Actual Minds, Possible Worlds

Jerome Bruner, Jerome Seymour Bruner

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1987
• Print ISBN: 9780674003668, 9780674003651
• eBook ISBN: 9780674253131
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this characteristically graceful and provocative book, Jerome Bruner, one of the principal architects of the cognitive revolution, sets forth nothing less than a new agenda for the study of mind. According to Professor Bruner, cognitive science has set its sights too narrowly on the logical, systematic aspects of mental life—those thought processes we use to solve puzzles, test hypotheses, and advance explanations. There is obviously another side to the mind—a side devoted to the irrepressibly human acts of imagination that allow us to make experience meaningful. This is the side of the mind that leads to good stories, gripping drama, primitive myths and rituals, and plausible historical accounts. Bruner calls it the "narrative mode," and his book makes important advances in the effort to unravel its nature.

Drawing on recent work in literary theory, linguistics, and symbolic anthropology, as well as cognitive and developmental psychology, Professor Bruner examines the mental acts that enter into the imaginative creation of possible worlds, and he shows how the activity of imaginary world making undergirds human science, literature, and philosophy, as well as everyday thinking, and even our sense of self.

Over twenty years ago, Jerome Bruner first sketched his ideas about the mind's other side in his justly admired book, On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds can be read as a sequel to this earlier work, but it is a sequel that goes well beyond its predecessor by providing rich examples of just how the mind's narrative mode can be successfully studied. The collective force of these examples points the way toward a more humane and subtle approach to the investigation of how the mind works.

Part One

Two Natural Kinds

1

Approaching the Literary

Czeslaw Milosz begins his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, delivered at Harvard in 1981–82, with a comment that is both emblem and warning:

Many learned books on poetry have been written, and they find, at least in the countries of the West, more readers than does poetry itself. This is not a good sign, even if it may be explained both by the brilliance of their authors and by their zeal in assimilating scientific disciplines which today enjoy universal respect. A poet who would like to compete with those mountains of erudition would have to pretend he possesses more self-knowledge than poets are allowed to have.

For the three essays in Part One of this book are about poetry in one or another of its guises. And together they constitute yet another of those efforts to look at art through the glass of those respected “scientific disciplines.”

Milosz goes on: “Frankly, all my life I have been in the power of a daimonion, and how the poems dictated by him came into being I do not quite understand. That is the reason why, in my years of teaching Slavic literatures, I have limited myself to the history of literature, trying to avoid poetics.” I doubt we can read the demon’s voice either, or even reconstruct it from the text. Freud, admitting the same point in “The Poet and the Daydream,” urges, nonetheless, that the poem in its own right can tell us much about the nature of mind, even if it fails to yield up the secret of its creation. Dostoevski’s mystical genius, Joyce’s treacherous ways with language, these can still be studied with profit, though we do not know their inspiration. No literary sciences (any more than any natural sciences) can penetrate particular moments of inspired creation. But however they came into existence, the worlds of The Secret Sharer or of Stephen Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man constitute texts as well as worlds. And these texts are worthy of the disciplined attention of anybody who seeks to understand the symbolic worlds that the writer creates. If we bring to bear upon these texts the most powerful instruments of literary, linguistic, and psychological analysis, we may yet understand not only what makes a story, but what makes it great. Who would deny that Aristotle’s Poetics helped us understand tragedy, or that two millennia later, others illuminated different literary landscapes—Roman Jakobson the sound structure of poetry, Vladimir Propp the morphology of folktales, Kenneth Burke the dramatistic “grammar of motives,” and even Roland Barthes (for all his self-mockery) the “writerly” text. This is the domain of literary theory.

But there is a second step in literary analysis that is rarely taken. Once we have characterized a text in terms of its structure, its historical context, its linguistic form, its genre, its multiple levels of meaning, and the rest, we may still wish to discover how and in what ways the text affects the reader and, indeed, what produces such effects on the reader as do occur. What makes great stories reverberate with such liveliness in our ordinarily mundane minds? What gives great fiction its power: what in the text and what in the reader? Can a “psychology” of literature describe systematically what happens when a reader enters the Dublin of Stephen Daedalus through the text of Portrait?

The usual way of approaching such issues is to invoke psychological processes or mechanisms that operate in “real life.” Characters in story are said to be compelling by virtue of our capacity for “identification” or because, in their ensemble, they represent the cast of characters that we, the readers, carry unconsciously within us. Or, on the linguistic side, literature is said to affect us by virtue of its tropes—for example, by metaphor and synecdoche that evoke zestful imaginative play. But such proposals explain so much that they explain very little. They fail to tell why some stories succeed and some fail to engage the reader. And above all, they fail to provide an account of the processes of reading and of entering a story. There have been efforts to explore these processes more directly, as in I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism where actual alternative “readings” of poems were examined, but such efforts have been rare and, on the whole, psychologically not well informed. Perhaps the task is too daunting.

Let me illustrate some of the challenges—and suggest why I think that, for all its dauntingness, the task is both possible and worthwhile, and why it might shed light not only on literary issues but on psychological ones beyond the limits of the psychology of literature. Take first the issue of alternative (or multiple) readings of a story or, for that matter, of any text. It is an ancient issue and has its origin in both classical linguistics and the interpreting of biblical texts. Nicholas of Lyra proposed many centuries ago, for example, that biblical texts are amenable to four levels of interpretation: litera, moralis, allegoria, and anagogia, the literal, the ethical, the historical, and the mystical. Literary and general linguists have always insisted that no text, no story can be understood at a single level. Roman Jakobson, for example, urged that all meaning is a form of translation, and that multiple translation (polysemy) is the rule rather than the exception: an utterance can be conceived of as referential, as expressive, as conative (in the sense of a speech act), as poetic, as phatic (contact preserving), and as metalinguistic. And Roland Barthes in S/Z (the analysis of a single text, Balzac’s Sarrasine) illustrates how a novel achieves its meaning in the interplay of the interpretations yielded by at least five different “codes.” What Nicholas of Lyra, Jakobson, and Barthes are saying, in effect, is that one can read and interpret texts in various ways, indeed in various ways simultaneously. Indeed, the prevailing view is that we must read and interpret in some multiple way if any “literary” meaning is to be extracted from a text. But in fact we know little about how readers actually do so—we know precious little indeed about the “reader-in-the-text” as a psychological process.

For the psychologist of literature, the theoretical analysis of “text interpretation” (by whomever formulated, and whatever the textual data base of the analysis) yields only hypotheses about actual readers. Do all readers assign multiple meanings to stories? And how can we characterize these multiple meanings? What kinds of category systems best capture this “meaning attribution” process, and how idiosyncratic is it? Is interpretation affected by genre, and what does genre mean psychologically (a matter to which I shall turn presendy)? And how are multiple meanings triggered? What is there in the text that produces this multiple effect, and how can one characterize the susceptibility of readers to polysemy? These are the kinds of questions we must ask as psychologists of literature, and I shall return to them in the next chapter.

Take the question of genre, another ancient issue in literary theory and one that still preoccupies literary scholars in a major way. Aristotle put his hand to the question in the Poetics, and his characterization of comedy and of tragedy in terms of both character and plot form is still a living part of literary theory. And Freud or no Freud, Aristode’s is still an astute psychological (as well as literary) speculation—to which I shall return to often in later chapters. There are many other literary approaches to genre that are psychologically suggestive. For contrast, take the formal distinction between epic and lyric offered by Austin Warren and René Wellek in their classic Theory of Litemture: epic is the poetry of past tense, third person; lyric of first person present tense. While it was a distinction offered only as text characterization, it is interesting in more than a purely linguistic sense. Is it the case, for example, that the generic “unity” in the world of a fictional text depends upon the maintenance of a space-time structure, and that this unity requires consistent marking of tense and person? Is “psychological” genre constituted of such space-time marking: tales-of-others in the past, tales-of-self in the present, and so on? We do not know the answers to such questions, but in the following chapters I shall explore ways of pursuing them.

One gets a sense of the psychology of genre by listening to readers “tell back” a story they have just read or spontaneously “tell” a story about a “happening” in their own lives. “Telling back” a Conrad story, one reader will turn it into a yarn of adventure, another into a moral tale about duplicity, and a third into a case study of a Doppelganger. The text from which they started was the same. Genre seems to be a way of both organizing the structure of events and organizing the telling of them—a way that can be used for one’s own storytelling or, indeed, for “placing” stories one is reading or hearing. Something in the actual text “triggers” an interpretation of genre in the reader, an interpretation that then dominates the reader’s own creation of what Wolfgang Iser calls a “virtual text.”

What then are the “triggers” and what are the subjective forms of genre that come to dominate the reader’s mind? Is subjective genre merely a convention, and are the triggers little more than literary or semiotic road signs telling the reader what genre it is and what stance to take toward the story? Yet, there is something altogether too universal about tragedy, comedy, epic, tales of deceit, for the explanation of genre to be only a matter of convention. Nor is it fixed and “hardwired.” Anthony Burgess says of “Clay” in Joyce’s Dubliners that it is a comic story. It can be read that way. Maria (its principal character) then is seen as a comic bungler caught in the ennui of Dublin. Her illusions about herself then become the stuff of Joycean black comedy. Yes, one can read it as Burgess does, or at least try to.

But stories, in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, are “models for the redescription of the world.” But the story is not by itself the model. It is, so to speak, an instantiation of models we carry in our own minds. An undergraduate in a seminar in which I once participated interpreted Hamlet as an account of the bungling of a Danish prince who had become “sword happy” at his German university and who was so inept at killing the man he hated that he did in his wisest friend, Polonius, in the process. Yes, this student admitted, the play was a “tragedy,” but it was also a bungle (he was in engineering—with passion).

One rereads a story in endlessly changing ways—litera, moralis, allegoria, anagogia. (The young engineer was at moralis.) The alternate ways of reading may battle one another, marry one another, mock one another in the reader’s mind. There is something in the telling, something in the plot that triggers this “genre conflict” in readers (see Chapter 2). The story goes nowhere and everywhere. So Frank Kermode, in distinguishing sjuzet and fabula (the linear incidents that make the plot, versus the timeless, motionless, underlying theme) remarks that the power of great stories is in the dialectical interaction they establish between the two: “the fusion of scandal and miracle.” So while the reader begins by placing a story in one genre (and that may have powerful effects on his reading), he changes as he goes. The actual text is unchanged; the virtual text (to paraphrase Iser) changes almost moment to moment in the act of reading.

If we then ask about the nature and role of psychological genre—the reader’s conception of what kind of story or text he is encountering or “recreating”—we are in fact asking not only a morphological question about the actual text, but also a question about the interpretive processes that are loosed by the text in the reader’s mind.

Twenty-odd years ago, engaged in research on the psychological nature and development of thought, I had one of those mild crises so endemic to students of mind. The Apollonian and the Dionysian, the logical and the intuitive, were at war. Gustave Theodor Fechner, the founder of modern experimental psychology, had called them the Tagesansicht and Nachtansicht. My own research had taken me more and more deeply into the study of logical inference, the strategies by which ordinary people penetrate to the logical structure of the regularities they encounter in a world that they create through the very exercise of mind that they use for exploring it.

I also read novels, went to films, let myself fall under the spell of Camus, Conrad, Robbe-Grillet, Sartre, Burgess, Bergman, Joyce, Antonioni. From time to time, almost as if to keep some balance between night and day, I wrote essays—about Freud, the modern novel, metaphor, mythology, painting. They were informal and “literary” rather than “systematic” in form, however psychologically motivated they may have been.

Eventually, I published these “fugitive” essays as a book: On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. It was a relief to get the book out, though I do not think its publication changed my way of working much. By day, the Tagesansicht prevailed: my psychological research continued. At night there were novels and poems and plays. The crisis had passed.

Meanwhile, psychology itself had gone through changes, and, doubdess for the good, the voices of the left hand and of the right came more publicly and raucously into discussion with each other. The cognitive revolution in psychology, for one thing, had made it possible to consider the question of how knowledge and experience in their myriad forms were organized. And since language is our most powerful tool for organizing experience, and indeed, for constituting “realities,” the products of language in all their rich variety were coming in for closer scrutiny. By the mid-1970s the social sciences had moved away from their traditional positivist stance toward a more interpretive posture: meaning became the central focus—how the word was interpreted, by what codes meaning was regulated, in what sense culture itself could be treated as a “text” that participants “read” for their own guidance.

And by the mid-1970s, with the Chomskian fervor spent, linguistics returned with more powerful tools to its classical concern with the uses of language—among them its use to create the illusions of reality that make fiction. There followed a torrent of research, some obscure and some enlightening, addressing the great themes of “poetics” in the spirit of Jakobson and the Prague School. In time French structuralism—with Claude Lévi-Strauss taking the lead with his analyses of myth—came to dominate literary theory, only to be toppled by the more functionalist approach of the later Barthes, of Derrida, of Greimas, and of the deconstructionist critics (see Chapter 2).

These developments (and more of them to be recounted later) opened new psychological perspectives. For perhaps it is true, as academic psychologists like to say about themselves, that psychology has the courage of other peoples’ convictions. Psychoanalysts, following the earlier lead of George Klein, began inquiring whether the object of analysis was not so much archaeologically to reconstruct a life as it was to help the patient construct a more contradiction-free and generative narrative of it. In which case, what constituted a narrative, or better, a good narrative? And academic psychologists, inspired by the lead of David Rumelhart, began to work on “story grammars,” formal descriptions of the minimum structure that yielded stories or storylike sequences. And as if part of a Zeitgeist, even historians and historiographers, not notable for innovative courage, were a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One · Two Natural Kinds
• Part Two · Language and Reality
• Part Three · Acting in Constructed Worlds
• Afterword
• Appendix: A Reader’s Retelling of “Clay” by James Joyce
• Notes
• Credits
• Index