Jacksonville State University, USA

            A psychologist friend of mine once told me that her primary function as a therapist is to help her patients understand how and why they “story their lives.” Her comfortable use of the noun story as a verb indicates the degree to which narrative theory has infiltrated the domain of psychology, appropriating literary language as psychological tool.  This entire volume of articles, collected and edited by Fireman, McVay and Flanagan, continues this trend, making the connection between literature, psychology, and the biological sciences explicit.  Narrative, the sequencing of life-events into a cohesive, linear structure that situates itself into a cultural and social milieu, becomes the point at which literature, psychology, and neuro-science all collide, intersect, and inform each other. 

This collection of articles, all originally given at an interdisciplinary conference (of the same name as the title of the book) at Texas Tech University in February 1999, attempts to “provide a distinct explanation for narrative in relation to consciousness,” while also recognizing that each “line of analysis”—phenomenological, psychological, and neurobiological—“has legitimate aims” of its own (3).  Like most collections, the success of each individual article varies widely (some have more field-specific jargon than others, for example), but for the most part, the editors have captured a cross-section of the most current dialogue in the area. Reading this volume will update anyone who has been out of touch with any of these areas with a minimum of anguish.  In addition, the editors have done an excellent job of organizing the articles into groups of two that complement each other, and all the groups complement the field as a whole.

The chapters each contain two articles, ranging from considerations of how and when children come into their conscious awareness; to the role of narrative in “autobiographical memory,” which the authors define as “a report of [a person’s] own life anywhere in length from a single event to an entire life story,” a type of “narrative reasoning” that is only one process among many used in recollection but is “probably the least well understood” (53); to the role of autobiographical memory in the construction of the self in adults; to “narrative disruptions” in the construction of the self; and finally, to the “naturalist model” of narrative and consciousness based on empirical evidence and applied to the sexual identities.  Out of the ten articles, only one uses a work of literature (James Phelan’s article, entitled “Dual Focalization, Retrospective Fictional Autobiography, and the Ethics of Lolita”) for illustration.  However, all of the works acknowledge

the powerful role for narrative [that] is realized by the linking of personal memories to present conditions and future hopes, by organizing, translating, and providing continuity and coherence to experience.  Self-awareness and self-knowledge are constructed, to a significant degree, through narrative as we compose and assemble stories for ourselves and our world.  (4)

Therefore, to a certain degree, while this philosophy certainly helps to validate literature as one of the most significant of human endeavors, it also takes the act of narration away from the exclusive hands of the “writer,” an occupation, and places it squarely into the possession of every human being on the planet, making the construction of stories as human an activity as talking, walking, breathing, or laughing.  It would seem appropriate then that the focus of this collection of essays is not on “literature,” per se, but rather on the act of constructing narrative, an act which not only entertains us, but is far more fundamental to human life than mere entertainment.  As the editors put it, “narrative does not merely capture aspects of the self for description, communication, and examination; narrative constructs the self” (5).

            While it is clear that identity is dependent upon memory in many important ways, it is just as clear that human memory is one of the most unreliable of human characteristics.  It is no wonder, then, that individual psychology is so vulnerable to disruption, from minor anxieties to full-blown neurotic insecurities, to self-loathing and self-destructive behavior.  If we are a deeply insecure species, it may be precisely because our identities are built on foundations of shifting sand.  Although Einstein and Flanagan, in their concluding article, “Sexual Identities and Narratives of Self,” maintain that “whole-body explanations may lead us to a better understanding of even how perceptual events play a role in constituting ourselves and developing our narratives of self” (230), no explanation, either partial- or whole-body, has yet to compensate for the fundamental problem: The narratives upon which we constitute ourselves are made up of, based on, and revolve around memories that have meaning only in the context of a single life, and even then, they offer little help. Unfortunately, while most of these articles acknowledge the unreliability of memory, they do not fully grapple with that flaw—at least not to this reviewer’s satisfaction. Perhaps future studies can take up the issue, find a satisfactory explanation for it, and even someday, figure out a solution to what is now completely undependable: human memory.  Until that day, we have no choice but to acknowledge and find a way to live with the consequences of such unreliability.