true listeners. (1993, p. 73)

Now, if we want to bring history to life, as so many people do, or if we want to bring life into history, insights like these about the power of voice and ear really do matter. Oral history, in other words, really does matter.

References

Baum, Willa K. and B. Hardwick, 'Oral Histories'. In J.C. Larsen (ed.), Researchers' Guide to Archives and Oral History Sources. Hamden: Library Professional Publications, 1988

Evans, George E., 'Approaches to Interviewing'. Oral History, 1973, No. 4

Evans, Richard L., Psychology and Arthur Miller. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1969

Lummis, Trevor, Listening to History. The Authenticity of Oral Evidence. London: Century Hutchinson, 1987

Neihardt, J.G., Black Elk Speaks. Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux as Told through John G. Neihardt (Flaming Rainbow). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961

Panikkar, Raimundo, 'There is No Outer without Inner Space'. Cross Currents, 1993, Vol. 43


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Last updated 4 November 1997
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