O'Halloran. The multi-voicedness of stories in Alcoholics Anonymous

Dr Seán O’Halloran
ICARUS – Irish Centre for Alcohol Research and Understanding,
3 Drumavoley Park, Ballycastle, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland.
BT54 6PE (address for proofs and offprints)
Tel: 00 44 028 20763318
Home Tel: 00 44 028 20763318
sean.ohalloran@btinternet.com

Bionote
Seán O’Halloran has been involved in English Language education as teacher and teacher educator in Ireland, England, Singapore and Hong Kong and he has published on ELT education and language and culture.
His interest in the constitutive nature of language has led him to study and publish on the discursive practices of Alcoholics Anonymous, the subject of his doctoral thesis from the University of Leicester.
He is involved in research with the Irish Centre for Alcohol Research and Understanding.
The paper has been formatted according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (4th edition)
Entering the dialogic: the multi-voicedness of stories in Alcoholics Anonymous

Key words
Multi-voicedness, Alcoholics Anonymous, dialogical self, discursive practice, voice, self narrative

Abstract:
This paper examines the sharing of members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Using transcriptions of recorded sharing in AA meetings, it illustrates and examines the multi-voicedness of these personal accounts, arguing that recovery in AA is marked by the acquisition of a story that accentuates the difference between the past and present self, which is embedded in and given salience through being part of a collective discourse and which enables personal change. It illustrates that the combative assertion of self which results in isolation that characterises the alcoholic is broken through a systematic incorporation into the alcoholic's discourse of several new voices. Through engaging in dialogic discourse, AA members produce new personal stories of their experiences which give salience to the voice of their recovery, affecting an altered relationship with self and others. This is brought about through interactively developing new versions of their life stories which locate both alcoholism and responsibility for their lives within the self and resist accounts which apportion blame elsewhere. Such voices are infused with other AA voices while resisting former stories involving blame and self justification. It is argues that the interaction of these voices not only displays but in part constitutes the dynamics of recovery.
Entering the dialogic: the multi-voicedness of stories in Alcoholics Anonymous
Seán O’Halloran, ICARUS (Irish Centre for Alcohol Research and Understanding)

Introduction

AA is a mutual help organisation whose primary purpose is to help its members achieve sobriety and whose basic methodology is story telling. The emergence of AA sharing can be traced to an encounter between Bill Wilson and Dr Robert Smith. Both, in an attempt to maintain their own sobriety, had become involved with the Oxford Group, a non-denominational Christian fellowship which aspired to emulate the spiritual simplicity of the early Christians . Bill Wilson was impressed by the sense of mutuality felt when talking with other alcoholics seeking a solution to their problem. Dr Bob Smith described the meeting as one of the formative moments if his life. During this conversation and in the many subsequent meeting from which Alcoholics Anonymous emerged, there developed a reflective, dialogic, interpretive process of story telling which brought into existence newly authored versions of their personal biographies as alcoholics.
This paper aims to give an account of one of the main discursive features of the reconstructive power of self-narration in recovery1 stories, focusing on how speakers in AA meetings present conflicting voices within their own life stories; those of their former selves and those of their recovering selves - the latter being dense in echoes of AA literature and discourse. This conflict brings to mind Hermans and Kempen’s view of the self as compromised of the interaction of many often conflicting and largely independent voices. They describe self-narrative as a process whereby the self derives power, continuity and renewal through a dialogical confrontation between conflicting attitudes within the self; this dialogic structure promoting a dynamic through inner conflict empowering continual choice.
It is suggested here that the dichotomisation of the narrator’s voice to that of the active alcoholic of the past and that of the recovering alcoholic of the present not only reflects but also partly constitutes the process of recovery itself. One of the means through which recovery is brought about is through the movement away from isolation and the acquisition of a communal AA identity and voice, both of which are derived through re-authoring their individualised story and acquiring a voice embedded in a lager AA discourse. Another means is through the creation of a former self through a processes of authoring a new self-narrative which constitutes one’s self as an abiding ‘alcoholic’ self alcoholic former and different from one’s self in recovery, though the sense of positions these two selves in conflict, a feature dramatised in AA self narratives.
The central, formative role of discourse within the AA process is illustrated by the fact that unlike most other institutionally constituted meetings, AA meetings have no institutional or social aim outside their own unfolding. Its only activity is to engage in a specific, highly specialised form of discourse. Indeed, an AA meeting has no obvious purpose beyond itself . The primary purpose of an AA meeting is to allow AA members to engage in a form of story telling through which they re-author themselves by engaging in a form of social interaction which releases them from alcoholic isolation and brings into salience a new identify through which they can address aspects of their compulsive behaviour. AA provides discursive and social psychologists as well as counsellors an opportunity to explore and analyse a highly specialised form of discourse whose primary function is dialogic engagement with others and the acquisition of a radically altered identity.

The constitutive aspects of voice

The narrative has been seen as basically constitutive in nature since Bathes . While some have focused on narrative form others approach storytelling as a way of organizing and making sense of the world and ourselves, particularly as a way of establishing and displaying a coherent personal identity . It is through our life stories that we not only represent or display ourselves to others but actually author ourselves.
How far and in what manner the self is displayed, discernible and indeed authored through discourse is informed by Bakhtin’s notion of the reality of the subjective psyche. For him the reality of the inner psyche is the same reality as that of the sign, there being no psych outside the material of signs . By its very existential nature, the subjective psyche is to be localized somewhere between the organism and the outside world, on the borderline separating these two spheres of reality.
When we author or display ourselves to others through the accounts we give of ourselves we do so within our own cultural norms, particularly within and through language, using shared words, collocations, allusions, idioms, texts and genres. Indeed, for Bakhtin, moral development, or what refers to as ‘ideological becoming’ is ‘the process of selectively assimilating the words of others’, that is giving them an individualised voice; ‘voice’ here meaning the embodiment of meaning through utterances that are themselves meaningfully related to and positioned towards the voice of others. The central ‘meanings’ dealt with relate to how AA narrators endow through their life stories their sense of a shared identity and shared beliefs about personal agency with a voice emanating from a personal position which is itself aligned to an immediate audience of AA members who are themselves immersed in a collective AA belief system. AA members display to others their emergent values and learn to make new attributions for aspects of their experience, particularly the role of their personal agency. Thus they display an altered alignment towards the events of which their stories treat. (p. 212-3)
It is typical of AA that values are displayed and attributions made through a narrative mode. Narratives relate to the particular and experiential rather than generalised conceptualisations. Indeed Bruner argues that narrative production is a natural mode of thought shaping our reality. White argues that it is a narrative mode of thought that indicates both the moral and the significant in life’s events which they do not possess inherently as mere sequence. Every narrative has within it the latent or manifest purpose to moralize the events of which it treats. Tappan claims that by telling a moral story, whether of oneself or not, an individual creates a dialogic context and relationship with the audience and thus claims authority and responsibility for the moral thoughts, feelings, and actions that constitute the psychological dimensions of the moral experience .Taylor goes on to state that in order to make sense of our lives, to have an identity, we need a moral realignment which is expressed primarily through narrative. How AA stories display Taylor’s notion of moral alignment and Tappan’s view of dialogic context in relationship with the audience are explored in the extracts discussed in what follows.
The notion of voice here is also characterised by features of the larger AA discourse within the discourse of the speaker. By intensifying the overtly intertextual allusions to AA discourse in their narrations, AA members implicitly disclaim total individual authorship of their own voices. These are largely subsumed into the collective voice of AA and their AA audience. The acquisition of this collective voice amounts to adopting a new stance which is displayed through the way the speaker aligns themselves towards life’s circumstances and events, their positioning towards the audience and the footing they assume in relationship to the way they display ownership of their voice. To clarify the use of these terms we can say alignment relates to the manner in which the speaker displays what Taylor calls a ‘framework’, providing the background to the speaker’s moral judgements, intuitions and reactions. Taylor claims that to articulate a framework is to make sense of our moral responses, forging the link between our identity and ‘a kind of orientation’ (pp 28). The term ‘alignment’ is used here as the term ‘orientation’ has a narrower meaning in the discussion of discursive practice.
The notion of positioning is taken from Davies and Harré and refers to the discursive practices through which selves are located and displayed in conversation by participants in jointly produced story lines. There is interactive positioning between the participants (sometimes referred to as the way speakers orient themselves to others) and there is reflexive positioning in which one positions oneself – including one’s former self. (pp 264).
The notion of footing is derived from Goffman . If both alignment and positioning relate to how speakers display their stance towards life’s events and other interlocutors, footing here relates to the extent to which participants claim ownership of what is said and the manner in which it has been crafted for audience ‘uptake’. These three aspects of stance, as displayed in self-narrations, are the subject of this study.

The context and materials of the study

Since its early meetings AA has developed an institutional form of interaction which members believe is essential for the maintenance of their sobriety. This interaction is not a casual or spontaneous occurrence but is invariably produced in the tightly framed institutionalised context of an AA meeting. The modern AA meeting is a planned, formal, even ritualised event; all members having clear expectations of what is to happen. It has three phases: the opening and closing elements, which act as the frame, and the central sharing episode. The two framing episodes are invariable and ritualised, comprising AA readings and prayer . The central episode is the crux of the meeting where sharing takes place. Borkman identifies two basic meeting methodologies: the sharing circle where members all face one another; and the ‘lecture’ style, where a speaker faces the audience from a podium or table. The central episode of all meetings however is the sustained sharing by members in extended, uninterrupted, largely autobiographical turns .
The material used here is naturally occurring, having been obtained from podium style meetings in AA international conventions in the Far East. Speakers were aware the meetings were being taped as such tapes are regularly made available to those present and other interested people on request. However, the audio recording was a peripheral and unobtrusive part of the proceedings. The participants are mainly ‘westerners’ living as expatriates in Asian cosmopolitan cities and come from many parts of the English speaking world and Europe. Some entered AA while living overseas; others were AA members of longstanding who joined local AA groups while working abroad, others - often the opening speaker - may be a ‘circuit speaker’ who has flown in on invitation, usually from the USA. As such they represent many traditions of AA but appear to belong to a common, highly specific and institutionalised speech community. This is apparent from the ease with which they recognise that they are participating in a common AA discourse; social institutions being constituted and given stability largely through text types . All the material presented here is derived from speakers who have achieved long-term sobriety and have demonstrated proficiency in its talk by being selected by other members as opening speakers.
International conventions are celebratory in nature and are held to affirm and ‘showcase’ AA. They are organised by AA groups quite regularly and members of other Twelve Step groups as well as non-AA members are invited to attend. Convention meetings are therefore ‘open’. AA meetings are more normally ‘closed’ and confined to AA members.
The taped spoken material itself was transcribed according to the conventions of Conversational Analysis (CA) but simplified particularly in regard to timed pauses, a feature not considered theoretically salient in the context of AA meetings where the interactive order is characterised by extended, non-negotiated, turns, initiated and closed solely by the speaker.
The author has had a long involvement with AA as a researcher, having attended many meetings and observed many members achieve long-term recovery. He has also seen many more approach AA and leave, some to find another solution, others to return, sometimes after many lapses, others to continue their troubled drinking, some to die. Thus this study is in no way a prescription for recovery from compulsive drinking. It is however an attempt to describe some of the more pervasive features of AA meeting discourse and tries to explore to what extent they are a manifestation of a sustained recovery and to what extent they may be implicated in it.

Aligning to the AA meta-narrative

The major activity within AA meetings is members telling, ‘what we used to be like, what happened and what we are like now’, , particularly in relation to their alcoholism and general well being. In developing their stories AA members use this relatively stable genre as a template to fashion versions of their lives based on a pre-existing stories available to all AA members though the sharing of others in meetings and from the story section of book Alcoholics Anonymous . In longer sustained sharing sessions, usually opening turns, these life stories display the narrators as alcoholics whose lives have become unmanageable (Step 1) and who have ‘hit bottom’ at which point they surrender to a higher power or God (Steps 2 and 3). Acknowledgment is made harm done (Steps 4 and 5). The accounts display the members as willing to seek help (a higher power) to live better lives (Steps 6 and 7); make amends (Steps 7 and 8) and engage in spiritual practices (Step 10). More experienced members give accounts of how these principles and practices are incorporated into their lives and by helping other alcoholics (Steps 11 and 12) . Throughout the narration, but especially at the end of the turn, members display their dependence on and gratitude to AA and the AA programme .
The shorter, episodic turns which follow the opening turns frequently act as a response, whereby the speakers align the moral dimension of their stories to that of the main speaker and the AA meta-narrative, claiming ‘identification’. Such stories are also self-evaluative and autobiographical, though of more limited scope, often referring to more current aspects of the speakers’ lives.
Experienced speakers accounts are underpinned by the notion of alcoholism as a physical, mental and spiritual affliction, seen by some as a ’disease’. Such a representation places responsibility for alcoholism on an inherent medical condition, and therefore beyond the responsibility of the sufferer, who is powerless over what happens in life but has responsibility for how they react to it (including taking the first drink). AA story telling requires an articulation of a new narrative understanding of the limitations of the protagonist as agent and thus how attributions - especially for their alcoholism and recovery - are made. This involves the display of a new alignment to both; the underling coherence of the AA story deriving from a notion of powerlessness over alcoholism and dependency on a higher power. As will be shown, this new alignment governs the way the speaker makes attributions and accounts for the causation of both their alcoholism and sobriety.

Acquiring a communal voice

The material presented below attempts to demonstrate that AA sharing is marked by a dialogic interplay of at least three voices: the voices of one’s former and present selves; the former being essentially solitary, the latter essentially an individualised manifestation of the third – the communal voice of AA. This involves a process whereby AA members articulate and engage in dialogue with other reconstructed voices, some from their days of active alcoholism, and - for more experienced members - voices form their early days in AA. These embedded voices act as dialogic foils to the emergent AA voice and allow it to display its ascendancy.
Here we see how Henry, the first speaker in a topic meeting, discusses how in early sobriety he was warned by his sponsor (more experienced AA mentor) not to attribute any of the benefits of AA membership to specific members.
Topic meeting –Life after Step Five – Henry- BTpM-S5-1H
I’d just like to share that without sponsorship (.) I wouldn’t be here either (.) …
when I would get all gushy over the phone
and I couldn’t believe that things were so wonderful (.) different (.) with my job and my life (.)
being able to pay bills and be able to earn some respect (.)
and Don would say over the phone /just don’t confuse the /message with the \messenger (.)
SO he wanted me to know that it wasn’t him (.) it was something he was passing on (.) and it really impressed me back then (.)
Within AA story telling, speakers go to quite considerable lengths to ensure the audience knows that evaluative positions, moral viewpoints or underlying ideologies inherent in their stories are derived from AA literature, other AA members and AA’s spiritual practices. Even within this short piece there are a number of fixed expressions common to AA discourse, including. I wouldn’t be here (if not for some aspect of AA), don’t confuse the message with the messenger, and passing on as with pass it on. Speakers tend to establish their footing as firmly placed in a communal AA discourse.
Throughout their sharing, members of the AA speech community reiterate words and saying drawn from AA texts and oral traditions which supply a repertoire of sayings, slogans, idioms and other fixed expressions readily available to all AA members. By entering this highly reiterative speech community the alcoholic enters a shared oral tradition, allowing them to emerge from the incoherent isolation of hitting bottom and acquiring and displaying a communal voice.
This pervasive feature of AA discourse, is referred to as ‘intertextuality’ by Julia Kristeva (1986). So steeped is AA sharing in intertextual allusions and echoes of AA terminology that the boundary between this specific individual voice and other AA texts is often ill defined. The entire utterance is constructed as a ventriloquation of a more authoritative voice. This extraordinary term is used by Bakhtin in his essay Discourse in the Novel (1981), where he explores the creation of narrative as a process by which the words, voices, and language of others are expressed and represented by the self, focusing on how language echoes a range of other voices. He argues that the ‘living language’ lies on the ‘borderline’ of self and other, that ‘the word in language, is half someone else’s’ (Bakhtin, 1981:293) and that it becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker appropriates it by using it for his own purposes, and with his own accent. In Foucault’s terms (1974), the subject hardly exists outside of or independently of the discourse but is a function of it. The subjects in this instance affirm and strengthen their identity as alcoholics through participating in AA discourse. Simultaneous however, by authoring their own life-stories through AA discourse, they not only give shape to their own identities but do so in terms which allows those identities to cohere with others.
This intertextual cohesion not only allows identity to be displayed through a collective discourse, but though intertextual cohesion with AA texts, AA members display a moral and spiritual alignment to the underpinning meanings of AA. As Bakhtin sees it, it is the embedded voices which determine the very bases of one’s ideological interrelations with the world and one’s behaviour. It is in this interrelationship that discourse becomes constitutive of self. Moral development, for Bakhtin, entails the processes of gradually coming to authorize and claim authority for one’s own voice, while remaining in constant dialogue with others. Tappan (1991) following Bakhtin, sees the task of living and telling one’s life as the art of authoring the self. This he sees as a fundamentally moral process as it is through this internalizing the words, voices, and language of others that shape and mediate one’s psychological and moral functioning. It is through this process of internalizing the words of others and representing the self that the individual is able to claim authority and responsibility for his or her own thoughts, feelings, and actions through a complex developmental process by which the words of others gradually become the words of the self.
Thus originality of expression is not valued in AA stories. New comers who make distinctions between themselves and others or seek recognition of their particular circumstances will probably hear a subsequent speaker talk of learning from others in AA that ‘we are not unique’. The newcomer will be told by the experienced member what that member was told. Nothing is claimed as original or particular to the individual member, apart from specifics of personal experiences and even these are expressed in terms of a shared emotional life and efficacy of the Twelve Steps.
Such intense intertextuality and the merging of individual voices into a single AA voice is a marked display of what Bakhtin referred to as the dialogic which in effect amounts to a deliberate suppression of the monologic or atomised voice typical of the active alcoholic. Charles Taylor (1985) sees one of the most negative aspects of modern life as atomism which presents the individual human identity as basically a stand-alone, disengaged entity. This, and the attendant notion of freedom, tends to view the individual as independent of society; a view which masks the reality of how the individual is constituted by the language and culture of which he or she is part. The active alcoholic at the point of hitting bottom is an extreme example of this atomised, fragmented position. Community, Taylor sees, is not merely an aggregation of individuals but is constitutive of the individual, in the sense that the self-interpretations which define him are drawn from the interchange within the community. A human being outside of community is an impossibility, as is a private language. It is the interaction within the community which provides the language on which the individual draws. It is through engaging in a shared, highly reiterated discourse in AA that the alienated and isolated alcoholic learns to engage or reengage in the communal.

Voices of the present and past selves

Through acquiring a new collective voice, AA newcomers have the consolation of being in the company of people who ‘speak the same language’ and can discuss similar problems; they have a new self to project and a new audience with which to engage. However, the corollary to that is that this enables them to position their life before entering AA, their lives as active alcoholics, as in the past and subject to the distancing evaluative accounts of their present selves.
The primary function of self narratives, their illocutionary force, in Searle’s terms , is that the narrator, through the unfolding narrative, is empowered to project his or her present self into the past, enabling him of her to review and display the past self to the audience according to the shared values and expectations of the present. The life story allows a dichotomisation between our former and present selves, unravelling the identity of the narrator as the producer and subject of the narration. This dichotomisation of self as narrator and protagonist affords enormous opportunity to build accounts which connect one’s present to the past, allowing acceptable and plausible evaluations of former and present events and identities. As such it is a powerful discursive means of effecting personal change.
Although AA stories are formally monologues they are in fact deeply dialogic in that they involve a considerable interplay of voices. Typically, however, these are voices of the protagonist as he or she represents different aspects and stages of him/herself. This is illustrated below by Bruno, the main speaker at a ‘speaker’ meeting.
Speaker meeting – Bruno, main speaker - BSpM-1FN
my mother was an alcoholic and she drank pretty regularly for the first maybe five years of my life
and then things started to come apart (.)
there was a great deal of violence in my house (.) my eldest sister (.) I saw her face bashed open with a lead pipe (.)
I’m not saying that- and I’m going to clarify here (.) I’m not saying these are reasons why I drank (.)
they’re not (.) but they’re instances why I chose to \shut \down (.)
All self narratives exploit a fundamental resource of language; the existence of the first person pronominal ‘I’ which also manifests itself as ‘me’. This linguistic fact enables narrators to position themselves as protagonists or topic of their own narration. By structuring events sequentially from a point in the past, the narrative form allows the use of the past tense, enabling the separation of the present self, the ‘I’, from the past self, the ‘me’. (Crossley 2000). This reification of the self as an entity in the past allows the present self to engage reflectively with past experiences through an ongoing current self, creating connections and relationships between the ‘me’ and the ‘I’; between the events of the past and the present, though a network of causal explanations. The utterance, they’re instances why I chose to shut down is a typical example of this basic mechanism involving present self commenting on and explaining former self. As Crossley (1996a) argues, the ‘me’ is the ‘I’s’ objectification, recollection or image of itself, arising from the ‘I’ adopting an ‘outside’ view upon itself. Thus, within the narrative framework the identity of the self persists through time linking the child to the adult.
This is a most basis form of narrative coherence, allowing us to present ourselves as stable entities from birth through the present and into the future. Thus the narrative mode allows us to become reflectively conscious of ourselves, endowing us with self-awareness. In a similar manner, it enables the narrator to express projections into the future based on present intentions and creates coherence between the present and the future.
Bruno, in talking of his childhood, displays himself as largely omniscient concerning his own life, being able to isolate relevant experiences from the past (I shut down) and make attributions for them and evaluate both them and the person he once was (I never fitted in). Meed (1934) calls this externalising of self ‘taking the attitude of the other’. This narrative devise, so pervasive in life stories, is used with a considerable degree of specialisation in AA. The process of self-narration endows the teller with two self-constituting resources; it constructs the teller as removed from the protagonist of the story distancing him or her from past events and it gives the narrator power of evaluation over both the conception of the person one once was and the one aspired to be. This engagement between present and past selves is probably the most central activity in AA story telling creating as it does the distance required for self-evaluation.
White (1990) points out this externalization is further brought about by the habitual retelling of these stories. As people retell their stories, they become distanced from them, breaking from the performance of their stories, and so experiencing a capacity to intervene in their own lives and relationships. It is noticeable how newcomers in the process of telling their stories for the first time are much more prone to displays of emotion than experienced members who can tell of the most heart-rendering and gruelling experiences - my eldest sister, I saw her face bashed open with a lead pipe -dispassionately and sometimes even with humour.
As AA stories occur within a turn prefaced and framed by the phrase, ‘I am x and I am an alcoholic’ the evaluating narrator is fully embedded within the AA context and belief system. The ‘I’ (the present self situated within AA) by adopting the contextually determined positioning of the ‘other’ becomes more closely identified with indeed even subsumed within the AA group.
According to Linde, the achievement of agreement of evaluation is perhaps the most important interactional part of the process of narration. It is a very prominent feature of AA story telling, probably one of its main purposes, where identification - the recognition of fellow feeling and shared perceptions - is the primary positioning. Voices at odds with the AA programme, though rarely heard within an AA meeting, may be comprehensively challenged (O'Halloran 2005). The speakers’ task is to construct a narrative which positions them within the same evaluative framework as their audience.
If it is central to the narrative coherence of life stories that personal identity persists throughout, it is also central to conversion stories that aspects of personality and identity change. Against this sense of dialogic connectedness within AA there is often juxtaposed an account of disconnectedness with the world before participating in AA. In his reaction to his upbringing Bruno talks of ‘shutting down’, of excluding himself from ordinary life; an isolating process he is confronting and reversing through the process of discussing it.
AA stories, with their single-minded focus by the protagonist on the protagonist, display the narrator as firmly aligned to AA’s culture and belief system with which the protagonist–in-recovery struggles. Thus story tellers display and evaluate aspects of themselves as part of their former selves now struggling with change and maintaining that change. It is apparent that the narration is not simply an account of or representation of a change which exists in the narrators’ life independently of its being spoken about, but is it to a considerable extent being forged and brought about through being talked about; it is being constituted through the process of its display. These discursive acts are precursors to and rehearsals for the more manifest changes in behaviour required through the Twelve Steps.
Resisted voices
Much AA story telling displays this process of resisting past voices and former selves. Indeed, Bakhtin sees our ideological development as an internal struggle for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions and values (1981). In the conversion process one is necessarily adopting a new version of one’s life which is bound to conflict with former ones which are then resisted. This is particularly the case with alcoholics who have nurtured versions of their lives based on hurt, resentment, jealousy or self-justification and whose main point is to apportion blame to people, places or events. Such stories tend to isolate their authors either because they are obviously self-justifying and have no credibility in the eyes of others or because their telling would inevitably damage the relationships with those to whom they are told. However, because these resisted versions may be self-serving or reinforce deep impulses to isolate, drink or engage in self-destructive or anti-social behaviour, they will remerge and threaten the new versions which promote engagement with others, the dialogic and integrative behaviour. Thus AA members sustain versions of their stories which present them as engaged in life and social relationships in a positive and fruitful way by constantly retelling such versions and resisting self-justifying and isolating ones.
In the extract above we see how Bruno resisted a version of his childhood experience which place blame on his mother. In the following extract Scout resists explanations which shifted responsibility for their alcoholism to factors outside himself.
Speaker meeting – Scout (BSpM7-1SN)
there were chronic institutionalisations (.) suicide attempts (.) physical abuse and I’m not telling you
that I didn’t have to do a lot of stuff to take care of it (.) I /did (.)
but uhh (.) they didn’t make me an alcoholic (.)
Crossley (2000) points out the choice of one narrative over another often has serious implications for the construction of images of self, responsibility, blame and morality. The selection of a particular narrative presents certain visions of self at the expense of others, which has both psychological and social implications. Here both speakers give accounts of their childhood which actively rebut ideas that their alcoholism is attributable to causes such as drunken parents, violence and physical abuse. It is a rebuttal of pervasive common sense attributions characterised by the notion: ‘it would drive you to drink’. It is also a rebuttal of popularised notions from psychology of the effect of childhood trauma on adult behaviour.
However, it is also a rebuttal of an implication within the narrative structure which has been embedded by the narrators themselves for a particular purpose. Labov and Waletzky argued that stories follow a chronological sequence: the order of events moves in a linear way through time and the order ‘cannot be changed without changing the inferred sequence of events in the original semantic interpretation.’ Thus sequence is the major structuring device of all narratives, giving an account an order that both the speaker and audience take as significant.
Nonetheless, having allowed the sequencing of the account to suggest their alcoholism was the result of abuse in childhood, both speakers actually warn the audience against this inference, though it is an inference made possible by their own accounts. They are warning the audience to reject an explanation of their alcoholism that involves blame precisely because such a plausible version is possible but has been rejected. The version presented here is a version which actively resists voices of common sense attribution and popular psychology and even the norms of cause and effect embedded in narrative structure. It therefore displays itself as a voice forged through struggle and conflict where popular and ready-made assumptions about cause and effect, the blameworthy and the blameless, have been thoroughly reappraised. It is also likely that the rejected versions once held credence and that both Bruno and Scout did once blame their alcoholism on factors such as the physical abuse in childhood and the drinking of their parents. The rejected versions still remain persuasive and dangerous precisely because they take the evaluative focus off self and place the blame on others and may be used to justify a bout of self-destructive drinking, thus the speaker is acknowledging their potency and implicitly warning others against them. Through explicitly rejecting such deterministic ideas, both speakers are implicitly aligning themselves to the AA belief that alcoholism is an innate affliction, sometimes seen as a disease, for which people – even oneself - and circumstances can not be blamed.
The two versions her reflect as internal dialogue between self and former self. As people’s lives change and develop their stores reflect and fashion these changes. In acquiring a new life story one is not simply allowing one version of events to replace and supersede a previous one. As Bakhtin suggests, older and previous stories remain embedded in new ones. It is through the multi-voicedness within the narrative itself that the processes of change are dramatised and the tensions and conflicts inherent in recovery are displayed.
It is not only the self-justifying voices marking active alcoholism which are resisted. Sobriety in AA is presented as a life-long spiritual journey where the voice of experience in sobriety is pitted against the voice of the newcomer. In the following extract, we see how progress through the AA programme is dramatized as a dynamic discursive process involving the AA novice resisting and finally complying with AA practices and thus growing into AA. The topic is Step Four, Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves which involves writing down personal defects.
Step meeting – Steps Four and Five – Richie- H21ISh5-Stps2
and step four for me was a very painful process
because it it demanded of me a er fearless and very vigorous
self-examination process (.)
and er I really wasn’t ready to do that,
at least I didn’t think I was
so I tried to take the easier softer way
I wasn’t going to write it down
I was going to tape it
you see I thought that if I ((cough)) could tape it
that perhaps it would not sound so bad or look so bad or whatever(….)
Though this is an exposition of AA principles and practices, it is presented as a personal recount based on the speaker’s specific experiences. As such it exemplifies a narrative mode of knowledge (Bruner 1986), with its emphasis on the particular and personal rather than being couched in terms of general principles. Tannen (1989) has noted how the narrative device of casting thoughts and speech in dialogue allows universals to be represented through the particular. ‘The accurate representation of the particular communicates universality, whereas direct attempts to represent universality often communicate nothing’. (pp. 105). However, by deciding to tape rather than write down his personal inventory or self-examination the speaker is presenting himself as wilfully resistant to an aspect of suggested AA practice.
>one of the things I< lacked when I first tried the fourth step
was any sense of balance at all
and I (.) didn’t clearly understand the meaning of the word moral in moral inventory
and I thought of all these funny places I had woken up in
with funny people .hh
and I thought gosh >you know I am a pretty immoral person< you know
and I am never going to be able to do this(.)
and I began to understand with the help of my sponsor ((cough)) (.)
the morality of all this
Here we see an AA speaker evaluating the former self negatively, in that his former limited view of morality is restricted to sexual behaviours and the resulting sense of guilt and inadequacy. However, again the voice of AA is pervasive within the text, manifest through allusions to the Big Book. These allusions include fearless, to take the easier softer way, write it down, moral inventory. Furthermore, references to AA practices include, (doing) step four, write it down, with the help of my sponsor. Through constant echoes of the words of the Big Book and AA slogans, AA speakers assume the voice of AA as their own, giving it evaluative ascendancy over other resisted voices. In effect, this makes what is formally a monologue into a highly interactive process, whereby AA sharing becomes ‘joint production’ involving a dynamic interplay between resisted and ascendant voices, the ascendant one being highly reiterative of other AA narratives and literature, particularly the Big Book, itself a joint production and assembly of many voices (Anon. 1986; Kurtz 1991). 22
However, as he continues his account we hear of his struggle with other internally persuasive discourses; that is his former self, which he presents as more wilful and independent in that it wants to tape rather than write the ‘moral inventory’:
you see I thought that if I ((cough)) could tape it
that perhaps it would not sound so bad or look so bad or whatever(.)
and:
and I thought gosh>you know I am a pretty one of the things I< lacked when I first tried the fourth step
was any sense of balance at all
Here Richie evaluates his former self with the voice of his present self, a voice embedded in and derived from AA (1981). Authorship arises out of a dialogic relationship between these voices, the process of entering into culturally available stories, taking them over and making them one’s own. Furthermore, through displaying strongly dialogic features of language the speaker constitutes himself as deeply embedded in a collective genre, value and coherence system.
As far as the teller’s relationship with the audience is concerned the discursive devise of creating a dialogue between the speaker’s former and present self allows the ideology and practices of the programme to be transmitted without imputing recalcitrance or naiveté to the audience. This allows the maintenance of symmetry between them (O'Halloran 2005), as the speaker avoids positioning himself as advising or preaching to the audience.
I was very fortunate because AA had been there /before me (.)
um every one in these rooms had been there /before me (.)
and some wonderful people
had also published one of these /books (.) ‘the forth step guide’ ((cough))
which I used(…) .hh
and I wrote it all down (.)
Richie’s narrative above outlines the shift from the recalcitrance of the novice to compliance (surrender to) the programme through AA practices. And I wrote it all down represents the triumph of AA practices and the AA programme over the voice of the speaker as recalcitrant. In particular it represents the triumph of a voice embedded in and derived from a collective source – a voice in chorus, if you like, as opposed to a voice in isolation. In subsuming one’s own version of one’s life story into the stories of others there is an accompanying process involving resisting other versions; these may be defunct versions that no longer have positive explanatory value or ones that are at odds with the new emerging version.

Community or cult?

Of course the process of acquiring the voice of another may be challenged as a form of ‘brain-washing’ or a feature of slavish adherence to a cult (Bufe 1998). Again Bakhtin is interesting on this; he distinguishes between two different types of discourse which he refers to as authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse. Authoritative discourse is the pre-existing word of religion, politics, morality - the voice of the father and adults. It demands that its authority is acknowledged in totality and that we make it our own unconditionally: It is distanced from the quirks of individual and artistic usage and may not be played with ironically and through metaphorical extensions. ‘We encounter it with its authority already fused to it’ (ibid 1981:342). ‘It is not a free appropriation and assimilation of the word itself that authoritative discourse seeks to elicit from us,’ he argues but, ‘rather, it demands our unconditional allegiance’ (ibid 1981:343). Its meaning is not subject to context and may even require a special script or frame sometimes even be expressed through a foreign language. There can be no real dialogue with or within it.
However, where the discourse of others is internally persuasive it may be of great significance in the development of individual consciousness, awakening it to independent ideological life precisely because it is the voice of another. Within AA, alcoholics are seen as ready to undertake the AA programme when they have hit bottom. That is the point where they are ready to emerge from their solitary and ineffective battle with booze, locked in self-absorption, isolation and denial. The recovery process requires a reversal of this. If the newcomer finds early engagement in AA interaction compelling and persists in participating in meetings, the internally persuasive discourse is assimilated and becomes tightly interwoven in the newcomer’s own. For Bakhtin, the internally persuasive word is half-ours and half-someone else’s. ‘Its creativity and productiveness lies in the fact that it awakens new and independent words, that it organises masses of our words from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition’ (ibid 1981:345). For newcomers to AA to become acculturated and assume the identity of recovering alcoholics, they need to be open and flexible to its discourse and experience it as persuasive and dynamic. In such cases, they claim ownership of both its discourse and embedded moral alignments, internalising them and re-authoring themselves through them, essentially becoming the ‘originators’ and ‘authors’ of the AA discourse they produce in meetings. Their voices assume, reiterate and amplify the voice of AA in making it their own.
In this way, the distinction between authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse rests on the degree to which the individual claims authority and responsibility for what he says, and thus for what he does. When another’s words are ‘retold in one’s own words,’ they become internally persuasive as they are affirmed through assimilation and, as we see here, tightly interwoven with the speaker’s, serving his purposes and using his accent as he appropriates the words, adapting them to his own semantic and expressive intention. As Bakhtin (1981) points out:
prior to this moment of appropriation the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that a speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions. (pp:293-294)
Richie has obviously found AA discourse persuasive, in that he assimilates its discourse into his own.

Conclusion

Typically within AA stories the conflicting voices are the voice of the active alcoholic and that of the alcoholic in recovery. The active alcoholic is often depicted as egotistical and given to ‘grandiosity, suffering from ‘self-pity’ and ‘resentment’ - the emotions represented as the greatest threats to continued sobriety. Bateson and the writers of Alcoholics Anonymous claim that a ‘surrender’ is required if an aggressive dualism between mind and body, self and behaviour, is to be resolved. This involves realignments both between the multiple voices of the alcoholic self and the manner in which the outside world is related to. The realignment within the alcoholic and to the external world is effected and made manifest, at least in part, through adopting, reiterating and amplifying the voice of AA within the accounts of themselves. This involves a discursive submission to the AA group and programme, the acquisition of collective voices and a story embedded in a common coherence system of explanations and accountability. It is a surrender of an atomised, fractured view and the acquisition of a dialogic one. These realignments are displayed in and constituted at least in part through giving salience to the voice of the acculturated, experienced AA member over the reconstructed voices of the past; the former is strengthened and emboldened through being in chorus with other AA members in the process of recovery, the latter is reconstructed as self-seeking and self-destructive, leading to isolated thinking and ‘the first drink’.