Life as Narrative
By Jerome
Bruner
I WOULD LIKE TO TRY
OUT AN IDEA THAT MAY NOT BE QUITE READY, indeed may not be quite possible. But
I have no doubt it is worth a try. It has to do with the nature of thought and
with one of its uses. It has been traditional to treat thought, so to speak, as
an instrument of reason. Good thought is right reason, and its efficacy is
measured against the laws of logic or induction. Indeed, in its most recent
computational form, it is a view of thought that has sped some of its
enthusiasts to the belief that all thought is reducible to machine
computability.
But logical thought
is not the only or even the most ubiquitous mode of thought. For the last
several years, I have been looking at another kind of thought (see, e.g., Bruner,
1986), one that is quite different in form from reasoning: the form of thought
that goes into the construction not of logical or inductive arguments but of
stories or narratives. What I want to do now is to extend these ideas about
narrative to the analysis of the stories we tell about our lives: our
"autobiographies."
Philosophically
speaking, the approach I shall take to narrative is a constructivist one--a
view that takes as its central premise that "world making" is the
principal function of mind, whether in the sciences or in the arts. But the
moment one applies a constructivist view of narrative to the self-narrative, to
the autobiography, one is faced with dilemmas. Take, for example, the
constructivist view that "stories" do not "happen" in the real
world but, rather, are constructed in people's heads. Or as Henry James once
put it, stories happen to people who know how to tell them. Does that mean that
our autobiographies are constructed, that they had better be viewed not as a
record of what happened (which is in any case a nonexistent record) but rather
as a continuing interpretation and reinterpretation of our experience? Just as
the philosopher Nelson Goodman argues that physics or painting or history are
"ways of world making" (Goodman, 1978), so autobiography (formal or
informal) should be viewed as a set of procedures for "life making."
And just as it is worthwhile examining in minute detail how physics or history
go about their world making, might we not be well advised to explore in equal detail
what we do when we construct ourselves autobiographically? Even if the exercise
should produce some obdurate dilemmas, it might nonetheless cast some light on
what we might mean by such expressions as "a life."
CULTURE AND
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Let me begin by
sketching out the general shape of the argument that I wish to explore. The
first thesis is this: We seem to have no other way of describing "lived
time" save in the form of a narrative. Which is not to say that there are
not other temporal forms that can be imposed on the experience of time, but
none of them succeeds in capturing the sense of lived time: not clock or
calendrical time forms, not serial or cyclical orders, not any of these. It is
a thesis that will be familiar to many of you, for it has been most recently
and powerfully argued by Paul Ricoeur (1984). Even if we set down annales in
the bare form of events (White, 1984), they will be seen to be events chosen
with a view to their place in an implicit narrative.
My second thesis is
that the mimesis between life so-called and narrative is a two-way affair: that
is to say, just as art imitates life in Aristotle's sense, so, in Oscar
Wilde's, life imitates art. Narrative imitates life, life imitates narrative.
"Life" in this sense is the same kind of construction of the human
imagination as "a narrative" is. It is constructed by human beings
through active ratiocination, by the same kind of ratiocination through which
we construct narratives. When somebody tells you his life--and that is
principally what we shall be talking about--it is always a cognitive
achievement rather than a through-the-clear-crystal recital of something
univocally given. In the end, it is a narrative achievement. There is no such
thing psychologically as "life itself." At very least, it is a
selective achievement of memory recall; beyond that, recounting one's life is
an interpretive feat. Philosophically speaking, it is hard to imagine being a
naive realist about "life itself."
The story of one's
own life is, of course, a privileged but troubled narrative in the sense that
it is reflexive: the narrator and the central figure in the narrative are the
same. This reflexivity creates dilemmas. The critic Paul de Man speaks of the
"defacement" imposed by turning around on oneself to create, as he
puts it, "a monument" (de Man, 1984: 84). Another critic comments on
the autobiographical narrator's irresistible error in accounting for his acts
in terms of intentions when, in fact, they might have been quite otherwise
determined. In any case, the reflexivity of self-narrative poses problems of a
deep and serious order--problems beyond those of verification, beyond the issue
of indeterminacy (that the very telling of the self-story distorts what we have
in mind to tell), beyond "rationalization." The whole enterprise
seems a most shaky one, and some critics, like Louis Renza, even think it is
impossible, "an endless prelude" (Renza, 1980).
Yet for all the
shakiness of the form, it is perfectly plain that not just any autobiography
will do--either for its teller or for his listener, for that matter. One
imposes criteria of rightness on the self-report of a life just as one imposes
them on the account of a football game or the report of an event in nature. And
they are by no means all external criteria as to whether, for example, one did
or did not visit Santander
in 1956. Besides, it may have been Salamanca
in 1953 and by certain criteria of narrative or of psychological adequacy even
be "right" if untrue. There are also internal criteria relating to
how one felt or what one intended, and these are just as demanding, even if
they are not subject to verification. Otherwise, we would not be able to say
that certain self-narratives are "shallow" and others
"deep." One criterion, of course, is whether a life story
"covers" the events of a life. But what is coverage? Are not
omissions also important? And we have all read or heard painfully detailed
autobiographies of which it can be said that the whole is drastically less than
the sum of the parts. They lack interpretation or "meaning," we say.
As Peter Winch reminded us a long time ago, it is not so evident in the human
sciences or human affairs how to specify criteria by which to judge the
rightness of any theory or model, especially a folk theory like an account of
"my life" (Winch, 1958). All verificationist criteria turn slippery,
and we surely cannot judge rightness by narrative adequacy alone. A rousing
tale of a life is not necessarily a "right" account.
All of which creates
special problems, as we shall see, and makes autobiographical accounts (even
the ones we tell ourselves) notably unstable. On the other hand, this very
instability makes life stories highly susceptible to cultural, interpersonal,
and linguistic influences. This susceptibility to influence may, in fact, be
the reason why "talking cures," religious instruction, and other
interventions in a life may often have such profound effects in changing a
person's life narrative.
Given their
constructed nature and their dependence upon the cultural conventions and
language usage, life narratives obviously reflect the prevailing theories about
"possible lives" that are part of one's culture. Indeed, one
important way of characterizing a culture is by the narrative models it makes
available for describing the course of a life. And the tool kit of any culture
is replete not only with a stock of canonical life narratives (heroes, Marthas,
tricksters, etc.), but with combinable formal constituents from which its
members can construct their own life narratives: canonical stances and
circumstances, as it were.
But the issue I wish
to address is not just about the "telling" of life narratives. The
heart of my argument is this: eventually the culturally shaped cognitive and
linguistic processes that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the
power to structure perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment and
purpose-build the very "events" of a life. In the end, we become the
autobiographical narratives by which we "tell about" our lives. And
given the cultural shaping to which I referred, we also become variants of the
culture's canonical forms. I cannot imagine a more important psychological
research project than one that addresses itself to the "development of
autobiography"--how our way of telling about ourselves changes, and how
these accounts come to take control of our ways of life. Yet I know of not a
single comprehensive study on this subject.
How a culture
transmits itself in this way is an anthropological topic and need not concern
us directly. Yet a general remark is in order. I want to address the question
of how self-narratives as a literary form, as autobiography, might have
developed. For the issue may throw some light on how more modest,
less-formulated modes of self-telling have emerged as well. Autobiography, we
are told, is a recent and a not very widely distributed literary genre. As the
French historian Georges Gusdorf (1980) remarks, it is limited in time and space; it has not always existed nor does it exist everywhere.... [Its] conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life is the late product of a specific civilization.... Autobiography becomes possible only under certain metaphysical preconditions.... The man who takes the trouble to tell of himself knows that the present differs from the past and that it will not be repeated in the future.
Gusdorf sees the
birth of literary autobiography as issuing from the mixed and unstable marriage
between Christian and classical thought in the Middle Ages, further inflamed by
the doubts kindled in the Copernican revolution. Doubtless the Reformation also
added fuel to the passion for written self-revelation.
While the act of
writing autobiography is new under the sun--like writing itself--the self-told
life narrative is, by all accounts, ancient and universal People anywhere can
tell you some intelligible account of their lives. What varies is the cultural
and linguistic perspective or narrative form in which it is formulated and
expressed. And that too will be found to spring from historical circumstances
as these have been incorporated in the culture and language of a people. I
suspect that it will be as important to study historical developments in forms
of self-telling as it is to study their ontogenesis. I have used the expression
"forms of self-telling," for I believe it is form rather than content
that matters. We must be clear, then, about what we mean by narrative form.
Vladimir Propp's classic analysis of folktales reveals, for example, that the
form of a folktale may remain unchanged even though its content changes (Propp,
1968). So, too, self-told life narratives may reveal a common formal structure
across a wide variety of content. So let us get to the heart of the matter: to
the forms of self-narrative or, indeed, of narrative generally, of which
self-narrative is a special case.
FORMS OF
SELF-NARRATIVE
Let me start my
account with the Russian formalists, who distinguished three aspects of story:
fabula, sjuzet, and forma--roughly theme, discourse, and genre. The first two
(fabula and sjuzet) have been described by modern literary theorists as,
respectively, the timeless and the sequenced aspects of story. The timeless
fabula is the mythic, the transcendent plight that a story is about: human jealousy,
authority and obedience, thwarted ambition, and those other plights that lay
claim to human universality. The sjuzet then incorporates or realizes the
timeless fabula not only in the form of a plot but also in an unwinding net of
language. Frank Kermode says that the joining of fabula and sjuzet in story is
like the blending of timeless mystery and current scandal (Kermode, 1984). The
ancient dilemmas of envy, loyalty, jealousy are woven into the acts of Iago,
Othello, Desdemona, and Everyman with a fierce particularity and localness
that, in Joyce's words, yield an "epiphany of the ordinary." This
particularity of time, place, person, and event is also reflected in the mode
of the telling, in the discourse properties of the sjuzet.
To achieve such epiphanous
and unique ordinariness, we are required, as Roman Jakobson used to tell his
Russian poets, to "make the ordinary strange" (Bruner, 1983). And
that must depend not upon plot alone but upon language. For language constructs
what it narrates, not only semantically but also pragmatically and
stylistically.
One word about the
third aspect of narrative--forma or genre, an ancient subject dating from
Aristotle's Poetics. How shall we understand it? Romance, farce, tragedy,
Bildungsroman, black comedy, adventure story, fairytale, wonder tale, etc. That
might do. A genre is plainly a type (in the linguist's sense) of which there
are near endless tokens, and in that sense it may be viewed as a set of
grammars for generating different kinds of story plots. But it cannot be that
alone. For genre also commits one to use language in a certain way: lyric, say,
is conventionally written in the first person/present tense, epic is third
person/past tense, etc. One question we shall simply pass over for the moment:
Are genres mere literary conventions, or (like Jung's alleged archetypes) are
they built into the human genome, or are they an invariant set of plights in
the human condition to which we all react in some necessary way? For our
present purposes, it does not matter.
We may ask then of
any self-told life what is its fabula (or gist, or moral, or leitmotiv); how is
it converted into an extended tale and through what uses of language; and into
what genre is it fitted. That is a start, but it does not get us very far.
There is widespread
agreement that stories are about the vicissitudes of human intention and that,
to paraphrase Kenneth Burke's classic, The Grammar of Motives, story structure
is composed minimally of the pentad of an Agent, an Action, a Goal, a Setting,
an Instrument--and Trouble (Burke, 1945). Trouble is what drives the drama, and
it is generated by a mismatch between two or more of the five constituents of
Burke's pentad: for example, Nora's Goals do not match either the Setting in
which she lives nor the Instruments available to her in Posen's A Doll's House.
The late Victor Turner, a gifted anthropologist who studied Western theater as
carefully as he studied the Ndembu in West Africa, locates this
"trouble" in the breaching of cultural legitimacy: an initial
canonical state is breached, redress is attempted which, if it fails, leads to
crisis; crisis, if unresolved, leads eventually to a new legitimate order
(Turner, 1982). The crisis, the role of agents in redress, the making of the
new legitimacy--these are the cultural constituents of which the variety of
drama is constructed in life as in literature. That is to say, Burke's
dramatistic troubles are, for Turner, individual embodiments of deeper cultural
crises.
We had better get on
to a closer characterization of Agents in stories, since our interest is in
self-told life narratives. Narrative studies began with the analysis of myth
and folktale. And it is indeed the case that, in these genres, the plot even
more than motive drives the Agent. You will find little about the doubts,
desires, or other intentional states of either Beowulf or Grendel, nor do you
get a clear sense from recorded myth about how Perseus decided to get involved
with the Gorgon. Even Oedipus is not so much driven by motives as by plight. As
Vladimir Propp put it, the dramatis personae of the classical folktale fulfill
a function in the plot but do not drive it. But that is only one version of
character: Agent as carrier of destiny, whether divine or secular.
As literary forms have
developed, they have moved steadily toward an empowerment and subjective
enrichment of the Agent protagonist. The most revealing single analysis of this
transformation is, I think, to be found in an essay by Amelie Rorty, in which
she traces the shape of agency in narrative from the folktale figure, "who
is neither formed by nor owns experience," to persons defined by roles and
responsibilities in a society for which they get rights in return (as, say, in
Jane Austen's novels), to selves who must compete for their roles in order to
earn their rights (as in Trollope), and finally to individuals who transcend
and resist society and must create or "rip off" their rights (as,
say, in Beckett) (Rorty, 1976). These, you will see, are characterizations of
the forms of relationship between an intention-driven actor and the settings in
which he must act to achieve his goals.
Another word, then,
about Agents. Narrative, even at its most primitive, is played out on a dual
landscape, to use Greimas's celebrated expression (Greimas and Courtes, 1976).
There is a landscape of action on which events unfold. Grendel wreaks
destruction on the drinking hall and upon its celebrating warriors in Beowulf.
But there is a second landscape, a landscape of consciousness, the inner worlds
of the protagonists involved in the action. It is the difference between
Oedipus taking Jocasta to wife before and after he learns from the messenger
that she is his mother. This duality of landscape, Greimas tells us, is an
essential ingredient of narrative and accounts in some measure for the
ubiquitousness of deceit in tales throughout history. In the modern novel--in
contrast to the classic myth or the folktale--there is a more explicit
treatment of the landscape of consciousness itself. Agents do not merely
deceive; they hope, are doubting and confused, wonder about appearance and
reality. Modern literature (perhaps like modern science) becomes more
epistemological, less ontological. The omniscient narrator (like the
prerelativity "observer") disappears, and with him so does hard-core
reality.
As narrative has
become "modernized," so too has its language changed. Since, say,
Conrad, Proust, Hardy, and Henry James, the language of the novel has
accommodated to the perspectivalism and subjectivism that replaced the
omniscient narrator. In another place, I have used the term
"subjunctivizing" to characterize this shift from expository to
perspectival narrative language, a shift from emphasis on actuality to the
evocation of possibility marked by the greater use of unpackable
presuppositions, of subjunctive discourse, of Gricean conversational
implicatures and the like. In the end, the reality of the omniscient narrator
disappears into the subjective worlds of the story's protagonists. (1)
Linguistically and in spirit as well, the modern novel may be as profound (and
perhaps out of the same cradle) as the invention of modern physics.
One last point, for
I have lingered too long introducing my subject. Jean-Paul Sartre remarks in
his autobiography, "a man is always a teller of stories, he lives
surrounded by his own stories and those of other people, he sees everything
that happens to him in terms of these stories and he tries to live his life as
if he were recounting it" (Sartre, 1964). His point is a telling one: life
stories must mesh, so to speak, within a community of life stories; tellers and
listeners must share some "deep structure" about the nature of a
"life," for if the rules of life-telling are altogether arbitrary,
tellers and listeners will surely be alienated by a failure to grasp what the
other is saying or what he thinks the other is hearing. Indeed, such alienation
does happen cross-generationally, often with baleful effects. Later, we shall
return to the issue of "life-story meshing" in a more concrete way.
FOUR SELF-NARRATIVES
Let me turn now to
the business of how a psychologist goes about studying issues of the kind that
we have been discussing. Along with my colleagues Susan Weisser and Carol
Staszewski, I have been engaged in a curious study. While it is far from done
(whatever that may mean), I would like to tell you enough about it to make what
I have been saying a little more concrete.
We were interested
in how people tell the stories of their lives and, perhaps simplemindedly, we asked
them to do so--telling them to keep it to about half an hour, even if it were
an impossible task. We told them that we were not interested in judging them or
curing them but that we were very interested in how people saw their lives.
After they were done--and most had little trouble in sticking to the time
limits or, for that matter, in filling up the time--we asked questions for
another half hour or so, questions designed to get a better picture of how
their stories had been put together. Had we followed a different procedure, we
doubtless would have obtained different accounts. Indeed, had we asked them to
tell us their lives in two minutes, perhaps we would have obtained something
more like a fabula than a sjuzet. But such variations will get their innings
later. Many people have now sat for their portraits, ranging in age from ten to
seventy, and their stories yield rich texts. But I want to talk of only four of
them now: a family--a father, a mother, and their grown son and grown daughter,
each of their accounts collected independently. There are two more grown
children in the family, a son and daughter, both of whom have also told their
stories, but four are enough to handle as a start.
We have chosen a
family as our target because it constitutes a miniature culture, and provides
an opportunity to explore how life stories are made to mesh with each other in
Sartre's sense. Beyond that, of course, the individual autobiographies provide
us the opportunity to explore the issues of form and structure to which I have
already alluded.
If you should now
ask how we propose to test whether these four lives "imitated" the
narratives each person told, your question would be proper enough, though a bit
impatient. The position I have avowed, indeed, leaves entirely moot what could
be meant by "lives" altogether, beyond what is contained in the
narrative. We shall not even be able to check, as Professor Neisser was able to
do in his studies of autobiographical memory (Neisser, 1987), whether
particular memories were veridical or distorted in some characteristic way. But
our aim is different. We are asking, rather, whether there is in each account a
set of selective narrative rules that lead the narrator to structure experience
in a particular way, structure it in a manner that gives form to the content
and the continuity of the life. And we are interested, as well, in how the
family itself formulates certain common rules for doing these things. I hope
this will be less abstract as we proceed.
Our family is headed
by George Goodhertz, a hard-working heating contractor in his early 60s, a
self-made man of moral principles, converted to Catholicism in childhood and
mindful of his obligations, though not devout. Although plainly intelligent and
well informed, he never finished high school: "had to go to work."
His father was, by Mr. Goodhertz's sparse characterization, "a
drinker" and a poor provider. Mr. Goodhertz is neither. Mrs. Goodhertz,
Rose, is a housewife of immediate Italian descent: family oriented, imbedded in
the urban neighborhood where she has lived for nearly 30 years, connected with
old friends who still live nearby. Her father was, in her words, "of the
old school"--arrogant, a drinker, a poor provider, and unfaithful to her
mother. In the opening paragraph of her autobiography she says, "I would
have preferred a better childhood, a happier one, but with God's influence, I
prayed hard enough for a good husband, and she [sic] answered me."
Daughter Debby, in
her mid-20s, is (in her own words) "still unmarried." She graduated a
few years ago from a local college that she never liked much and now studies
acting. Outgoing, she enjoys friends, old and new, but is determined not to get
"stuck" in the old neighborhood with the old friends of her past and
their old attitudes. Yet she is not ambitious, but caught, rather, between
ideals of local kindliness and of broader adventure, the latter more in the
existential form of a desire for experience than by any wish to achieve. She
lives at home--in Brooklyn with her parents in
the old neighborhood. Her 30-year-old brother, Carl, who is about to finish his
doctorate in neurophysiology at one of the solid, if not distinguished
Boston-area universities, is aware of how far beyond family expectations his
studies have taken him, but is neither deferential nor aggressive about his
leap in status. Like his sister Debby, he remains attached to and in easy
contact with his parents though he lives on his own even when he is in New York working at a
local university laboratory. At school Carl always felt "special" and
different--both in the Catholic high school and then in the Catholic college he
attended. The graduate school he chose is secular, and a complete break with
his past. He is ambitious to get ahead, but he is not one to take the
conventional "up" stairway. Both in his own eyes and, indeed, by
conventional standards, he is a bit eccentric and a risk taker. Where his
sister Debby (and his mother) welcomes intimacy and closeness, Carl (like his
father) keeps people more at arm's length. Experience for its own sake is not
his thing. He is as concerned as his sister about not being "tied
down."
And that, I now want
to assure you, is the end of the omniscient authorial voice. For our task now
is to sample the texts, the narratives of these four lives--father's, mother's,
son's, and daughter's--to see not what they are about but how the narrators
construct themselves. Their texts are all we have--though we may seem to have,
so to speak, the hermeneutical advantage of four narratives that spring from a
common landscape. But as you will see, the advantage that it yields is in
narrative power and possibility, not in the ontology of verification. For one
view of the world cannot confirm another, though, in Clifford Geertz's
evocative phrase, it can "thicken" it.
Let me begin the
analysis with Kenneth Burke's pentad, his skeleton of dramatism, and
particularly with the setting or Scene of these life stories. Most
psychological theories of personality, alas, have no place for place. They would
not do well with Stephen Daedalus in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, for he is inexplicable without the Dublin
that he carries in his head. In these four life narratives too, place is
crucial and it shapes and constrains the stories that are told or, indeed, that
could be told. Place is not simply a piece of geography, an established Italian
neighborhood in Brooklyn , though it helps to
know its "culture" too. It is an intricate construct, whose language
dominates the thought of our four narrators. For each, its central axis is
"home," which is placed in sharp contrast to what they all refer to
as "the real world." They were, by all their own accounts, a
"close" family, and their language seals that closeness.
Consider the psychic
geography. For each of our narrators, "home" is a place that is
inside, private, forgiving, intimate, predictably safe. "The real
world" is outside, demanding, anonymous, open, unpredictable, and
consequently dangerous. But home and real world are also contrastive in another
way, explicitly for the two children, implicitly and covertly for the parents:
home is to be "cooped up," restricted by duties and bored; the real
world is excitement and opportunity. Early on, the mother says of the children,
"We spoiled them for the real world," and the father speaks of
"getting them ready for the real world." The son speaks of its
hypocrisies that need to be confronted and overcome to achieve one's goals. It
is a worthwhile but treacherous battlefield. The daughter idealizes it for the
new experience to be harvested there. Each, in their way, creates a different
ontological landscape out of "the real world" to give it an
appropriate force as the Scene in the narratives they are constructing.
One thing that is
striking about all four narratives is the extent to which the spatial
distinction home-real world concentrates all four of them on spatial and
locative terms in their autobiographical accounts. Take Carl. His account is
laden with spatial metaphors: in/out, here/there, coming from/going to,
place/special place. The movement forward in his story is not so much temporal
as spatial: a sequential outward movement from home to neighborhood to Catholic
school to the library alone to college to the Catholic peace movement to graduate
school and then triumphantly back to New
York . In his Bildungsroman of a life story, the
challenge is to find a place, the right place, and then a special place in each
of these concentric outgoings. For Carl, you get involved in things, or you
feel "out of place." You "go to" Boston or to a course or a lab, and fellow
students "come from" prestigious schools. Or "I started gaining
a fairly special place in the department," and later "I ended up
getting a fairly privileged place in the department." The "special
places" allow, permit, make possible. "After about six months I
really started settling in and enjoying the program and enjoying the
opportunities it gave me." And later, about the students who get a special
place, "The faculty are committed to shielding their graduate students
from negative repercussions of failure."
Two things are both
surprising and revealing about Carl's language. One is the extent to which his
sentences take self as object, and the other is the high frequency of the
passive voice. With respect to the latter, some 11 percent of his sentences are
in the passive voice, which is surprisingly high for such an action-oriented
text. But they both are of a piece and tell something interesting about his
world making. Recall the importance for Carl of "place" and
particularly of the "special place." Whenever he recounts something
connected with these places, the places "happen" and then he acts
accordingly. His sentences then begin with either a passive or with
self-as-object, and then move to the active voice. At a particular colloquium
where he knew his stuff, "It allowed me to deal with the faculty on an
equal footing." Or of his debating team experience, "It taught me how
to handle myself." Occasions in these "special places" are seen as
if they had homelike privileges: allowing and permitting and teaching. It is as
if Carl manages the "real world" by colonizing it with "special
places" that provide some of the privileges of home.
With Debby, 37 of
the first 100 sentences in her life narrative contain spatial metaphors or
locatives. The principal clusters are about her place in the family (the gap or
span in ages); the life layout ("the house I was brought home to is the
house I live in now"; or "I traveled, my relatives are all over the
country"; or "I've been coming to the city by myself ever since I was
14"); the coming-back theme ("everybody except me has gone out and
come back at one time or another").
So much for Scene,
at least for the moment. Come now to the agentive, to Burke's Actor. Rorty's
typology turns out to be enormously useful, for in all four self-portraits the
tale moves from Actor as figure, figure becoming a person, person becoming a
self, self becoming an individual. Well into her 50s, even Mrs. Goodhertz has
finally taken a job for pay, albeit working as secretary for her husband's
heating-contracting business, motivated by the desire for some independence and
the wish not to get "stuck" raising her eldest daughter's child. She
remarks that it is "her" job and that she now "works." The
transformation of her language as she runs through the chronology of her life
is striking. When speaking of her childhood, self is often an object in such
sentences as: "everything was thrown at us." But finally, by the time
she takes her first job as a young woman, "I decided to take things in my
own hands." Throughout her account, she "owns her own
experience," to use Rorty's phrase. More than eight in ten of her
sentences contain a stative verb, a verb dealing with thinking, feeling, intending,
believing, praying. (This contrasts with five in ten for her more
action-oriented husband.) One is easily deceived, reading Mrs. Goodhertz's
self-portrait, into thinking that she is accepting of fate, perhaps passive.
Instead, she believes in fate, but she also believes that fate can be nudged by
her own efforts. And we rather suspect that the style is cultivated. For a
closer analysis of her language reveals a very high "subjectivity
level" as carried in those stative verbs.
We must return again
to Scene, or perhaps to what might better be called mise-en-scene. Both the
elder Goodhertzes--unlike their children--construct their lives as if they
constituted two sides of a deep divide. That divide is marked by an escape from
childhood, an old life, indeed, an old secret life of suffering and shame as
figures in unbearably capricious family settings. Personhood is on the other
side of the divide. Mrs. Goodhertz gets to the other side, to personhood, by
"praying for the right husband" and getting him, of which more in a
moment. Mr. Goodhertz crosses the divide by work, hard work, and by the grace
of "the owner [who] took me under his wing." To him, achieving
mastery of your work and, as we shall see, helping others help themselves are
the two dominant ideals. For her, it is somewhat more complex. The linguistic
vehicle is the "but ..." construction. She uses it repeatedly, and in
several telltale ways, the most crucial being to distinguish what is from what
might have been, as in talking about teenage drug taking, "... but I am
blessed my kids didn't start in on it," or "I would have been
stricter, but they turned out with less problems than others." The
construction is her reminder of what might have been and, at the same time, a
string on her finger to remind her that she is the agent who produces the
better event on the other side of the ... but.... Her courtship and marriage
are a case in point. Yes, she was waiting for God to bring the right man, but
in fact she decided the moment her eyes fell on Mr. Goodhertz that he was the
man and knew not an instant's remorse in throwing over her then fiance.
Their secret
childhoods provide a unique source of consciousness for the elder Goodhertzes.
It is a concealed secret that they share and that provides the contrast to what
they have established as the organizing concept of "home." Mrs.
Goodhertz's knowledge of her macho father as a bad provider, a drinker, and a
philanderer is secret knowledge, quickly and hintingly told in her narrative in
a way that brooked no probing. It was there only to let us know why she prayed
for a good husband and a better life for her children. Mr. Goodhertz goes into
even less detail. But note the two following quotations, both about hopes for
the children, each said independently of the other. Mr. Goodhertz: "I
wanted to give them all the things I didn't get as a kid." And Mrs.
Goodhertz: "To a point, I think, we try not to make our children have too
much of what we had."
So Debby and Carl
start on the other side of the divide. Each of them tells a tale that is
animated by a contrast between a kindly but inert, entrenched, or
"given" world and a "new" one that is their own. Carl is a
young Werther. His tale begins with the episode when, as an aspiring young
football player, he and his teammates are told by the coach to knock out the
opposing team's star quarterback. He keeps his own counsel, quits football, and
starts on his own road. For Debby the tale is more like the young Stephen Hero
in the discarded early version of Portrait. She exposes herself to experience
as it may come, "trying" in the sense of "trying on" rather
than of striving. Her involvement in acting is in the spirit of trying on new
roles. Of life she says, "I don't like doing one thing ... the same thing
all my life, ... shoved into a house and cooped up with four kids all
day." If Carl's autobiography is a Bildungsroman, Debby's is an
existential novel. His account is linear, from start to end, but it is replete
with what literary linguists call prolepsis. That is to say, it is full of
those odd flash-forwards that implicate the present for the future, like
"if I had known then what I know now" and "learning to debate
would stand me in good stead later." His narrative is progressive and
sequential: the story tracks "real time." It "accounts" for
things, and things are mentioned because they account for things. Privileged
opportunities "happen to" him, as we have seen, and he turns them
into ventures.
The exception to
this pattern is the dilemma of moral issues--as with the coach's murderous
instructions or his becoming a conscientious objector in the Vietnam War,
inspired by the Berrigans. Then his language (and his thought) becomes
subjunctive rather than instrumental, playing on possibilities and inwardness.
In this respect, he is his father's son, for Mr. Goodhertz too is principally
oriented to action (recall that half his sentences contain nonstative verbs)
save when he encounters issues he defines as matters of morality. Don't
condemn, he would say, "you never know the whole story." And in the
same spirit, Mr. Goodhertz's self-portrait is laced with literally dozens of
instances of the intransitive verb to seem, as if he were forever mindful of a
feather edge separating appearance from reality. When Carl decided he would
become a conscientious objector against the Vietnam draft, his father stood by
him on grounds that Carl's convictions, honestly arrived at, were worthy of
respect even though he did not agree with them. Carl unwittingly even describes
his intellectual quest in the same instrumental terms that his father uses in
describing his ducting work. Both emphasize skills and "know-how,"
both reject received ways of doing things. Theirs is "instrumental"
language and thought, as well suited to talking about heat ducting as to Carl's
strikingly procedural approach to visual physiology. The father confesses to
having missed intimacy in his life. So, probably, will Carl one day. Their
instrumental language leaves little room for it in their discourse.
Debby's highly stative
language is specialized for the reception of experience and for exploring the
affect that it creates. It is richly adjectival, and the adjectives cluster
around inner states. Her own acts are almost elided from her account. The past
exists in its own right rather than as a guide to the present or future. In
recounting the present there are vivid analeptic flashbacks--as in an unbid
memory of an injured chicken on the Long Island Expressway, the traffic too
thick for rescue. Like so many of her images, this one was dense with plight
and affect. It evoked her tenderness for helpless animals, she told us, then
veering off to that topic. And so her order of telling is dominated not by
real-time sequences but by a going back and forth between what happens and what
she feels and believes, and what she felt and believed. In this, and in her
heavy use of stative verbs, she is her mother's daughter--and, I suspect, both
are locked in the same gender language. Finally, in Debby's self-story
"themes and variations" are as recursive as her brother's is
progressive, and hers is as lacking in efforts to give causes as his are
replete with causative expressions.
RECIPES FOR
STRUCTURING EXPERIENCE
You will ask whether
the narrative forms and the language that goes with them in our four subjects
are not simply expressions of their inner states, ways of talk that are
required by the nature of those internal states. Perhaps so. But I have been
proposing a more radical hypothesis than that. I believe that the ways of telling
and the ways of conceptualizing that go with them become so habitual that they
finally become recipes for structuring experience itself, for laying down
routes into memory, for not only guiding the life narrative up to the present
but directing it into the future. I have argued that a life as led is
inseparable from a life as told--or more bluntly, a life is not "how it
was" but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold: Freud's
psychic reality. Certain basic formal properties of the life narrative do not
change easily. Our excursion into experimental autobiography suggests that
these formal structures may get laid down early in the discourse of family life
and persist stubbornly in spite of changed conditions. Just as Georges Gusdorf
argued that a special, historically conditioned, metaphysical condition was
needed to bring autobiography into existence as a literary form, so perhaps a
metaphysical change is required to alter the narratives that we have settled
upon as "being" our lives. The fish will, indeed, be the last to
discover water--unless he gets a metaphysical assist.
My life as a student
of mind has taught me one incontrovertible lesson: mind is never free of
precommitment. There is no innocent eye, nor is there one that penetrates
aboriginal reality. There are instead hypotheses, versions, expected scenarios.
Our precommitment about the nature of a life is that it is a story, some
narrative however incoherently put together. Perhaps we can say one other
thing: any story one may tell about anything is better understood by
considering other possible ways in which it can be told. That must surely be as
true of the life stories we tell as of any others. In that case, we have come
full round to the ancient homily that the only life worth living is the
well-examined one. But it puts a different meaning on the homily. If we can
learn how people put their narratives together when they tell stories from
life, considering as well how they might have proceeded, we might then have
contributed something new to that great ideal. Even if, with respect to life
and narrative, we discover, as in Yeats's line, that we cannot tell the dancer
from the dance, that may be good enough.
NOTES
(1.) For those of
you interested in this type of linguistic analysis, I refer you to Todorov's
The Poetics of Prose (1977) and to my own recent volume Actual Minds, Possible
Worlds (1986).
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School for Social Research
Source:
Social Research, Fall 2004.
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