The Shape of the Story

The best books have the capacity to change lives, sometimes by the sheer force of ideas communicated with felicity and grace. Jerome Bruner’s short, compelling new work, “Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life,” is just such a book.

Bruner does so very well what he sets out to do by making sharply visible what otherwise would be only indistinctly felt. He trains his searchlight on the complex and diverse uses not only of the conventional, easily-recognized stories of myth and literature but also of obscure stories, those found not lying on library shelves but buried within our culture, our institutions and ourselves.

Bruner, who teaches at New York University’s School of Law after a distinguished career as an academic psychologist, makes a case, first, for the primacy of storytelling. He argues that stories are not merely entertaining or enlightening or sources of deep pleasure, at once primitive and sophisticated, but utterly essential to the people we are collectively and individually. Without them, Bruner suggests, we would be something less than human. Narrative, Bruner audaciously claims, “is our preferred, perhaps even our obligatory medium for expressing human aspirations and their vicissitudes.” Stories are “the coin and currency of culture,” through which “we construct, reconstruct, in some ways reinvent yesterday and tomorrow.”

Stories are all around us and, Bruner says, woefully unexamined, so he sets out to elucidate them. A story begins, he says, with something gone awry. Combining that with a cast of characters, a narrator, a resolution and a coda, we have the essential elements that allow “for coming to terms with the surprises and oddities of the human condition and for coming to terms with our imperfect grasp of that condition.”

Bruner finds relevant, important stories everywhere. He ranges freely across cultures, millenniums and disciplines. Law, for example, dependent as it is on narrative pleading, is one place stories abound. Judges and lawyers, Bruner says, do their best to make “law stories as unstory-like as possible, even anti-story-like: factual, logically self-evident, hostile to the fanciful, respectful to the ordinary, seemingly ‘untailored.’ Yet in pleading cases, they create drama.” And in the drama of the lawsuit can lie urgent consequences for the parties and maybe for the law itself. Small wonder that, as Bruner reports, when the stages of ancient Greece were bare, “Athenians often repaired to the law courts.”

The stories we tell about ourselves as a nation also influence the course of our lives, and Bruner traces the evolving narratives about race that in the last century shaped an expanding and then contracting understanding of constitutional rights and the meaning of equality.

Bruner hears stories as well in the voices of friends and students. Some of these are stories they created in the process of having to make choices about the trajectory of their lives. Stories told, for example, of a young doctor’s sojourn in Africa or a law student’s encounter with parents summoned to court on charges of abuse and neglect of their children allow for balancing “autonomy and commitment in one’s sense of self,” a way to “make it all of a piece.” These are difficult but urgent tasks in the construction of a self.

Ultimately, Bruner’s argument suggests that we might make sense of much in our lives and our world through the prism of stories, our love for them, our hunger for them and our instinctive, addictive, often unconscious need to make them. Stories, Bruner argues, are live, dynamic forces, tools for manipulating the world, not tableaux through which to view it. His is a call to action. To use this precious story-making capacity well is a provocative challenge.