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Remembered Future: Neuro-Cognitive Identity in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, The
College Literature, Spring 2004 by Wesley, Marilyn C
The perceptions in the passage include the description of the day and the destination; the latter rendered in imagistic detail, including the kinesthetic suggestion of the "bumping" ride, the appearance of the house, the accompanying sounds of the carriage running over gravel and the cries of the rooks. The ups and downs of the emotional effect on the governess, with reference to her past experience, of the last several days and the years preceding, as well her hopes for the future are subject to evaluation. The "right throbs and the wrong" are registered and a possible "mistake" is noted, only to be replaced by the general impression of "greatness" of setting that extends to the governess's sense of positive anticipation. What she herself designates as a "scene" evidently contributes to her developing sense of self, the transition from her private role within a family of "scant" means to her emerging public role as the governess of a large estate. The meaning of this transformation is implied through social signs embedded in personal experience: the "commodious" conveyance which awaits her, the apparent anticipation by the expectant household staff, and especially the ceremonious "curtsey" which formally institutes a new and elevated status.
In addition to the content of higher-order consciousness, Edelman and Giulio Tononi theorize its functional properties:
1) A conscious scene is unified-it operates as a gestalt impression, rather than a conglomerate of parts;
2) it is private in that it is apprehended from a single point of view;
3) it is focused. The unity and singularity of conscious experience seem to preclude other conscious experience at the same time. As a result, conscious states are experienced serially as a linear trajectory of impressions. Thus, although "continuous," consciousness "is continually changing."
4) The conscious state that is being experienced is selective; that is, it is differentiated from an infinite number of alternative, potentially associable sensory, imagistic, emotional, intellectual, ethical qualities that could have been included;
5) it is informative: "the occurrence of a given conscious state among billions of others represents information, in the fundamental sense of reducing uncertainty among a large number of choices;
6) and for this reason the awareness produced by consciousness can lead to a large number of behavioral outcomes. Therefore it promotes a flexibility of response based on the adaptive "ability to learn unexpected associations among a large variety of apparently unconnected signals." (Edelman and Tononi 2000, 147-152)
The arrival at Bly, although composed of many observations, produces a unified impression. Even at the level of primary consciousness, according to Edelman and Tononi, the brain is capable of abstracting the "gist" of an experience (2000, 141), a rudimentary sense of whether it is a threat or a boon to the participant, and the essence of this more complex scene is evidently its portent of possibility for the governess. Just as the composite of consciousness organizes variable information, the paragraph seems to foster the emergence of an identity that can cope with its own exigencies. The composite memory of the governess's arrival at Bly, translated into language, provides not so much a mimetic record as a formulation to advance the agency and perspective the rest of the story tests. From the first person point of view of the governess, the scene denotes and connotes a future "self," which by the end of the tale is subject to potentially devastating moral evaluation.
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