III. DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF PARTY CONVERSATION - Legend

Just as persons increased their interest for others through use of personal surrogates, so, too, they were likely to choose a conversational style that would heighten interest in the topic. We considered five styles, of which the legendary style proved to be the one most characteristic of parties. It may be of interest to list all five, partly to give an idea of the frequency of each in the set of parties we examined, and partly because the definition of what legend IS consists partly of what legend IS NOT.

The five styles were as follows.

Referential conversation (25% of all coded episodes) was believed to be accurate about the real world. It had a place at parties, particularly in connection with identity maintenance, but usually that was not enough. It was important that there should also be some expansion of focus, some departure from literal modes of thought.

Sometimes people at a party were able to move toward evaluation and exploration of ideas, and exciting intellectual interchange. (8% of the episodes.)

Sometimes they were able to move toward play and fantasy. (20% of the episodes.)

Sometimes they engaged in what we saw as interest in passing oddities – -- a weird story from the current newspaper, perhaps. (5% of the episodes)

However, the style of conversation that was most frequent at the parties we saw was what we called legendary (42% of the episodes).

These categories may be considered to represent different kinds of belief. In referential conversation, people talked about things they believed to be true. In fantasy, it was clear that the things they said were not true. But legend was the language of “half-truth”: people could talk at the time as if they believed the legend implicitly, and yet be free to claim the next day that they did not mean what they said.

Possibly the readiness to claim that a legend should not be taken seriously was actually a means of protecting the right to take it seriously in spite of contrary evidence. In legendary conversation the rules of evidence were modified or suspended. However, if facts were missing or ambiguous, legendary communication about matters of common concern could provide an alternate route to belief. Legends could be one of the major products that remained after the party was over.

To say that party conversation was often legendary was to say that people at parties told stories. They told stories about themselves, about other people, about events of interest. We called these stories legends, because of the way they combined facts with wishful thinking.

Legends showed imagination. They were dramatic and consistent with other legends. They were presented as if they were true.

Legends were not open to critical examination. In a legendary conversation, a listener might add to the legend, might match it with a similar legend or counter it with a competing legend, but might not introduce a (referential) set of facts to show that the legend was partly true and partly false.

Example:

If A said Paris was a marvelous city, B might counter that it was a horrible city, but C might not offer statistics to show that it was both.

Example: Legend

Stephanie said she loved to be in the mountains in the winter when it was so quiet. Irene picked up this idea and said that she and her husband spent three months of the summer on a mountain top in Wyoming, and how wonderful that quiet was.

(See also previous examples referring to the University Development Office; the lieutenant in World War I; the sharing of feminist ideas; and the income tax agent.)

Like personal surrogates, legends were found in many kinds of parties, but were particularly high for partners who were already in the process of becoming acquainted.

This leads us to believe that for the parties we saw, a major function of party conversation was to facilitate the development of acquaintance. This process relied heavily upon legend and upon personal surrogates.

© 2012 Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt. All Rights Reserved
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