Narrative Thought and Narrative Language

Bruce K. Britton, Anthony D. Pellegrini, Bruce K. Britton, Anthony D. Pellegrini

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317785866
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology

Since before the dawn of history, people have been telling stories to each other and to themselves. Thus stories are at the root of human experience. This volume describes empirical investigations by Jerome Bruner, Wallace Chafe, David Olson, and others on the relationship between stories and cognition. Using philosophical, linguistic, anthropological, and psychological perspectives on narrative, the contributors provide a definitive, highly diversified portrait of human cognition.

1

Narrative Comprehension

Carol Fleisher Feldman

Jerome Bruner

Bobbi Renderer

Sally Spitzer

New York University

Basic cognitive processes for understanding the physical world have been at least well studied if not altogether well elucidated in recent decades. We now know a good deal about how experience of that world is organized—the classes and relations used, the propositions and operations employed, and so forth. But the world we inhabit has more than things in it. It also includes cultural products, among which are written poems, stories, and novels, and oral stories that we tell each other. Although these are symbolic objects, we strive to understand them too, and we probably succeed at it as well as we do with the physical world. But how do we do it? What cognitive processes are engaged? Are they the same as the ones we employ in understanding the world of things? And if different, what are they like?

To construe stories, may, of course, require the use of cognitive processes used for other purposes, but there are other processes that are unique to the story domain and to the world of narrative products. Other students of narrative have amply noted the applicability of non-unique processes to the comprehension of simple narratives: Trebasso and Sperry (1985) for moral parables and folk tales, Nelson (1986) and others for a restaurant tale that reports a sequence of events, and Mandler (1984) for goal-directed action patterns analyzable as schemas. But narrative products in any culture are typically more richly patterned than that. One source of this richer patterning in more literary stories—say in Modern Western literature or in Indian oral poetry—is the presence of a dual patterning: They contain both a landscape of consciousness and a landscape of action (Bruner, 1986).

Narrative forms can exist, of course, with only a landscape of action. Propp’s (1986/1968) famous study of the morphology of the folktale describes a sequence of action functions as types, where many tokens can fulfill the type in order to structure the plot as a whole. For such folktales, the landscape of action is a temporally patterned sequence of action events reported in the third person with minimal information about the psychological states of the protagonists. Even when accounts of this kind are in the first person, as in The Travels of Marco Polo, the narrative is dominated by the landscape of action, and events are reported as they might have appeared to anyone who had been present, to an omniscient observer. In such a landscape, it is not of concern how things are perceived, felt, intended, or imagined. So, in the landscape of action, things happen or they don’t. It is not concerned with how they are perceived.

In contrast, the landscape of consciousness (as in modern and postmodern fiction) is devoted precisely to how the world is perceived or felt by various members of the cast of characters, each from their own perspective. Whereas in folktales the verbs are verbs of action, in stories that include the landscape of consciousness, the language is marked by a heavy usage of mental verbs—of thinking, supposing, feeling, and believing. Indeed, the purpose of such stories is to explore the nature of the mental perspectives of characters rather than to report omnisciently on events encountered. Indeed, some forms (as in Joyce, Beckett, or Robbe-Grillet) may be largely dedicated to sketching a landscape of consciousness with virtually no landscape of action. But most modern narrative uses both a landscape of consciousness and a landscape of action and puts them into an ambiguous relation to each other. The modern reader, then, must interpret both sides of this dual landscape.

Whereas interpretation of the landscape of action may require only the use of the familiar cognitive processes that are used to explain the physical world, the landscape of consciousness may call into play cognitive processes not familiar from studies of our understanding of that world. A good deal has been written about the philosophical difference between explanation and interpretation (see, for example, Morton, 1980). In narratives having merely a landscape of action, the actions are given causal organization, and forms of processing (explanation) designed to unpack causality must be used to understand them. Narratives having a landscape of consciousness impose a different problem. By virtue of their events being mental, organized in terms of human agency and intentionality, they require processes of interpretation to deal with intentionality and its vicissitudes. Although we know very little about such processes of interpretation, fortunately they are not entirely unfamiliar. For the study of interpretation is as old as literary theory, which, after all, had its roots in Biblical exegesis. What we need to know better is the cognitive psychology of these processes.

No doubt the cognitive processing that we use to interpret human intentionality in stories is related to the processes we use to understand human intentionality in life encounters with other people. We might think of them both as derived from general cognitive procedures for interpreting intentionality. But literature is not quite life, and the procedures for interpretation of intentionality in texts and in human interaction may differ in some important ways. In other words, when we say that an action means such and such and that a text means such and such we invoke two different notions of meaning—and it is not yet clear how different they are.

In particular, the interpretation of intentionality in texts requires particular attention to two sorts of strictly linguistic phenomena: tropes and mental state terms. By tropes, we mean such devices as metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, and irony. Tropes can convey implicitly or in compressed form someone’s point of view about an event (the neutral or metaphorically sympathetic “His mother was upstairs taking her medicine” vs. the pejorative and ironic “His mother was upstairs swallowing a pill.”) An example of a mental state expression is “She dreaded his arrival.” Both tropes and mental state terms play an important role in conveying human intentionality in stories, whereas the interpretation of intentionality in human action and interaction must depend largely on such other stance conveying mechanisms as facial expression, tone of voice, gesture, and posture. Each, then, depends on a very different tool kit of cues.

The studies reported here have the explicit purpose of trying to explore the cognitive processes people use to understand or unpack story texts that comprise a dual landscape typical of modern storytelling—both a landscape of consciousness and a landscape of action. What distinctive cognitive procedures do people bring to bear in order to interpret the landscape of consciousness; how do these differ from those used to understand the landscape of action; and how do people handle the combination of the two in the dual landscape? In order to explore these questions, we designed a procedure for manipulating the richness of the landscape of consciousness in literary story texts. We sought an experimental procedure to help us tease apart the two landscapes.

In order to manipulate the landscape of consciousness, or the richness of information about human intentionality in the texts, we created two versions of the same story. We selected, for the first study, two stories that had both a landscape of action and a landscape of consciousness. We then tried to diminish the landscape of consciousness in each story by neutralizing or deleting its mental state descriptions. Both versions of each story were used in the experiment. One version was the published version as written with its rich landscape of consciousness—called here the conscious version. The other was the version with many of the mental state verbs deleted or replaced with action language—called hereafter the nonconscious version. This made the nonconscious versions shorter than the conscious versions of both stories. Note that though the nonconscious versions have a much reduced language of consciousness, they still have an inferrable pattern of human consciousness—at least to modern readers who expect to know what their protagonists are thinking and will make inferences about it on minimal information.

We expected the nonconscious version to be understood at least in part by means of the familiar hypothetico-deductive processes that Bruner (1986) has called paradigmatic thinking, with some new wrinkles due to the fact that the material is text rather than physical states. We hoped to learn something of the nature of those wrinkles, and we also hoped to discover the nature of any unique cognitive processes of interpretation that these same subjects used to understand the stories in their conscious versions.

We conducted two studies of this kind to explore the cognitive procedures people use for interpreting stories. In each study, different stories were used, but both studies followed the same pattern. In each study, 12 adult subjects were individually read two short stories. One was read as published—the conscious version. The other contained a reduced landscape of consciousness—the nonconscious version. In each study, 6 of the 12 subjects got Story 1 in the conscious version, and Story 2 in the nonconscious version; 6 got Story 2 in the conscious version and Story 1 in the nonconscious version. The order of presentation was counterbalanced, and the counterbalanced pattern was preserved across the two experimenters who interviewed the subjects. Subjects were all young adults living in New York City.

Before we start, however, we must say a word about the place of this study in the general scheme of things. To begin with, it falls midway between literary “reader response” approaches to comprehension of narrative literature and the experimental study of “made up” stories of the kind mentioned earlier. It uses as its input genuine literary products (although it uses artificial variants of them as well), and attempts to use an “experimental” procedure to determine how people interpret “real” stories. Although it is motivated by theoretical concerns, it attempts, nonetheless, to maintain an “empirical innocence” in the sense of letting subjects give their own accounts of what stories “mean.” We do not, moreover, attempt a sociolinguistic analysis in the sense of comparing our subjects’ cultural background or analyzing closely the social context in which their interpretation were given. Our subjects were young, middle-class, educated adults who were occasional readers of novels.

We say all this not in apology, but to indicate that this was an exploratory study designed to give us a sense of how a group of literate subjects go about “interpreting” or “understanding” a small collection of literary works. In subsequent work, we have addressed more directly the kinds of issues mentioned. But the present pilot study nonetheless can contribute to an appreciation of the kinds of interesting reactions one obtains when one asks people what they make of a story that is unfolding before them.

STUDY 1

In the first study, the stories were Brendan Gill’s “Truth and Consequences” and Henrich Böll’s “Nostalgia or: Grease Spots.” The stories, as written and as amended, appear in Appendix A. We strongly urge the reader to turn now to the Appendix and read the stories, for the findings are difficult to grasp for the reader unfamiliar ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Narrative Comprehension
• 2 Some Things That Narratives Tell Us About the Mind
• 3 Thinking About Narrative
• 4 The Joint Construction of Stories by Preschool Children and an Experimenter
• 5 Canonicality and Consciousness in Child Narrative
• 6 Narrative and the Child’s Theory of Mind
• 7 The Narration of Dialogue and Narration Within Dialogue: The Transition From Story to Logic
• 8 The Principle of Relevance and the Production of Discourse: Evidence From Xhosa Folk Narrative
• 9 The Rhetoric of Narrative: A Hermeneutic Critical Theory
• 10 Narrative in Psychoanalysis: Truth? Consequences?
• Author Index
• Subject Index