Remembered Future: Neuro-Cognitive Identity in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, The

On the basis of this comparison, we may conclude that the special kind of awareness of experience, emotion, perceptual imagery, place, time, personhood, and judgment that characterizes autobiographical memory may also define literary narrative. That is, narrative mimics consciousness to unite the needs of the organism, the perceptions of the world through the complex social codes of language and story forms into an "identity" capable of negotiating a demanding environment. The brain's capacity to bind distributed neurological information into a form that may be used for adaptive choice, especially evident in autobiographical memory, is reflected in the formal features of fiction, probably for a similar purpose: to cultivate an aptitude for the speculative insight necessary for planning goals and predicting outcomes. The aim of autobiographical memory is to superintend what can happen to the self in a kind of "remembered future," the same objective, I argue, that the governess's story illustrates.

In his monumental treatise The Principles of Psychology published in 1890, just seven years before his brother Henry completed his popular novella, William James claimed that what we think of as memory is not a mere "copy" of the past but "on the contrary, a very complex representation, that of the fact to be recalled plus" all its later associations-an ongoing reconstruction of experience deemed as integral to the emerging identity of the rememberer (1904, 650). "The electric current, so to speak, between it and our present self does not close," James asserted (652). Given the mutually influential affiliation of the James brothers, the psychologist and the author, it is reasonable to assume that the "complex representation" of experience-memory reproducing its train of past associations in the present, connecting the current world to the future "self," within both the psyche and the text-might have interested both of them. The fraternal alliance may account for Henry James's suffusion of Turn of the Screw with issues of creative remembering.

For as we have noted in Henry James's remarkable example, consciousness, in its many manifestations, generally includes a sense of self-awareness, but it is in the special branch of consciousness psychologists designate autobiographical memory that this feature is most fully realized. If it is true, as I propose, that the remarkable similarities shared by fiction and autobiographical memory also confirm that they share a common purpose-promoting a capability for the kind of complicated adaptive action demonstrated in the governess's self-construction in The Turn of the Screw-investigations of autobiographical memory may also contribute to our understanding of how it is that stories sustain us. It is the business of neurologists to determine how this complicated transaction is achieved by the cells of the human brain. And it is the responsibility of cognitivists to describe how the properties we know as autobiographical memory and selfhood contribute to human knowing. For literary scholars, an important task is to make full use of the emerging revelations about how neuro-psychological memory does what it does in order to understand how it is that the narrative self, the functional center of public text and private life, helps us to know what we do, to be what we are, and become what we shall.