Rita Carter, towards the end of our selection from Exploring Consciousness, discusses, briefly, almost as a throwaway, the levels of awareness our minds seem capable, upon introspection, of attaining (forgive me my weak Jamesian mimicry!). "The human mind," she says, "can lift itself by its bootstraps to higher and higher levels of self-reflection in the process known as introspection," which occurs, "when the contents of one's consciousness itself becomes the subject of attention" (43). Essentially, I take this to mean, and I think we more or less agreed on this as a class, that our minds are capable of not only perceiving qualia, but also knowing we perceive that qualia, and knowing we know we perceive the qualia, and so on a so forth, upwards of four or five levels, after which it all kind of falls apart. I think this model of introspection is useful in attempting to understand James' construction of The Turn of the Screw.
From what I can glean, there are four levels of awareness in the book: the Governess's, Douglas's, the unnamed "I" narrator's of the prologue, and the reader's. The governess is the one to whom the experience of the "ghosts" happens; she tells/writes of her experience to Douglas, Douglas tells/recites the governess's story to his audience (one of whose members is the unnamed "I" narrator); "I" tells the story to us ("from an exact transcript of my own made much later," he says (4) ). What we are getting, then, is a retelling of a retelling of a retelling of an experience (or series of experiences). If we plotted out the points along which the story travels, from the point of departure to the destination, it might look something like this:
Governess ---> Douglas ---> Narrator ("I") ---> Audience (us, the readers)
We are NOT there with the governess as the events of the story unfold. We are three factors removed, as it were, from the "real" source of the story.
If we were to put this into "Carter-ian" terms, the Governess represents an experience (the experience of a red traffic light in her example), Douglas represents the consciousness of that experience, "I" represents the awareness of the consciousness of that experience, and we, the readers, represent the fourth-level knowledge of the awareness of the consciousness of that experience (Right? Or have I completely *f-ed* this up?) So then, we have:
Governess = Experience
Douglas = Consciousness of Experience
Narrator = Awareness of Consciousness of Experience
Us = Knowledge of Awareness of Consciousness of Experience
This is exceptionally difficult to hold in one's head during a reading. I certainly couldn't do it, not for every sentence. It's something I had to remind myself of during breaks between chapters. But that's partially the point. By removing us so far from the source of the narrative, by inserting these layers between us and the governess, James is intentionally obfuscating the very "facts" upon which the story is built. There's always that moment when we as readers have to ask, "Wait a minute, how are we getting this information again?" And then we think about it, and we kind of get it, but we're not completely sure, and then we start reading again and we get so caught up in unpacking James' sentences that we forget all about the question of narrative authority. Ambiguity, like the insulation of a house, has been built into the overall structure of the story itself.
So what would Carter say? "One way of looking at the accretion of layered awareness," she writes, "is that it builds an ever more complex and meaningful illusion from a reality that is at base mindless. But another way is to regard it as a screen that occludes a richer reality - and that every extra layer makes our view more obscure" (43). The governess' reality, in this reading, is either "at base mindless," and these layers give us the illusion of reality, or it is a "richer reality," from which the layers of narration forever separate us.
Comments (2)
I realize I misinformed you about the narrative structure; I apologize. I tend to read things fast in brief sections in class.
I like the parallel between meta-cognition and the frame narrative. I think this is a good way of reading the story; it really makes you wonder if the events really happened as they did (if they are really a complex, decorated illusion of reality taken from a meaningless set of situations (true reality)) or if these events tell something deeper, hidden by these layers of consciousness.
Posted by Rebecca | October 1, 2007 8:52 PM
Posted on October 1, 2007 20:52
I agree that the analogy between reading the frame narrative and Carter's discussion of meta-cognition is a smart idea-- and accurate. Also, Andrew, your writing here is beautiful, which makes it all the more convincing. The analysis is cogent and the language and structure really elegant.
Literary critic Peter Brooks discusses framed tales in interesting ways-- focusing on epistemology (where the truth is supposed to lie in tales with frames). If anybody's interested in pursuing this further, his book Reading for the Plot might be a useful source. There's been lots of recent research on meta-cognition recnetly, so it might be helpful to dig into some of that (perhaps starting with sources listed in Carter's bibliography).
Okay, now a question. If James puts the reader in an almost impossible position, a fourth remove from the "real of the story," or at meta-cognitive level four, how does he manage to keep us from losing track of it entirely. Is it that the story is written in such a way that we more often reside in levels 1 or 2 as we actually read, but that levels 3 and 4 are always there in the shadows, to be considered at moments where we pause and reflect, or "during breaks between chapters," as Andrew describes it?
Posted by Jason Tougaw | October 2, 2007 11:45 AM
Posted on October 2, 2007 11:45