Cogniţie, Creier, Comportament / Cognition, Brain, Behavior

Copyright © 2007 Romanian Association for Cognitive Science. All rights reserved.
ISSN: 1224-8398
Volume XI, No. 2 (June), 229-247

THE SAID AND THE UNSAID:

APPROACHES TO NARRATIVE ANALYSIS
Irina TODOROVA*
Health Psychology Research Center, Sofia, Bulgaria & Boston, USA

ABSTRACT

Creating stories about events and lives is seen as a fundamental human ability,
and the key way of constructing lives and selves, of personality and identities.
Within health psychology, the focus of narratives is as a way of making sense of
illness, of finding order and meaning in lives and selves destabilized by
embodied suffering. As this interest in narratives has expanded, so has the
variety of approaches to studying them. One concept that has been key in
defining and analyzing narratives is that of coherence. The discontinuities and
incoherence of narratives, in other words the narratives that do not fit into the
expected order can be seen as a way of resisting and destabilizing dominant
discourses that can be oppressive. Since the discontinuities in narratives are
less often discussed, this paper illustrates one method of narrative analysis,
Interpretative Poetics (Rogers et al., 1999), which acknowledges that the
narrative is an attempt to create a coherent understanding of events and
experiences, but also employs readings, which examine the places where
coherence apparently breaks down through silences, gaps and negativity.
Following four layers of analysis, this interpretative method unglues multiple
voices of the said and the unsaid. As an example of this method, we present an
interview with Nadya, in which we study the ways in which she comes to terms
with childlessness. Her story contains what can be seen as examples of very
subtle, implicit and most likely unconscious resistance to the existing dominant
cultural discourses of childlessness.

KEYWORDS: Narrative analysis, Interpretative Poetics, childlessness.

Pieces and Spaces

When starting a collage, each piece of paper is detached and shapeless, its
boundaries clearly visible, yet carrying traces of its past history as part of a larger

*
Corresponding author:
Email: Irina_Todorova@post.harvard.edu
230 I. Todorova

sheet of paper. Hand-made paper is an absolutely central element of these collages

– starting out as fibers of dry plants, the process of turning them into pulp that is
malleable into paper sheets is deeply embodied. A long, physically intensive
period of hammering the fibers into pulp, requiring the full concentration of bodily
attention, dissolves boundaries between artist and material, infuses the artist’s non-
verbal voice into the still shapeless mass and helps her hear the grass fibers. The
hand dissolves into the water, the pulp diffuses into the hand and the body knows
the texture of the material. Memories of this dance are carried into the future work.
“I know that after you read me it is hard to reproduce my music by ear, it’s
not possible to sing it without having it memorized. And how do you memorize
a thing that has no story?” (Lispector, 1983).

The dissected fibers are carried and washed by the water. After achieving
the desired consistency, the pulp is poured into the frame that defines its shape.
The frame, however, never completely molds the shape of the wet sheet, but
preserves the memory of water in what is the most moving characteristic of hand-
made paper – its rough edges. Having made a sheet, it is rarely used as is, and it is
not cut with scissors, but torn. Tearing the sheet transforms it into separate and
unique pieces with the shape that each one acquires being beyond the artist’s
control. The fibers tear in unpredictable ways, and they flow from the edges of the
piece. These pieces with their creative and dynamic ragged edges are repositioned
in a new context, they are layered next to and over each other and acquire new
meaning. So do the cracks between them, where the fibers play.
The hand-made paper is combined with other pieces taken from others’
work, from photographs, from reproductions – shapelessly torn, or sometimes cut
in a rigid form. The work of others finds its place, but as Geertz (1986) points out,
“It is the copying that originates”. Originality hides in the touching and reshaping
of each piece to make it part of the new whole. Each piece is set into the others;
layers of tissue paper are pasted over them so as to cover several at the same time
and create connectivity among them, yet ensure that all are still visible; paint is
brushed with a wide brush over many pieces to blend the edges into each other, to
make them unified, yet pieces of the fibers stick out; melted wax is poured onto the
surface and it trickles and sets into the empty spaces, filling some, yet creating new
ones. The final product is shaped by many pieces and layers, each with a different
history and a different message, but also with a new common one. The spaces
between the pieces, the play between the ragged edges, are as much a part of the
tune as the pieces themselves.
The final product can be a collage, a life narrative or a work of research.
There are multiple voices in each life narrative, including the multiple voices
within. The tunes that are sung by the spaces between are frequently “notes not
heard” or “forms not tolerated” (Eliot, 1963). We fill some of the missing pieces
and spaces, and can thus shape stories that become selves and lives through their
telling. Narrative researchers pay attention mainly to the words but sometimes also
to the spaces between them.

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 I. Todorova 231

Narrative Analysis

Interest in narratives in psychology has blossomed in the last 15 years

(Bamberg, 2006; Crossley, 2000a; Sarbin, 1986). Creating stories about events and
lives is seen as a fundamental human ability, and the key way of constructing lives
and selves, of personality and identities (McAdams, 2001, 2006). Within health
psychology, the focus of narratives is as a way of making sense of illness, of
finding order and meaning in lives and selves destabilized by embodied suffering.
Narrative approaches have also expanded to different areas of practice, such as
medicine (Charon, 2006a, 2006b), psychotherapy (Freedman & Combs, 1996;
White & Epston, 1990) and organizational development (Gergen & Gergen, 2006).
As this interest in narratives in psychology in general, and in health psychology in
particular, has expanded, so has the variety of approaches to studying them
(Crossley, 2000b; Mishler, 1995; Murray, 1997, 1999, 2003; Smith & Sparkes,
2006).
In narrative approaches to qualitative research, different methods are used
to understand the structure, content and function of stories in people’s lives and
culture. Some approaches foreground “what” is being told, while others prefer to
understand the “how” of the telling (Smith & Sparkes, 2006). The goal, however,
is always to identify stories within the text and to preserve the flow of this story in
the process of analysis. The main feature that distinguishes narrative analysis from
most other forms of qualitative research is this interest in longer segments of
interview or natural conversation text and the temporal ordering of events in the
telling of the story. While many qualitative methods use some form of thematic
categorization of interview segments, and the identification of these categories
across several cases, narrative analysis on the other hand identifies stories within a
single interview and applies different interpretative lenses to them (Mishler, 1995).
Narrative analysis identifies the way stories are shaped, or emplotted , as well as
the way they are embedded in exiting cultural narratives and the social functions
that they serve (Murray, 2003). This analytical process can certainly be repeated
for several cases and more general conclusions can be made, as illustrated by
Mishler, but nonetheless the focus is always on the order (and disorder) within the
flow of the particular stories (Mishler, 1999).
Some of the interpretative lenses, which are zoomed in on stories have a
realist assumption, which aim, in Mishler’s words, to identify the correspondence
between the “told and the telling” – in other words, how the narrative (the telling)
maps onto the actual events (the told) as they happened (Mishler, 1995).
Other lenses have a social constructionist theoretical orientation.
Riessman discusses in greater detail the performative view of narrative (Riessman,
2002). The view of narrative as performance assumes a multiple self, which is
positioned differently depending on the relational context, presenting a “preferred
identity” at the particular time, situation and interaction. The idea is that identities
are not inside people, but are created between people – femininity and masculinity,

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for example, are relationally accomplished. She states: “Informants do not reveal
an essential self, as much as they perform a preferred one, selected from the
multiplicity of selves and personas that individuals switch among as they go about
their lives” (p. 701). When discussing social positioning, she also stresses that they
are fluid, and that narrators ‘choose” how to position themselves. Wetherell (2003)
underscores that the social constructionist approach, specifically the discursive
approach to narrative analysis is interested in the “cultural resources through which
intelligible selves are constructed” (p. 106).
Current psychoanalytic approaches to narrative interpretation are based on
a “partial constructionism” (Wetherell, 2003), positing the existence of a reality but
also the understanding that access to reality is mediated through one’s unconscious
models, defenses and desires. From such a perspective, the narrative is seen as
allowing access to the individual’s psychic reality, as well as to the ways in which
people both express and avoid knowing their psychic worlds through what they say
and cannot say. In contrast to discourse analysis as applied to narratives, which
will use the text as its subject matter, a psychoanalytic approach will be interested
to a greater extent in the psychological processes that are implied “beyond the
text”.
A key concept that is often invoked when studying narratives is that of
narrative coherence. Murray (2003), for example defines narratives through this
concept: “The most distinctive feature of a narrative is that it provides a coherent
causal account of an event that has occurred or is expected to occur.” (p. 98).
McAdams identifies coherence as the first criterion for a ‘good’ narrative
(McAdams, 1993). He states: “Over the course of adolescence through middle
adulthood, our personal myths should ideally develop in the direction of increasing
1) coherence, 2) openness, 3) credibility, 4) differentiation, 5) reconciliation and 6)
generative integration. The prototype of the ‘good story’ in human identity is one
that receives high marks on these six narrative standards. All other things being
equal, the personal myth that is more coherent is better than the one that is less
coherent.” (p. 110-111). Some indicators of coherence are characters and
motivations that make sense, events that follow in a causal manner, absence of
contradictions, and others. Later in the book, however, he also somewhat dethrones
coherence by stating that stories that are too coherent do not ring true.
While for McAdams and others (Baerger & McAdams, 1999), the life
story inherently has a level of coherence, which is correlated with health and well-
being, for other authors, the achievement of narrative coherence is a process (Smith
& Sparkes, 2006). The concept of coherence is also central to the ideas about life
stories developed by Linde (1993), however, the narrating of the Life Story is a
process of “creation of coherence”. The two basic criteria for coherence in Linde’s
account are causality and continuity (p. 127), as well as richness of account,
temporal depth, non-contradictory accounts (Linde, 1993). She presents ways in
which adequate coherence is created and underlines that the criteria for this
adequacy are individual and social, in other words – they are contextual and can
vary locally and historically.

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Identifying the demand for or achievement of coherence as a central

characteristic of a narrative ignores the multiple aspects and places of discontinuity
and disorder in a story. Mishler (1999) destabilizes the taken-for-granted idea of
narrative coherence, and states that “coherence is an essentially and intractably
ambiguous concept, that defies any effort for formal and precise definition” (p. 84).
He goes on to illustrate how the “apparent orderliness” of craftartists’ narratives
does exist and is created in the interview interaction, but cannot have a single
definition that is relevant to all of the narratives and through which they can be
compared (p. 110). Murray (2003) also “challenges” the idea of singular narrative
coherence; the narratives that do not fit into the expected order being a way of
resisting and destabilizing dominant discourses that can be oppressive. The
overemphasis on coherence and other criteria of “good” stories can introduce a
prescriptive element into the analysis and to dichotomizing stories into evaluative
categories (Squire, Forthcoming).

The Poetics of Narratives

“Hear me, hear my silence. What I speak is never what I speak but something
else. When I say “overflowing waters”: I am talking about bodily strength
within the waters of the world. Capture this something else of which I truly
speak […]. Read the energy that is there in my silence”(Lispector, 1983).

Since the discontinuities in narratives are less often discussed, in this paper
I will illustrate one method of narrative analysis, Interpretative Poetics (Rogers et
al., 1999), which acknowledges that the narrative is an attempt to create a coherent
understanding of events and experiences, but also employs readings, which
examine the places where coherence apparently breaks down through silences,
gaps and negativity. I use this method to attempt to hear, though not necessarily
name, the many voices in women’s stories of infertility treatment. This method
employs multiple readings through a single interview transcript, to understand both
the content and the plot of the story evident in the text, as well as that which is not
explicitly stated. As such, it is to some extent informed by current, particularly
feminist, psychoanalytic approaches to narrative, as it states that “the unsayable
lies just under the surface of conscious knowing, while what is unspeakable exists
as a deep and haunting sense of something present that begs for words but is also
absolutely forbidden to be spoken” (Rogers et al., 1999). It is also informed by
linguistics and literary theory (Budick & Iser, 1987), as well as by the Voice-
Centered Method (Gilligan, Spencer, Weinberg, & Bertsch, 2003).
The authors of the Interpretative Poetics Method developed it through their
work with children, who speak of difficult, traumatic and abusive experiences,
aiming to further understand these experiences. Following four layers of analysis,
this interpretative method unglues multiple voices of the said and the unsaid, so as
to be heard more clearly, yet preserves their interconnectedness and overlap. It
helps the researcher peek into the silences, or into the cracks between the pieces,

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234 I. Todorova

offering a guide through the maze of the fascinating, but confusing play at the
edges. It values those parts of the stories in which that, which is too painful or too
dangerous to be spoken hides, yet struggles to be voiced. At the same time, it takes
seriously the ethical dilemmas and responsibilities of research, which imposes
meanings and interpretations to that which has not been explicitly stated (Rogers et
al., 1999).
For this analysis, I will present an interview with Nadya, in which I study
the ways in which she comes to terms with childlessness. Her story contains what
can be seen as examples of very subtle, implicit and most likely unconscious
resistance to the existing dominant cultural discourses of childlessness, rather than
direct expressions of protest or disagreement through statements or acts (Riessman,
2000). It is precisely in cases like this for which the method of Interpretative
Poetics is most valuable – cases in which the unsaid is layered within the said, in
which many things cannot be spoken, where the text elicits a ‘doubling of
meaning” .
I have used all four dimensions of the Interpretative Poetics Method,
reading through the interview text once for each dimension, then returning again to
previous dimensions, informed by the subsequent ones. During the first reading, I
chose passages that reflect one particular story based on an interpretative question,
connecting them into a profile. The second layer of the interpretative poetics reads
for the relational dynamics between interviewer and interviewee, asking about the
limits and edges of what the researcher and the participant can know together.
This reading acknowledges that narratives are interpersonal phenomena, particular
to the specific interview context and are co-constructed by both interviewer and
interviewee. Through this reading I identified instances of recognition,
disconnection and reconnection. I became aware of how the sensitivity of the topic
of infertility kept us, and especially me as an interviewer, from entering too
quickly into sensitive topics of conversation. I also identified several instances of
topics that were mentioned, but that we avoided bringing out, such as the
relationship that Nadya had with her father.
The third layer was very important in revealing the theme of the current
paper, since it asks: are there instances of the languages of the unsayable and what
might be their meaning? I searched for these languages – identified as languages
of negation, revision, smokescreen and the language of silence by the authors of
the method (Rogers et al., 1999). I paid attention to negative statements, to sudden
changes in the story, to incomplete sentences, to silences and spaces, asking what
could be their significance.
In the fourth layer of reading the interview, I looked for language contrasts
– contrasts in meaning or in the type of language used. Later, within these
contrasts, I looked for examples of figurative thought expressed through
metaphors, metonymies and irony. This reading led to additional clarification of
the themes that had been identified through the initial three readings.
Though rather separate, these layers of Interpretative Poetics inform each
other throughout the process of analysis.

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After having conducted the analysis through all four dimensions of the
Interpretative Poetics, I have written a story about Nadya’s story, which
incorporates elements of the understanding that I have gained at each layer about
how Nadya comes to term with childlessness in relation to the process of
negotiating responsibility and control.
I don’t know
I don’t think
I simply don’t like
I think
that I like
to be different.
Nadya (p. 14)1
Nadya arrived at the office in Sofia in which I was conducting interviews
with women undergoing infertility treatment at the appointed time and almost
immediately started telling her story of a struggle with unsuccessful treatments for
childlessness. Soon after, her tears also began flowing along with her words and
were an almost constant presence in our conversation. I interrupted our dialogue
several times to ask her if she would prefer to stop the interview. She said no. She
interrupted her story several times to ask me when I would pose my pre-formulated
questions. I said I didn’t really have any, but could she tell me her story.
Nadya was one of the 15 participants in the study on Living With Infertility
in Bulgaria, which I conducted in Sofia, Bulgaria. She is from Sofia, an interesting
and energetic 39 year-old woman with dark hair and glasses. Nadya is a math
teacher in middle school, but is currently unemployed, as is her husband, due to
layoffs in schools and basically in all state-funded sectors of the economy. She has
some income from private lessons and part-time contract work with computer
companies, with which they barely make ends meet. They have no children after
having been married for 12 years and this is a major source of sadness for her.
Nadya’s husband, however, who is 16 years older than her, has two children from
previous marriages. This, along with the fact that she has been medically diagnosed
as having “underdeveloped ovaries” has led to the construction of an explanation
for the childlessness of the couple as being almost solely her responsibility.
Generally, Nadya has come to the conclusion that there is little hope for
her to become pregnant in the future, and the use of assisted reproductive
technology as a means of conception is currently out of the question for financial
reasons. Adoption has been considered, but was somehow never carried through.
Although at times throughout the interview she does envision what it would be like
if a child came into her life, the overwhelming sense is that she is trying to accept
that, most likely, there won’t be one. Thus, she is accepting the fact that having
children is unlikely and the ways in which she finds reasons, logic, and comfort in

1
This is an “I poem” from Nadya’s interview, identified through the Voice Centered
Method (Gilligan et al., 2003)

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236 I. Todorova

this knowledge, and more generally – the way in which she attempts to make it
meaningful.
One of the ways in which Nadya makes sense of childlessness is through
the construction of multiple explanations. These include explanations of the causes
of childlessness (how did it happen?), but also ways in which the condition has
shaped her life, ways in which she sees it as changing her, or contributing in some
way to her growth (‘why did it happen?’). A major sub-process in coming to terms
with childlessness for Nadya is locating control through the crafting of multiple,
coexistent, though sometimes seemingly contradictory, explanations for infertility
and for still remaining childless. The complex issue of locating and constructing
control and responsibility is a sub-theme of the process of making sense of
childlessness for the women that I interviewed.

The Context

The multiple ways of affirming and questioning the conceptions of

womanhood that are available in Bulgarian society are the focus of my analysis.
Much has been written about the fact that responsibility, and thus the blame, for the
inability to conceive is attributed mainly to women, both through societal
discourses and through the social science and medical literature on the topic – an
attribution that seems to exist in different forms across many national and cultural
boundaries. Sandelowski (1990) follows the construction of infertility as a “failure
of volition” through history, demonstrating how it has been linked with behaviors,
mainly those of women, that are voluntary and under the control of the will. Such
behaviors are delaying childbirth, contraceptive use, abortions, sexually
transmitted diseases and others – leading to an image of infertility as a matter of
choice, and consequently as located in the moral domain, thus at least to some
extent, warranting blame. Similarly to the case of “at-risk” pregnancies, described
by Talbot et al. (Talbot, Bibace, Bokhour, & Bamberg, 1996), the ability or
inability to conceive historically has taken on the quality of a moral discourse. As
these authors state for the case of pregnancy, the theme that emerged historically is
that “reproductive processes are the responsibility of individual agents, who are
capable of making key decisions that influence the well-being of the fetus and
mother-to-be”.
In Bulgarian culture, women have been considered more responsible for
reproduction, and respectively culpable for failure to have children, and giving
birth was a sacred duty to family and country. The stigmatization of infertile
women as both deprived of meaningful lives and as socially unproductive citizens
is subtly or directly evident in the medical and broader social discourses (Todorova
& Kotzeva, 2003).
I will understand “voices of resistance” in a broad sense to mean any, even
the most subtle drawing on “a counter narrative consisting of claims as to what
they did and who they are, that resist and even challenge components of the
dominant discourse” (Talbot et al., 1996) of the woman as the sole agent of

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 I. Todorova 237

responsibility and control in the case of inability to conceive. Resistance to

compulsory expectations about the body can take on multiple forms (Riessman,
2000), which can include stories about acts, reflective statements, incomplete hints,
or even silences, and along the edges of these “forms not tolerated” we can begin
to gain an understanding of the complexity and multiplicity of the play of
accommodation and questioning or countering the cultural expectations.

The Cause is in My Body

Nadya begins her story – even before we have had a chance to clarify some
of the more mundane details about the goals of the interview or of her condition –
with a statement underlining the fact that her husband has two sons from two
different marriages. Though he very much wants to have a little girl, “the problem
is not the same for me as it is for my husband, who already has two sons….” The
phrase “he has two sons” is repeated several times within this initial paragraph, as
well as throughout the interview in different contexts. Thus, through the voice of
caring (Gilligan, 1982), Nadya is actively trying to distract attention from her
husband, so as to relieve him of the burden of the stigma of male infertility, by
offering unquestionable proof of his fertility.
This confidence, however, is somewhat shaken when they have to get
detailed testing done for both of them, on the one hand as part of the diagnostic
procedures and on the other hand as a bureaucratic necessity in order to apply for
tax waiver as a childless couple.2 As a result, the couple, rather than herself, is
labeled as “sterile”, and both of them have a hard time accepting this label. The
doctors, however, do convince her, and she has the difficult job of convincing her
husband that there is some problem with the mobility of his sperm, which probably
has to do with age.

N: [...] In spite of the fact that he has two sons, but, then, when he did the tests,
simply the doctor told me, I told him, look doctor, he has children from two
marriages and he simply explained, it seem that this are this way – he can have a
son the previous year and two months later he can be sterile and so on...
I: So then they did [testing]...
N. Yes, it was, yes a spermogram, I think the spermogram and what else...I had to
convince him that we buy this apartment, those were some of the most difficult
things that I had to convince him of, in our life.
I: All at the same time?
N. No, not at the same time […], simply at different times, but to convince him
of something like that, I think that for every man this is extremely unpleasant
and,...right, incredibly unpleasant. And he, even though he has, even though
he is an intelligent man. Right, even though he has two sons, he said, look

2
At that time, childless couples paid an additional income tax, under the logic that they
have fewer expenses. The idea was that what was taken from them was redistributed as
supplements to the salary of families with children. This tax was waived for people that
showed proof of medical reasons for childlessness.

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238 I. Todorova

here, how so, right, I specifically explained to him what the doctor had said
and so on, and despite that, very unpleasant, I even think, um, that he was
practically willing, when we went to the clinic for those, his tests…

Even so, Nadya continues to remind me of her husband’s two sons

throughout the interview and ends the interview on the following note:

N: I have thought about that, exactly that, obviously, right, my husband is, the
doctor used this expression: “Oh, this is a man for three women”. I thought it
was quite funny because I am his third wife.
I: Oh, yes.
N: Obviously the spermogram shows, that there are enough active sperm, but
obviously the psychological state plays a role, obviously…only the in vitro
method could possibly help me, if I had an egg cell, right, the fertilization
process also depends on the psyche. Right, obviously the psychology is also
of great importance.

In this passage, her husband’s fertility (and by extension, his reputation) is

restored, and any questions about the fertilizing capacity of his sperm are seen as
temporary and resolvable instabilities due to psychological mood. This is a gesture
on Nadya’s part to protect her husband’s reputation, and though it is a function of
her relationship with me as an interviewer, I would suspect that it is a common
expression of caring and would also be apparent in other contexts. In order to
further shelter him, she quickly brings the responsibility back into her own body,
which she sees as possibly being helped only through the intervention of
complicated artificial technological procedures.
Thus, Nadya does introduce the possibility that the medical causes of the
couple’s infertility are at least partially located in her husband’s physiology or
psyche in spite of the visible proof of his fertility. All of the other medical
explanations that Nadya offers, however, have to do with the functioning of her
own body.

N: I understand perfectly well that this is the best husband I could possibly
have, including in that sense. I mean the following, that if I had married, first
of all I don’t like, for me all other men are too young, they will seem like my
students… Obviously it’s a question of temperament… All these men, a large
portion of them, if they didn’t have children, they would want to have children
and the fact that I can’t have a child, obviously the cause is in me, because we
did, we did the testing, all sorts of things, I even accidentally remembered, I
brought this special document, which they gave us at the beginning, well not
quite the beginning, of our marriage where it says that they officially absolve
us from paying taxes. Because we went [to doctors] and our couple [was
defined] as sterile. It doesn’t matter that he has two sons, but, then, when he
did the tests, simply the doctor told me, I told him, look doctor, he has
children from two marriages and he simply explained, it seem that this are
this way -- he can have a son the previous year and two months later he can
be sterile and so on..

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 I. Todorova 239

Thus, the statement that “obviously the cause is in me” directly precedes
the description of how the couple is medically identified as infertile. This definitive
localization of the medical cause in her body is present at many points throughout
the interview:

N: Yes, in practice, for example, I regret, and that is precisely one of the
things, that I wanted to say, that in essence something that is, in essence, a
psychological problem, but it is also connected with health and one must, if
one has any doubts, especially women, if they doubt themselves, I had such
problems, generally I had irregular periods since I don’t know when, since I
was a college student and maybe soon after I got married, I think for about a
year, I don’t know how long I had no period, then they explained that it is on
the basis of stress and so on, my father didn’t attend the wedding…

N: For about a year, I was a patient at the Endocrinology department. I was

an inpatient at Endocrinology and they did some sorts of tests and it was
determined, that I am healthy, I obviously have small, underdeveloped
ovaries. Then, right, they did some sort of contrast photo, of the ovaries,
small, underdeveloped ovaries. And then way after that, maybe 2-3 years
later, I was a patient at the OB-GYN, so that they can do a laparoscopy, they
open up and observe the organs, while at the Endocrinology , testing and
medications. While I think that the laparoscopy is the method used at the final
stage, they see the localization of the organs and generally, right, with some
kind of light, there they can see the exact condition of things and after that
then they issued, I think, that document. And then it became clear, in the
sense, right, irreversibly clear, that things are due to me, and that, right, that I
will not have….

Again in this paragraph, the fact that the mentioned document identifies
the couple as “sterile” is unattended to and Nadya underlines that “it became
irreversibly clear, that things are due to me”.

N: Yes, that I will have no hope. And maybe, maybe a little after that…In
general ovulation can sometimes happen, sometimes doesn’t, everything is
caused by these underdeveloped ovaries (p. 9)
N: Obviously in my case… Generally speaking the ovaries are functioning
weakly. Obviously everything is due to me. (p. 10)
N: No, um, I think that when … when I was in the Endocrinology, I think they
did, or maybe in the OB-GYN they did these tests. Right, many women have
this problem, they don’t, their tubes are blocked. In my case all the tubes, all
that is fine, but simply the ovaries aren’t, underdeveloped, and… And I also
think I have a reversed uterus. But my mother has told me that she also had a
reversed uterus, right, and she told me and she comforted me with that, she
told me “Dear Nadya, right, with this reversed uterus I have two daughters
and I don’t know how many, 2 or 3 abortions. Simply once there is a
pregnancy if it is a reversed uterus you can’t have a miscarriage. Obviously I
simply can’t get pregnant. (p. 18).

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240 I. Todorova

I have presented many, almost repetitive, examples precisely to illustrate

the frequency and the force with which Nadya comes back to this statement. The
causation for infertility is so frequently and definitively located in Nadya’s body by
everyone around her, including herself, that at one point the body responds with
what she describes as a fantasy of a pregnancy, in complete compliance with
dominant explanations for the causes of childlessness. She develops all the
symptoms that accompany it, with one major absence. As Nadya points out, “I
develop all symptoms of pregnancy, with the exception, right, of the presence of a
fetus…”.
Nadya does introduce the counter-narrative of her husband’s medical
problems as a possible reason for the infertility of the couple. This, however, is
done in a way that makes this cause suspect, and at the same time shows her care
for him and her insistence to protect his reputation.

Somehow Everything Fell Through

In addition to constructing explanations based on medical causes, woven

throughout the interview is Nadya’s story of the decisions that they have made
about adoption. In the first instance in which Nadya mentions adoption, I
understand that the subject has been discussed quite early in their marriage and that
they have come to a conclusion, which at this point seems completely
unproblematic.

I: This was in the very beginning [of the marriage], you decided right away…
N: Yes, this was somewhere in the first… No, no, it was simply in the first year
of our marriage, and generally, since I had these problems, we had discussed
it, we had discussed it a little before we got married with my husband and we
had agreed that if I can’t have children we will adopt. […] And as a
coincidence our friends had…I think, yes, not that they had, but their daughter
was adopted.

At the end of this paragraph we see what seems to be the first hint,
introduced through revision, that the topic of adoption might not be so
unproblematic for the family, since it is seen as not quite the same as “having” a
child. Later on, once more through focusing on the languages of negation and
revisions, other clues can be identified that show that both adoption and all the
other different solutions, which have been discussed, are somehow problematic.

N: …and then again some problem arose, when one doesn’t push things
[adoption procedures] and when one somehow has other problems, time
passed and I think the doctor died [who was helping them with the adoption]
and then came the great 19893. … And then other problems come to the

3
The year of the change in the political system in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe.

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 I. Todorova 241

forefront. And when the doctor died, things stopped moving. They were in a
dead, dead end and ever since then I regret immensely, that simply… For
example, that I didn’t quickly… Right, maybe, it should be completely clear,
that things are like that, that it was some sort of illusion that one can have
one’s own children. We had decided that in the end we will adopt, right, a
child and… Right, we both were clear about that, my mother not that she was
against, but… She said, wait….

N: In spite of all this, this too [in vitro] with time, it fell through, because I
think, it was right, right during the time, right when we had decided, including
we had partially decided, I had explicitly talked with my husband and he had
agreed with this in vitro method. Simply to try it, even though the probability
there was also very small, since it turns out, that in practice this method, it’s
not clear, I think.

N: No, but the diagnosis… Yes, but I knew, I knew that, we simply discussed it,
that we both agree, my husband is intelligent… In many cases, it is not a
question of intelligence, for example many men would not, would not adopt
children, though wouldn’t, that’s how they express it, they wouldn’t take care
of a bastard and would not at all… But it is simply a little child, they will take
care of a …

This passage is saturated with negations, contrasts and finally what is

probably a smokescreen, since she jumps from her husband to other men in a way
which leaves the logic and the point of her statement unclear. It exemplifies the
fear of the possible stigma that in some cases is attached to adoption in Bulgaria,
especially by men, who see it as a symbol of failed masculinity.
Another smokescreen immediately follows the previous one. As soon as
we started the interview, Nadya stated that she has a message of advice for other
women going through infertility treatment. She came back to that message at the
end of the interview, in a passage that became central to my way of understanding
Nadya’s experience of infertility.

N: They should adopt a child as early as possible. Naturally, I’m not at all
suggesting that… For example I would never get married to a man who
wouldn’t want to adopt a child. I don’t mean, I don’t mean that I know that I
can’t have children, I don’t mean that. These are just, some, some… thoughts
in me… So for example, it turns out, that I have married a person, who, not
that he doesn’t value poetry, but since I value it very much… But for example,
he has these friends, coincidentally A.K.4 is a friend of ours. He values him as
a person, as an individual. Well, he values, some of his, he’s read some of his
poems, but… So maybe, how can I know, so, I’ve said, I won’t marry such a
man, yet it turns out I have married, nothing is perfect.

4
A famous Bulgarian poet.

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242 I. Todorova

Looking in detail into the above paragraph, it becomes absolutely

impossible to pinpoint whether Nadya means that she married a man who doesn’t
like poetry, or who doesn’t want to adopt a child. This paragraph attempts to focus
attention on her husband’s attitude toward poetry, and smoke-screens attention
away from the unsaid – her husband’s attitude toward adoption.
Additionally, there is an important language contrast between the forceful
way in which she states that the cause for the couple’s childlessness is “obviously”
in her, as was illustrated in the previous section, and the statements with which she
only hints that others might also have some contribution. These are in a language
that is full of negations, revisions and smokescreens. On the one hand, we see
short, tight sentences of the type: "Obviously everything is due to me" and the
much more unclear, discontinuous language and lengthy sentences through which
she describes their decisions to adopt or to undergo treatment.
For Nadya, the hope for children is equivalent to life.

N: … I would have convinced him, no, I, I am certain, that my husband, from

taking into consideration, simply our financial insecurity. If it was just the
two of us, he knows very well, that from lessons we can make ends meet […]
so we had enough for food. For food and medications. It was maybe January
when I stocked up on my hormones for a year. But then, I remember, when I
was looking for them, I went around searching the pharmacies for half a day,
I was so stressed – will I find them in this pharmacy, for what price, I know I
have a limited amount, will I be able to buy medications till the end of the
year… somehow will I be able to buy life until the end of the year?

The intensity of this metaphor of the hope for children as life is deeply
moving, as is Nadya’s story of struggle with financial insecurity and the then-
present problems of finding imported medications in Bulgarian pharmacies. It is
telling that buying medications is a priority, considering that they had only money
left over for food. Additionally, I have a sense that the importance of sustaining
the hope for conception by buying medications with her last resources carries an
element of futility to it. This sense of hopelessness is difficult to grasp in this short
quote, yet I feel it can be extrapolated from the interview as a whole, since her
primary meaning-making processes are directed toward accepting the fact of her
childlessness.
Other relevant metaphors and passages in the text also represent the theme
of children as having a very high value for Nadya, especially in the way in which
she talks about her love for her niece. The little girl “fills an emptiness inside me”.
She is “my child”, a “holiday” and “a sweet duty”. The following passage was
spoken through incessant tears, which are another way of representing the
unsayable, in this instance, the inexpressible anguish of living with the unfulfilled
dream of loving and being loved by her own child.

N: Specifically my niece, I don’t know if all children, if they are so affectionate, but
she… There have been times when I go to visit my mother, I’m sad about something, I

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 I. Todorova 243

go there and Yana is there, since they, my parents take care of her. In the summer
there is no day care, though now she’s been going to school for a year. There have
been times when I’m sad and she sees, she sees that I’ll start crying and she comes.
My husband would never do it, for him, for men, when someone is crying, I don’t
know… He doesn’t feel it, but this child, because you’re crying or just because… She
really loves me very much, she feels it even if I haven’t told her, Yana, you do know
that I love you very much, she knows it, they feel it. And she loves me with the same,
she responds, it’s mutual (crying).

In contrasting the importance that children have in Nadya’s life with the
fact that "everything fell through", or "we didn't push things", I reach the edges of
my understanding of Nadya's explanations. In the interest of space my analysis so
far has remained focused on the concepts of control and responsibility, however,
this contrast is so pervasive throughout the interview that it warrants attention,
even though I believe that it is more relevant to another important theme – stigma.
It is quite possible that these acts – in the sense of allowing the adoption procedure
to fall through, never taking on in vitro, not wanting to be an object of gossip in
school after adoption – are in themselves unconscious forms of resistance to the
stigma of infertility.

I Should Have Insisted More

Even though Nadya is adamant that it is definitely impossible for her to

conceive due to physiological problems that have been present since an early age
and are talked about as unsolvable, she frequently comes back to regrets and self-
blame for postponing treatment due to indecision or to the requirements of her
profession as a teacher. This contrast between the medical causes of infertility as
irresolvable and her regret at not doing more to resolve them, is again tied into the
theme of locating responsibility and control. The definitive location of the medical
causes in Nadya’s narrative is in her body, and while the fact that medical testing
has shown decreased sperm activity for her husband is mentioned, it has little
impact on the way in which she constructs her explanations.
From another perspective, if we accept the definitive, irreversible
dysfunction of Nadya’s ovaries as the unquestionable reason for infertility, then it
becomes difficult to understand why she frequently comes back to the theme of “if
only I hadn’t procrastinated, I might have had a child”. This became slightly
clearer when I realized that statements referring to regret for procrastination are
combined with statements of the type: “If only I had insisted more”. For example,
she blames herself for not insisting more intensively on having a biological child
with her husband, who has invoked the argument against it because of the high
probability of birth defects at an older age. The explanation is complicated: it
includes age, financial insecurity, but it is even more striking in what it excludes –
the "obviousness" of the inability of her body to become pregnant, as well as her
husband's low sperm count. Thus, through what is said: "I would have convinced
my husband", she is taking on responsibility for not insisting enough. Through
what is not said: the unfinished sentences and the way in which she abruptly

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244 I. Todorova

switches from one idea to another, which have to do with his reluctance, broadly
speaking, she formulates her call for him to share that responsibility with her.

N: Right, if I had the security, I am certain, if we had been well-off financially,

I am certain, I would have convinced my husband. Right, because now he is
saying, at his age… To me he is still, for example, not that, right, I am always
surprised, maybe he looks, I don’t think he looks 55 and generally, he looks
younger, so. […] I would have convinced him, now, I am sure, that my
husband, from that perspective, simply because of our insecure economic
situation.

Her regret for procrastinating or not insisting refers mainly to the adoption
procedures, rather than to medical treatments.

N: And this was exactly, this was the psychological problem… with the
adoption. If we, I keep thinking, if we had agreed about it early on, if I had
been more persistent… As early as possible, if I had adopted a child, that
would have, I know perfectly well, it would have release my psyche. There
are many cases like that and children are born. I even think there is a Latin
name for it – pregnancy after adoption or something like that. In the sense
that there is a medical term.

When Nadya talks about adoption, through the explicit language she takes
on sole responsibility, while through the languages of the unsayable she introduces
the contributions that others might have made in putting it off, yet in a way that
strives not to assign blame. Although others contributed to not making a definitive
decision to adopt, she still sees it as her responsibility to have been more active and
to have put more pressure on them to make the decision. At the same time, even if
adoption had worked, it would still have been her responsibility to relax after that
and conceive biologically.

Conclusion

Nadya has given multiple explanations of infertility, in which her body or

her psyche is the only “cause” or in which she has procrastinated making decisions
about treatments and adoption. Rarely does anyone else directly figure in these
explanations. Even when describing the testing done on her husband and the
insistence of the doctors that the spermogram shows decreased fertilizing capacity,
his virility is preserved through the voice of caring and frequent reminders that he
already has two sons.
Although the idea that the partner might hold part or all of the explanation
for childlessness is not completely unsayable in Bulgarian culture (and many of the
women I spoke to stated it explicitly), it is a difficult thing to say. It might be
unsayable for Nadya in this particular relationship with me as an interviewer, or in
her particular family context – there could be a connection here with another topic

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 I. Todorova 245

that remains unexplored in detail in our interview – that of her authoritarian father
who punishes his daughter’s noncompliance by not attending her wedding.
In addition to the fact that Nadya can only indirectly state in the interview
that her husband was included in their decisions not to go along with adoption, she
might also be reluctant to relinquish control by including others in the explanation.
She knows that in a place where responsibility and blame for infertility are so
obviously placed on the woman, any solution would also have to be initiated and
carried out by herself, most probably almost completely on her own. Constructing
an explanation of childlessness that includes others would in a symbolic way
weaken her potential to intervene through exercising agency and thus will limit her
chances of having a child.
Nadya oscillates between the cultural discourse of locating responsibility
solely within the woman and infertility as a woman’s disease, and subtle
suggestions that others might be involved. Through the languages of the unsayable
we can identify hints that her husband and her mother might have also had
something to do with the unending postponement of adoption and with the fact that
with time, “it simply fell through”. A possible reason for Nadya’s difficulty with
including others in her explanation is that she cannot do so without herself being
implicated in a blaming game. There is an absence of a language through which
explanations of infertility can be constructed around “relational appreciation”
rather than through the attribution of blame.
Nadya’s narrative seems incoherent, disordered, saturated with
ambivalence and confusion. She states her knowledge then seems to undo it. This
analysis through Interpretative Poetics (Rogers et al., 1999) suggests, however, that
she is not undoing her knowledge, but possibly “undoing power5” and expressing a
multiplicity and coexistence of contradictory narratives. The tension between
internalized responsibility and rejecting the blame is painful and exhausting,
almost as difficult as living without the fulfillment of a dream for a child. This
form of resistance is a step, albeit a small one, toward suggesting alternative
discourses that reject blame.

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