Actual Minds, Possible Worlds
Jerome Bruner
3. 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.
5. 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.
8. 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.
9. Top-down partisans take off from a theory about story, about mind, about writers, about readers. The theory may be anchored wherever: in psychoanalysis, in structural linguistics, in a theory of memory, in the philosophy of history. Armed with an hypothesis, the top-down partisan swoops on this text and that, searching for instances (and less often counter-instances) of what he hopes will be a right “explanation.” In skilled and dispassionate hands, it is a powerful way to work. It is the way of the linguist, the social scientist, and of science generally, but it instills habits of work that always risk producing results that are insensitive to the contexts in which they were dug up. It partakes of one of the modes of thought to which I shall turn in the next chapter—the paradigmatic.
Bottom-up partisans march to a very different tune. Their approach is focused on a particular piece of work: a story, a novel, a poem, even a line. They take it as their morsel of reality and explore it to reconstruct or deconstruct it… the effort is to read a text for its meanings, and by doing so to elucidate the art of its author. They do not forswear the guidance of psychoanalytic theory or of Jakobsonian poetics or even of the philosophy of language in pursuing their quest. But their quest is not to prove or disprove a theory, but to explore the world of a particular literary work.
11. There are two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality. The two (though complementary) are irreducible to one another. Efforts to reduce one mode to the other or to ignore one at the expense of the other inevitably fail to capture the rich diversity of thought.
Each of the ways of knowing, moreover, has operating principles of its own and its own criteria of well-formedness. They differ radically in their procedures for verification. A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as means for convincing another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude. It has been claimed that the one is a refinement of or an abstraction from the other. But this must be either false or true only in the most unenlightening way.
13. The imaginative application of the paradigmatic mode leads to good theory, tight analysis, logical proof, sound argument, and empirical discovery guided by reasoned hypothesis. But paradigmatic “imagination” (or intuition) is not the same as the imagination of the novelist or poet. Rather, it is the ability to see possible formal connections before one is able to prove them in any formal way.
The imaginative application of the narrative mode leads instead to good stories, gripping drama, believable (though not necessarily “true”) historical accounts. It deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course. It strives to put its timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place.
16. Narrative deals with the vicissitudes of human intentions. And since there are myriad intentions and endless ways for them to run into trouble—or so it would seem—there should be endless kinds of stories. But, surprisingly, this seems not to be the case. One view has it that lifelike narratives start with a canonical or “legitimate” steady state, which is breached, resulting in a crisis, which is terminated by a redress, with recurrence of the cycle an open possibility. Literary theorists… suggest that there is some such constraining deep structure to narrative, and that good stories are well-formed particular realizations of it.
21. In any case, the fabula of story—its timeless underlying theme—seems to be a unity that incorporates at least three constituents. It contains a plight into which characters have fallen as a result of intentions that have gone awry either because of circumstances, of the “character of characters,” or most likely of the interaction between the two. And it requires an uneven distribution of underlying consciousness among the characters with respect to the plight. What gives the story its unity is the manner in which plight, characters, and consciousness interact to yield a structure that has a start, a development, and a “sense of an ending.” Whether it is sufficient to characterize this unified structure as steady state, breach, crisis, redress is difficult to know. It is certainly not necessary to do so, for what one seeks in story structure is precisely how plight, character, and consciousness are integrated. Better to leave the issue open and to approach the matter with an open mind.
24. In the end, it is the reader who must write for himself what he intends to do with the actual text.
24. Which brings us directly to Wolfgang Iser’s reflections in The Act of Reading on what manner of speech act is a narrative. I want to touch on only one part of his argument, one that is central to my own. With respect to narrative, he says, “the reader receives it by composing it.” The text itself has structures that are “two-sided”: a verbal aspect that guides reaction and prevents it from being arbitrary, and an affective aspect that is triggered or “prestructured by the language of the text.” But the prestructure is undetermined: fictional texts are inherently “indeterminate.”
“fictional texts constitute their own objects and do not copy something already in existence. For this reason they cannot have the full determinacy of real objects, and indeed, it is the element of indeterminacy that evokes the test to “communicate” with the reader, in the sense that they induce him to participate both in the production and the comprehension of this work’s intention.”
It is this “relative indeterminacy of a text” that “allows a spectrum of actualizations.” And so, “literary texts initiate ‘performances’ of meaning rather than actually formulating meanings themselves.”
27. Cookbooks on story writing urge the use of implications to increase “narrative tension,” and they can easily lose their effect when overused. Yet they provide the means for the kind of indirect talk that forces “meaning performance” upon the reader.
27. I think it is plain (though the details are not easy) that triggering presuppositions, like intentionally violating conversational maxims, provides a powerful way of “meaning more than you are saying,” or going beyond surface text, or packing the text with meaning for narrative purposes.
The use of presupposition is greatly facilitated by an informal “contract” that governs language exchanges. As Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson have noted, we characteristically assume that what somebody says must make sense, and we will, when in doubt about what sense it makes, search for or invent an interpretation of the utterance to give it sense.