The remembered future: neuro-cognitive identity in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.

The concept of selfhood has taken a beating lately through the political critique of so-called "identity" politics, the post-structural obliteration of individuality, and the sociological condemnation of a culture of narcissism. But as much as we may want to condemn personal identity as we know it, shaped by the isolation and instability of contemporary life, and exploited by 20th-century advertising, the self, understood neurologically and cognitively, is one of the superb achievements of human evolution. Further, its maintenance, a full-time job for human consciousness, also includes, I believe, the practice of literary narrative. Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, a novella that, paradoxically, celebrates the achievement of narrative identity even as it tells a tale of autobiographical failure, demonstrates that the self--as a structure of the mind and as a device of fiction--integrates an extraordinary range of information for adaptive use in a challenging world. James's novella, a famous story that foregrounds identity by making it problematic, displays a central purpose of literature and well exemplifies the related processes of fiction and mind that should guide our inquiries into the similar functions of narrative and consciousness.

Of the 500-plus interpretations of James's famous novella, a large number argue or assume that the mental affliction of the unnamed governess who narrates the story is the unreliable source of its supernatural incidents. According to Edmund Wilson's influential explication, "the governess who is made to tell the story is a neurotic case of sex repression, and ... the ghosts are not real ghosts but hallucinations of the governess" (1960, 115). Yet there is another plausible way to understand the striking "mind" of the text. The Turn of the Screw is an extraordinarily detailed account of the construction of past events in response to the cues and needs of present circumstances. It is a remarkable report of the operation of what we may call autobiographical memory (1)--the creative application of experience to the evolution of personal identity, one of the most important products of the relation between the human brain and the natural and cultural world. My purpose in shifting the predominant psychoanalytical focus to include emerging issues of neurology and psychology is not meant to substitute a novel interpretation--likely an impossibility--but rather to reuse what we already know about a representative classic text in the service of what we are just beginning to learn about the parallels of mind-making and narrative process.

In place of the common-sense belief that memory replicates experience, evolutionary neurologist Gerald M. Edelman, from whom I adapt my title, theorizes the constructive nature of remembering. (2) In a similar vein, cognitive neurologist Antonio Damasio argues that memory is best understood in terms of narrative process. And cognitive psychologist David B. Pillemer posits narrative construction as the very basis of autobiographical memory. This substitution of active creation for passive retrieval has significant parallels to literary narrative, which may seem to offer a reflection of reality but in fact operates as structure through which actuality is organized for social use, a purpose I will consider in light of Jerome Bruner's Acts of Meaning (1990). The special ability of conscious memory to weave details of emotional context, sequentiality, sensory effects, and causal relationships into the personal sense of repetition of an event--the hallmark of remembering that is actually a recreation shaped to the internal needs of the individual in relation to the complicated forces and issues of external environment--is, I shall argue, the subject and strategy of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.

Figures for Memory

In the absence of any complete scientific understanding of the operation of the human mind it has historically (and currently) been necessary to speculate about specific properties through the imposition of provisional symbols. In fact, in a recent study of ideas about the mind, historian of psychology Douwe Draaisma argues that conceptions of memory have been shaped by the many metaphors employed to define it, and these metaphors inevitably operate as ideological bridges between concepts of memory and the contexts out of which they emerge. In Metaphors of Memory (2000) he considers the influence of a range of comparative figures--from Socrates' simile of the aviary to present-day holographic imagery--on psychological, philosophical, and neurological models of remembering. Since The Turn of the Screw is plotted as an account of the memories of the central character, let us begin by considering the figures for memory James brings to bear. The intriguing introductory chapter makes use of three: the locked drawer, the ghost story, and the act of narration.

One of the earliest and most enduring tropes of memory is that of "the storehouse," a veritable "archetype" of scholarly descriptions, according to Draaisma (2000, 27). This metaphor is repeated in James's prologue to the novella through the detail that the governess's written record, which, previously consigned to Douglas's care, has been for many years secured in "a locked drawer" and must be obtained by his manservant and carried to his present location before her story can be imparted (9). This figure conveys the sense that memory, absent from present consciousness, is like a buried treasure repossessed after exertion and delay. According to this metaphor, memory is organized, particularized, valuable, and recuperable in a form identical to the original.

As Draaisma explains it, the advantage of metaphoric expression of psychological states resides in the rendering of what science is unable to describe--"either not yet or in principle" (2000, 11). But the concomitant drawback is that figurative representation may also limit in advance what it is possible to understand about what is not yet understood. The storehouse metaphor is a case in point. While allowing us to imagine memory as the accumulation and later retrieval of perceptual experience, according to Draaisma, it also "raises the question of how something can be found in the memory which has not entered through the doors of the senses" (28). It is in relation to this question that James's introductory metaphor for memory conflicts with the content of the governess's recollection of literally non-corporeal experience.