Self-Making and World-Making

Author(s): Jerome Bruner

Source: The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 25, No. 1, Special Issue: More Ways of
Worldmaking (Spring, 1991), pp. 67-78
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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 Self-Making and World-Making

JEROME BRUNER

I want to speak with the voice of one who takes seriously Wittgenstein's
statement that the function of the philosopher is to help the fly out of the
bottle. I am the fly. The philosopher who has helped me most whenever I
found myself trapped in the Wittgensteinian bottle is Nelson Goodman. I
propose to set forth some conjectures and hypotheses that need particularly
to be elucidated by a strong philosophical mind. They all have to do with a
subject that is deceptively simple: how people give account of themselves
or, in its broader form, what they do when they set forth an "autobiog-
raphy."
In autobiography, we set forth a view of what we call our Self and its
doings, reflections, thoughts, and place in the world. Now, just what the
referent is in such discourse is an extremely difficult matter to specify. And
it is to some of these difficulties that I want to address my attention. I
should say, by the way, that my reflections are not all hypothetical. I have
what in modern jargon is called a database. We have been involved, a
group of us in New York, in gathering spontaneous, non-artful, if there is
such a thing, autobiographies from ordinary people. We solicited volun-
teers and simply asked them: "Tell us the story of your life." We assured
them first that we were not clinicians but that, nonetheless, we would like
very much to find out, using very Goodmanian language, how they con-
structed a picture of their lives. An odd thing happened. We interviewed a
man, and then interviewed his sister whom he had "recommended" to us,
and then she said, "You know my other brother would like to be inter-
viewed too," and before long we had interviewed all the members of the
same family: two grown daughters and sons, the father and the mother.
Perhaps for the first time in human history-at least I could find no report
in the literature of anything comparable-we had interviewed separately

Jerome Bruner is Research Professor of Psychology at New York University and cur-
rently Meyer Visiting Professor of Law at the New York University Law School. His
most recent works are Acts of Meaning, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, and In Search of
Mind: Autobiographical Essays.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring 1991

?1991 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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68 Jerome Bruner

six members of the same family, all of whom had, if I may be forgiven the
expression, "psychic realities" that somehow impinged upon each other. It
was the material of un roman familial.
At one point in the proceedings, I was having lunch with an old friend,
the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, and asked him what a family is, from an
anthropological or ethnological point of view. Professor Geertz replied,
"Well, a family is, in the first place, a system designed for keeping
centrifugal forces from working within a group of people who have to stay
together." I found this a "cool" and useful way of looking at the matter-
cool, in the sense that family life is such a heated process ordinarily. It was
then that I began to realize, concretely, to what degree the construction of
selves and of the "lives" of people within a family (or any other close
group) consists of just such an anticentrifugal negotiation of roles.
But the negotiations in question, it soon appeared, were not, as it were,
ex nihilo. Rather, they were patterned into something that I can only call
genres-fairly easily recognizable literary genres. There must, then, be some
deep sense in which Henry James was right when he said that adventures
happen to people who know how to tell about them. If he is correct, he
must be profoundly so. To what degree is one impelled, once one launches
on a genre account of oneself, to stay with it forevermore? We shall return
to that issue presently. But let me first go back to the beginning and discuss
more freely the curious process by which people construct what we call "a
self" and "a life."

Not so terribly long ago, certainly at the turn of the century, the process
of self-creation did not seem to bother students of autobiography very
much. The great volumes by Georg Misch that appeared prior to the first
World War had other concerns. He was interested in "lives" in so far as
they represented exemplary and representative expressions of the culture.
A contemporary, touched by the doubts of postmodernism, can only be
astonished by what one reads in Misch's volumes. To begin with, how was
he able to judge what was representative of any era? And why was he so lit-
tle interested in the epistemological issues involved-both for himself and
for the "exemplary and representative" men (he is, of course, very male-
oriented)? How did he deal with the fact that there were inventions in
autobiographical form that were themselves as important as any events in
forming the kinds of autobiographies that then followed them? Thomas a
Kempis was one such innovator. But it was not just autobiographers who
set the new forms, but philosophers and novelists as well-like Rousseau or
Flaubert. There were, to be sure, autobiographers aware of the "construc-
tivist problem"-from Augustine to Henry Adams-but most of the writers
on autobiography up to the end of the nineteenth century conceived of
autobiographical writing as writing about an "essential self," and as writing
about a "life," in Goodman's terms, as "an aboriginal life" that was inde-

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 Self-Making 69

pendent of the process of constructing it. All that was necessary was to cap-
ture it, write it, put it down. It was a point of view not far from the convic-
tion that lead well-meaning aunts to assure writers starting an
autobiography that "it should not be hard; you've led such an interesting
life."

Today, the tide has turned completely. We have come to reject the view
that a "life" is anything in itself and to believe that it is all in the construct-
ing, in the text, or the text making. If you read contemporary writers on
autobiography, like William Spengemann or Janet Varner Gunn, you will
find them thoroughgoing constructionists. Their concerns are with literary-
historical invention, with form, with the depiction of reality. Like me, they
are concerned with the literary forces that shape autobiography. Is an auto-
biography, say, a Bildungsroman, premissed on the accretion of wisdom
from experience, as a British empiricist might put it? As if, so to speak, one
gradually transforms the primary qualities of direct experience into the
secondary qualities of higher knowledge.
But it is not only genre that has this forming function, but certain or-
ganizing metaphors as well. Take the following instance. One of the par-
ticipants in our study, when asked about his life, started right off with a
metaphoric event that shaped the entire interview. He himself was a pub-
lished writer, a teacher of English, and had been born in England, in a Mid-
lands town where he spent his childhood and adolescence. Here is how he
started: "My parents ran a small hotel on the edge of a small Midlands
town. When I was born, they called the obstetrician. The obstetrician, find-
ing that I was having difficulty breathing, raised me by my heels, slapped
me on the back, and broke two ribs. You see, I had osteoporosis. Rather like
the story of my life: people breaking my bones in the interest of helping
me." He never returned to that episode again or even repeated those terms.
Yet, each of the turning points in his life (I shall return to turning points
later) contained a variant of that same metaphoric theme: harm coming to
him by dint of another's good intentions. And so we began asking what
role a genre or a metaphoric theme serves in a life account. Let me dwell on
that problem for a moment.
What after all is an autobiography? It consists of the following. A nar-
rator, in the here and now, takes upon himself or herself the task of describ-
ing the progress of a protagonist in the there and then, one who happens to
share his name. He must by convention bring that protagonist from the past
into the present in such a way that the protagonist and the narrator even-
tually fuse and become one person with a shared consciousness. Now, in
order to bring a protagonist from the there and then to the point where the
original protagonist becomes the present narrator, one needs a theory of
growth or at least of transformation. You need a prescription that will allow
the callow pear-stealing boy to turn into the thoughtful St. Augustine now

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70 Jerome Bruner

caught in a struggle between faith and reason. The boy, of course, becomes
an instrument in the telling. His life becomes dedicated to the theory or
story into which his destiny is fitted. In stories of this kind, it is not amiss to
say that the old adage is turned around. If initially the child was father to
the man, now (in autobiography) the man reclaims the role of being father
to the child-but this time recapturing the child for the culture by the use of
the culture's theories and stories.

There is an interesting anomaly here. The theories or stories one con-

structs about one's growth and, indeed, about the "stages" along the path of
that growth are not verifiable in the usual sense that that term is used. The
best one can do is to check them against one's own memory-which, of
course, is notoriously fallible and open to schematization, as Sir Frederic
Bartlett long ago reminded us-or to check them against "family recollec-
tions."1 Or, indeed, to check them against what elsewhere I have called
"culturally canonical accounts" of what growing up and what childhood
are about.2 Strictly speaking, such "checking" is guided not by ordinary
verification but by a criterion of verisimilitude, lifelikeness. That is to say,
"the story of my life"-and I'll come to "story" in a moment-is not com-
posed of a set of testable propositions in the usual sense, but is composed as
a narrative. And this imposes constraints that have as much to do with the
requirements of narrative as they have to do with what "happened" to one,
or what one remembers as having happened. Recall the obstetrician who
broke those two ribs. The "facts" (though culturally transmitted) are
probably right. The interpretation and its later metaphoric use is a narrative
invention that provides continuity both with the received facts and with the
autobiographer's conception (or invention) of his "life." But it must also fit
the requirements of narrative as a form of organizing experience. What can
we say about these requirements of narrative?
Narrative accounts must have at least two characteristics. They should
center upon people and their intentional states: their desires, beliefs, and so
on; and they should focus on how these intentional states led to certain
kinds of activities. Such an account should also be or appear to be order
preserving, in the sense of preserving or appearing to preserve sequence-
the sequential properties of which life itself consists or is supposed to con-
sist. Now, in the nature of things, if these points are correct,
autobiographies should be about the past, should be par excellence the genre
(or set of genres) composed in the past tense. So just for fun, we decided to
find out whether in fact autobiographies were all in the past tense-both the
spontaneous ones we had collected and a sample of literary auto-
biographies.
We have never found a single one where past-tense verbs constituted
more than 70 percent of the verbs used. Autobiographies are, to be sure,
about the past; but what of the 30 percent or more of their sentences that are

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 Self-Making 71

not in the past tense? I'm sure it will be apparent without all these statistics
that autobiography is not only about the past, but is busily about the present
as well. If it is to bring the protagonist up to the present, it must deal with
the present as well as the past-and not just at the end of the account, as it
were. That is one part of it. But there is another part that is more interesting.
Most of the "present-tense" aspect of autobiography has to do with what
students of narrative structure call "evaluation"-the task of placing those
sequential events in terms of a meaningful context. Narrative, whether
looked at from the more formalistic perspective of William Labov or the
more literary, historical one of Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, necessarily com-
prises two features: one of them is telling what happened to a cast of
human beings with a view to the order in which things happened.3 That
part is greatly aided by the devices of flashback, flashforward, and the rest.
But a narrative must also answer the question "Why," "Why is this worth
telling, what is interesting about it?" Not everything that happened is
worth telling about, and it is not always clear why what one tells merits tell-
ing. We are bored and offended by such accounts as "I got up in the morn-
ing, got out of bed, dressed and tied my shoes, shaved, had breakfast, went
off to the office and saw a graduate student who had an idea for a
thesis...."
The "why tell" function imposes something of great (and hidden) sig-
nificance on narrative. Not only must a narrative be about a sequence of
events over time, structured comprehensibly in terms of cultural canon-
icality, it must also contain something that endows it with exceptionality. We
had better pause for a moment and explore what this criterion of excep-
tionality means for autobiography and, incidentally, why it creates such a
spate of present-tense clauses in the writing of autobiography.
An autobiography serves a dual function. On the one hand, it is an act of
"entrenchment," to use Nelson Goodman's term. That is to say, we wish to
present ourselves to others (and to ourselves) as typical or characteristic or
"culture confirming" in some way. That is to say, our intentional states and
actions are comprehensible in the light of the "folk psychology" that is in-
trinsic in our culture. In the main, we laugh at what is canonically funny,
sorrow for what is canonically sad. This is the set of "givens" in a life. But if
it is all "givens," then there is no individuality, no modern Self. We are
simply mirrors of our culture. To assure individuality (and I am speaking of
Western culture only), we focus upon what, in the light of some folk
psychology, is exceptional (and, therefore, worthy of "telling") in our lives.
Now, the only requirement imposed by having to tell a life story (even
when only invited to do so by a psychologist) is that one tell something "in-
teresting"-which is to say a story that is at once recognizably canonical
and recognizably noncanonical. What makes for something "interesting" is
invariably a "theory" or "story" that runs counter to expectancy or pro-

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72 Jerome Bruner

duces an outcome counter to expectancy. But expectancy, of course, is con-

trolled by the implicit folk psychology that prevails in a culture. It is the
case, then, that a story (to meet the criterion of tellability) must violate
canonical expectancy, but do so in a way that is culturally comprehensible.
That is to say, it must be a violation of the folk-psychologically canonical
that is itself canonical-that is, the breach of convention must itself be con-
ventional, like the cuckolded husband, the betrayed fair maiden, and so
forth.

Now let me return to the issue of genre raised earlier. I want to offer the
hypothesis that literary genres represent stylized forms of violations of the
folk-psychological canon. And by this I do not intend to say that genres, as
it were, are "copies" of what happens in life. Indeed, as already noted,
literary inventions are inspirations to new modes of life, invitations to ex-
perience fresh ways of violating the banalities of folk psychology, and we
honor the Laurence Sternes and Natalia Ginzburgs, the Virginia Woolfs and
Anais Nins as much for their "human insights" as for their literary skills. So
just as folk psychology embodies and entrenches the canonical ways of
people responding to the world, literature comes to invent and exemplify
forms of deviation-and by "literature" I mean as well the literary-intellec-
tual world of great innovators in human "personality" psychology ranging
from the exponents of the four humoral types, through Mesmer and the
apostles of "suggestibility," and on into modem times when new and "in-
teresting" noncanonical stories have been invented by the likes of Pierre
Janet, Freud, Jung, and more recently Laing and Lacan. And of course, with
each new entrenchment of deviation from folk-psychological canon there is
invention of terminology which further entrenches the new breakaway pat-
tern-"ego defense," "archetype," "introvert," and so on.
The object of narrative, then, is to demystify deviations. Narrative solves
no problems. It simply locates them in such a way as to make them com-
prehensible. It does so by invoking the play of psychological states and of
actions that transpire when human beings interact with each other and re-
lates these to what can usually be expected to happen. I think that Kenneth
Burke has a good deal to say about this "play of psychological states" in
narrative, and I think it would help to examine his ideas. In his The Gram-
mar of Motives, he introduces the idea of "dramatism."4 Burke noted that
dramatism was created by the interplay of five elements (he refers to them
as the Pentad). These comprise an Actor who commits an Action toward a
Goal with the use of some Instrument in a particular Scene. Dramatism is
created, he argues, when elements of the Pentad are out of balance, lose
their appropriate "ratio." This creates Trouble, an emergent sixth element.
He has much to say about what leads to the breakdown in the ratios be-
tween the elements of the dramatistic pentad. For example, the Actor and
the Scene don't fit. Nora, for example: what in the world is the rebellious

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 Self-Making 73

Nora in A Doll's House doing in this banal doctor's household? Or Oedipus

taking his mother Jocasta unknowingly to wife. The "appropriate ratios," of
course, are given by the canonical stances of folk psychology toward the
human condition. Dramatism constitutes their patterned violation. In a clas-
sically oral culture, the great myths that circulate are the archetypal forms
of violation, and these become increasingly "smoothed" and formalized-
even frozen-over time, as we know from the classic studies of Russian
folktales published by Vladimir Propp.5 In more mobile literary cultures, of
course, the range and variation in such tales and stories greatly increases,
matching the greater complexity and widened opportunities that accom-
pany literacy. Genres develop, new forms emerge, variety increases-at
least at first. It may well be that with the emergence of mass cultures and
the new massifying media, new constraints on this variation occur, but that
is a topic that would take us beyond the scope of this essay.
There is one feature of Western autobiography that needs special men-
tion. It relates to what I shall call the highlighting or "marking" of turning
points. By "turning points" I mean those episodes in which, as if to under-
line the power of the agent's intentional states, the narrator attributes a cru-
cial change or stance in the protagonist's story to a belief, a conviction, a
thought. This I see as crucial to the effort to individualize a life, to make it
clearly and patently something more than a running off of automatic, folk-
psychological canonicality. I will give an example in a moment, drawn from
our "family" of autobiographies.
But before I do that, let me comment briefly on why I use the word
"marking." As Roman Jakobson put it a generation ago, language is a sys-
tem not only for communicating, but also for organizing attention.6 Speak-
ing (in contrast to remaining silent) is itself a way of marking, of drawing
attention to that which one wishes to forefront. And once one speaks, there
is within every language at every level a highly elaborated system for dis-
tinguishing the "marked" from the "unmarked"-what is to be taken for
granted as given and what is to be highlighted as new, deviant, special, or
interestworthy. So, for example, there are narrative devices for indicating
what, as it were, is newsworthy-ways of marking, in Burke's sense, the
imbalances in ratio between the elements of the Pentad. I see the construc-

tion of narrative "turning points" as a device further to distinguish what is

ordinary and expectable (i.e., folk psychological) from that which is idio-
syncratic and quintessentially agentive.
Now an example. Let me present Carl, the eldest brother in the Good-
hertz family, the nom de plume we use for our autobiographical family. The
example concerns his introduction of one of the leitmotifs in his spon-
taneously spoken autobiography and occurred when he was a schoolboy.
He tells us that he went out for the football team, and because he was heavy
he made it. During his third game on this Catholic high-school team, the

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74 Jerome Bruner

coach said to him, "That end, I want him out of the game. Get him out of
the game." He was shocked and put in a moral conflict. "I decided then and
there this was not for me." So he quit the football team right after the game.
In the months following, he spent a lot of time in the library, "brooding."
He tells us that he became much concerned with moral integrity and how
you maintain it, given the way the world is. The world is a tough, dirty
place where your coach asks you to knock out the opposing end. You your-
self must decide what is right in your convictions, never mind what
anybody thinks.
Eventually, Carl finds a way of "patterning" his deviation from high-
school culture-and "finds" is the right word. He finds the Berrigan
brothers, becomes active in a neighborhood settlement house, and eventual-
ly becomes a Vietnam war protester-which gives his initial deviation a
new legitimization, a new narrative structure.
Turning points need more study. They represent a way in which people
free themselves in their self-consciousness from their history, their banal
destiny, their conventionality. In doing so, they mark off the narrator's con-
sciousness from the protagonist's and begin closing the gap between the
two at the same time. Turning points are steps toward narratorial con-
sciousness. Not surprising that, in most autobiographies, they are located at
points where the culture in fact gives more degrees of freedom-elbow
room for turning points. In America, for example, high school graduation is
one such point. "I've always done what my parents wanted. At that point I
started thinking about what I was, and I decided that ... ." All such pas-
sages are marked by a mental verb. This signals an "inside" transformation,
a change in intentional state. Had the autobiography been written before
the break, you sense it would have been a different autobiography.
So in this sense, too, one recognizes that folk psychology has "written"
into it not only that people are directed by their own intentional states, but
that these change in patterned ways and at predictable times. And, as for
example with adolescence, the literary culture concentrates its sense of in-
vention on the exploration of consciousness and deviation during these pre-
dictable and privileged times. And in a mass society one has the impression
that the varieties of adolescent crisis become products of a literary/image-
making industry.
We see all of these puzzles very concretely raised in the autobiographies
of the family we are studying.7 Each is, in his or her own way, an expres-
sion of the culture. Their individual psychic geography reflects the cultural
geography of New York in the late 1980s. But-and here I return to Profes-
sor Geertz's comment about the family as a system for containing and
counteracting centrifugal tendencies-the family also serves as a microcosm
in which the conflicts of the broader enclave are represented and, within
certain limits, contained. For the family, in the case of the Goodhertzes, rep-

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 Self-Making 75

resents an implicit commitment to a way of life--certain beliefs, desires, in-

tentions that all of them took for granted as "givens." It is as if they share a
morphology of the world and of people. And this shared morphology
forms the way not only of seeing others, but of seeing themselves, however
different they may be. They distinguish, for example, between the "real
world" and "home"-surely a widespread distinction in the culture, but
nonetheless a highly personal one for the Goodhertzes. The values for the
real world are "street smarts," as they put it: how to deal with the
hypocritical, the ambitious, the exploitative. The values of home ar open-
ness, sympathy, forgiveness, neighborhood. Each expresses this geography
and morphology in their own way, for each is different, very different from
the others.

The father is a man who managed to become a master sergeant in the

peacetime army before he was twenty-five (having enlisted at eighteen, il-
legally underage at that time). He had a rough childhood, with an alcoholic
father who deserted the family, with him having to take over respon-
sibilities too early. His response was to take responsibility, but always to be
aware of what seemed to be the case in contrast to what the case might in
fact be. He played his cards close to his chest, went into plumbing after dis-
charge from the Army, became a trusted and dependable man in the com-
munity-but had few intimates. When he married he, like his wife who also
had experienced a hard childhood, decided that they would protect their
children from the tough times they had known as children. Mrs. Goodhertz
was a woman of strong views, "a Catholic and a Democrat," and the two of
them have in fact made a home for their kids--indeed have lived in the
same Brooklyn neighborhood now for thirty years, where they have be-
come pillars of the community.
When Carl, the eldest son, becomes a Vietnam draft protester, we see the
family culture at work. His father was "hard hat," but he backed Carl when
he became a draft-evader. So long as Carl came honestly by his opinion,
that was fine. In the family, each could have their own version of the world
if they came by it through honest conviction. But Carl's stand on the war
(like his stand on the football team) was also premissed on a belief that his
father believed in individual integrity. "We are a highly moral family," he
says in an interview. Believe it too. For in fact, they each define themselves
in terms of those private family values of openness, sharing, and forgive-
ness. They boast that there is nothing they cannot discuss around the Sun-
day dinner table when they come together. And that is the tribunal where
they try out their changing versions of their self-image and their auto-
biographies. Right now, for example, Mr. Goodhertz is thinking about retir-
ing. He likes his work, and it gives him a needed sense of autonomy and
self-reliance. Besides, he feels that he lacks intimacy in his life. It is interest-
ing to see him shaping a new turning point in his life, from which the past

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76 Jerome Bruner

will look different. But you sense that it is being designed with the others in
mind, that maintaining a version of your life concordant with those of the
others in the family is a paramount consideration. Self-making is powerful-
ly affected not only by your own interpretations of yourself, but by the in-
terpretations others offer of your version. One anomaly, of course, is that
while Self is regarded (at least in Western ideology) as the most "private"
aspect of our being, it turns out on close inspection to be highly negotiable,
highly sensitive to bidding on the not so open market of one's own
reference group.
It becomes plain, as one observes this process of self-formation, that it is
probably a mistake to conceive of Self as solo, as locked up inside one
person's subjectivity, as hermetically sealed off. Rather, Self seems also to
be intersubjective or "distributed" in the same way that one's "knowledge"
is distributed beyond one's head to include the friends and colleagues to
whom one has access, the notes one has filed, the books one has on one's
shelves. Yet somehow, there is resistance to such a view in most people. For
in our Western culture, one opts for a view of commitment as individual.
Yet it has not always and everywhere been so, and one is led to wonder
whether there is something "essential" about our contemporary notion of
selfhood or whether it will change as much as it has in the past, say, from
the Middle Ages to the rise of mercantilism.8
Perhaps what remains most stable about the Self as an enduring concept
over time, as Charles Taylor has recently reminded us, is a sense of commit-
ment to a set of beliefs and values that we are unwilling (or unable) to sub-
mit to "radical" scrutiny.9 It is this commitment, of course, that provides the
engine, as it were, for the rhetorical aspect of autobiography, a subject we
have not considered in any detail thus far and cannot in the compass of a
brief essay. But we have touched on it obliquely in noting the "evaluative"
component in autobiographical discourse. For "what makes the telling jus-
tifiable" is also a commitment to a certain set of presuppositions about
oneself, one's relation to others, one's view of the world and one's place in
it. So, given that autobiography is also a form of "taking a stand," it is per-
force rhetorical. And when one combines the rhetoric of self-justification
with the requirements of a genre-linked narrative, one begins to come very
close to what Goodman describes as "worldmaking" in which the con-
structed Self and its agentive powers become, as it were, the gravitational
center of the world. And the force that relates the center to the rest of the
world is a commitment that endures over time-a commitment that ensures

a certain stability in self-conception, but also permits the autobiographer to

maintain a sense of alliance with others--alliance and opposition as well.
For as both Taylor and Henri Tajfel point out, defining the Self and its allies
also defines those who are in the out-group, and as Tajfel has so brilliantly
demonstrated, there seems always to be a degradation of the out-group that

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 Self-Making 77

has a of
qualities special role,
those with byonecontrast,
whom is allied, one'sin defining
in-group. one's own 1.ualities and the
In this sense, autobiography (like the novel) involves not only the con-
struction of self, but also a construction of one's culture-just as Geertz as-
sures us that writing anthropology also involves a kind of autobiography.11
It is interesting to contemplate the Romantic stereotype that insists that one
can "find" one's Self only by withdrawing from the world-as with the
1970s undergraduates who would ask for a leave of absence to go live in a
village in Maine or Nepal or the Greek Islands in order to "find them-
selves." I think this is a lingering vestige of the notion of an "essential" self
that has a being independent of the culture in terms of which one navigates
the world. It is a great puzzle, examining actual autobiographies and the
process of their construction, how it is that such isolating concepts can sur-
vive the actual experience of self-accounting. To revert again to one of
Goodman's points about worldmaking, it is surely clear that the criteria of
"rightness" for a constructed world have very little to do with the usual
criteria for establishing "truth" either by correspondence or by congruence.
Rather, rightness appears to be pragmatically controlled-it is what one can
live with among those with whom one interacts in the setting where one
must operate.
One final word about the development of the self-concept in different
cultures under different conditions of life. It is a vast topic, and one not very
well studied, though the literature on the subject is voluminous. A group of
us, under Katherine Nelson's leadership, have recently published a study of
one child's after-bedtime soliloquies--a good many of which are quasi-
autobiographical. The soliloquies extend from Emmy's eighteenth month to
her third birthday.12 What is apparent from that work and from other
recent studies is that self-construction begins very early and is a strikingly
systematic process that is deeply enmeshed with the mastery of language it-
self-not just its syntax and lexicon, but its rhetoric and its rules for con-
structing narrative. Like all other aspects of worldmaking, self-making (or
"life-making") depends heavily upon the symbolic system in which it is
conducted-its opportunities and constraints. I would like to end with the
comment that Nelson Goodman's constructivism arms one well to ap-
preciate the complexities of self- and life-making. And I hope that in the
course of these remarks I have indicated some of the ways in which his
ideas can be put to work in this domain.

NOTES

1. See F. C. Bartlett, Remembering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932);

D. C. Rubin, ed., Autobiographical Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986).

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78 Jerome Bruner

2. Jerome S. Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1990).
3. W. Labov, "Speech Actions and Reactions in Personal Narrative," in Analyzing
Discourse: Text and Talk, ed. D. Tannen (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown Univer-
sity Press, 1982); Barbara Herrnstein Smith, On the Margins of Discourse
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
4. Kenneth Burke, The Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945).
5. V. Propp, The Morphology of the Folk Tale, rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1986).
6. R. Jakobson, Selected Writings, vol. 8 (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988), pp. 92f.
7. This work is now nearing completion and will appear as J. S. Bruner and Susan
Weisser, Autobiography and the Construction of Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press).
8. For a fuller discussion of this point, see my Acts of Meaning.
9. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1989).
10. H. Tajfel, Differentiation between Groups (London: Academic Press, 1978), see part
1.
11. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
12. K. Nelson, ed., Narratives from the Crib (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1989).

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