The following list of saliency cues--as well as supporting examples--has been taken from my chapter IN PRESS on the Prototypical Scene:

"The notion that it might be possible to systematically extract uniquely revealing fragments from life-writings began with Irving Alexander's work on "principal identifiers of salience." These immensely useful identifiers--which I include early on in all my narrative-based courses--comprise a "set of pointers" for homing in on psychologically important information. I present each in turn, with occasional examples of my own (here is the book in which these "pointers" are proposed).

Primacy. I suggest to students that what comes first sometimes tells us more than anything else, as in the tradition of attaching extra importance to earliest memories, first loves, first traumas, and so on, under the assumption that people do not start stories haphazardly. I often bring in texts and ask the class to speculate about their openings, then keep these speculations in mind as additional life material gets introduced. For instance, Nabokov begins his autobiography Speak, Memory with an account of a suspiciously hypothetical "chronophobe" (Nabokov himself?) unnerved by the image of a brand-new baby carriage glimpsed in home movies made a few weeks before his birth. It stands on the porch "with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin" (1966, 19). He goes on: "Over and over again my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life," the two black voids, fore and aft (20).

Interestingly, Nabokov's relationship to time is a central focus of Brian Boyd's (1990) mammoth biography. As Boyd sees it, "One of the central themes of Nabokov's work has always been that Time, if we could return to it endlessly, might disclose evidence of a richness and design obscured by the crowdedness of passing mortal time" (467). For Nabokov, art and the creative imagination make transcendence possible. By discovering the ultimate artfulness behind things--the particulars and patterns of the world, including fate--we merge with creative forces "beyond death" and form a "new relation to time," which Nabokov described as a "prison" (319). Along with personality and the closed circle of mortal knowledge, Boyd identifies time as the "third constraint upon consciousness" in Nabokov's metaphysics--a constraint which can be surmounted, however, for as Nabokov blithely declares: "I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another" (Nabokov, 1966, 139). Nabokov the practicing lepidopterist found his "highest enjoyment of timelessness" when standing among rare butterflies: "This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain" (139).

Here, then, is an example of how lingering over beginnings can suggest life themes and/or enduring concerns.

Uniqueness. Sometimes subjects preface statements by declaring their uniqueness or else speak in language that clearly departs from a usual mode of expression. Other times, material stands out because of its patent oddity. Fortunately, students seem to grasp this idea intuitively. For instance, Leonardo was not in the habit of telling stories about his childhood, so when he described a fantasy of a "vulture" visiting him in his cradle and thrusting its tail into his mouth, Freud took notice, making the fantasy a central feature of his psychobiography of the great painter (with disastrous results, in this case, because of a mistranslation--the bird was not a vulture, but a kite).

My class found a nice illustration of uniqueness in Kafka's painfully dense Letter to His Father. How he begins the anecdote is especially telling.

There is only one episode in the early years of which I have a direct memory. You [Kafka's father] may remember it, too. One night I kept on whimpering for water, not, I am certain, because I was thirsty, but probably partly to be annoying, partly to amuse myself. After several vigorous threats had failed to have any effect, you took me out of bed, carried me out onto the pavlatche, and left me there alone for a while in my nightshirt, outside the shut door. . . I dare say I was quite obedient afterwards at that period, but it did me inner harm. What was for me a matter of course, that senseless asking for water, and the extraordinary terror of being carried outside were two things that I, my nature being what it was, could never properly connect with each other. Even years afterwards I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night. . . (Kafka, 1976, 17).

Kafka earmarks the incident for us by highlighting its uniqueness. It is the only memory he retains from his early years. That being the case, we are justified in wondering why. In the next paragraph, he traces the "sense of nothingness" often dominating him to this action by his father, the ultimate authority. Since nothingness, absurdity, and the inscrutability of causality between events all combine to form a part of the definition of "Kafkaesque," Kafka's aside is anything but inconsequential. And when one recalls that much of Kafka's fiction takes as its subject the bewildering actions of authorities guided by incomprehensible laws, this memory of being carried out onto the pavlatche retrospectively predicts a major theme in Kafka's art. For these reasons and others, Kafka's memory strikes me as at least potentially prototypical. At minimum, it encapsulates a life theme. And though--for reasons I discuss later--saliency cues do not always succeed in identifying what I think of as prototypical scenes, this example shows that they sometimes might, under the right circumstances.

I would add one additional possibility to the saliency cue of uniqueness, this being that sometimes life events stand out for their unrepeatedness regardless of whether or not subjects draw attention to them in speech or writing. I am thinking of an event in the life of Picasso. At age 16 while in the isolated mountain village of Horta de Ebro, Picasso would have occasion to observe the macabre nocturnal autopsy of an old woman and her granddaughter, both killed by lightning. A cut was made with a saw from the top of the young girl's scalp down to her neck in order to expose the brain, in effect severing one half of the face from the other (Mailer, 1995, 24). Armed with such evidence, some have argued--most notably Picasso biographer Patrick O'Brian--that Picasso's split heads and double profiles, so plentiful in his mid- and later painting, can be traced to what Mailer calls the "pickled horror" of witnessing this crude dissection. Unique experiences call for unique responses, and Picasso's fractured faces certainly are unique--and uniquely horrifying.

Frequency. Another term for this "pointer" might be repetition, a textual element students should be told to watch for carefully. When subjects frequently retell the same story, sometimes in almost identical language, that act marks the episode as peculiarly unfinished and psychologically compelling. In Freudian terms, we repeat what we have not mastered. Repetition therefore denotes unresolved conflict. And unresolved conflict is always of paramount importance to personologists. Because he told it time and again, Capote's memory of being locked in a hotel room is a good example of repetition. So is Alan Elms' excellent account of Allport's fateful meeting with Freud, an event of such "pungent significance" that Allport would go on to invent a theory refuting the entire Freudian system, especially Freud's notion of the infantile motives for adult behavior (see Elms, 1994).

Negation. If one can entertain the likelihood of a truth by eliminating its negative component, then what we conspicuously disavow might suggest psychological significance (Alexander, 1988; 1990). "When the subject tells you who she or he isn't," as Elms explains, "you should pay at least as much attention" as when a subject tells you who he or she is (Elms, 1994, 246). In his prison letter to Lord Alfred Douglas--the man who, according to most interpreters, precipitated Oscar Wilde's descent into ruin--Wilde repeatedly assures Douglas that he does not blame him (Wilde, 1996). Many regard this particular disavowal as the confirmation of its opposite: blame.

Emphasis. This cue includes "obvious forms of accent or underlining in oral or written communication" (Alexander, 1990, 17). Alexander names three types: overemphasis (attention focused on something typically considered commonplace); underemphasis (little attention paid to something important); and misplaced emphasis (when means-ends sequences stretch the limits of credulity).

Omission, another of Alexander's saliency cues, is emphasis' antithesis. Elms (1994) calls omission the "Sherlock Holmes rule." Sometimes we should ask more questions when a dog doesn't bark than when it does. An example might be a subject's failure to identify a particular family member in an autobiographical essay including detailed interactions with all other members of the family unit. Another possibility is the omission of an expected affective response (this according to certain culturally established norms of behavior). In his autobiography Boy Roald Dahl describes his father's death with such neutrality and relative under-elaboration that one can't help but wonder what he may be holding back.

Error, incompletion, and isolation conclude the list of potential saliency cues. I combine them here because they possess a kind of family resemblance. Errors include all forms of "mischievement"--verbal slips, distortions, miscommunications, and ostensible accidents. Such "bunglings" can reveal hidden motives or conflicts. Incompletion occurs when "an expository sequence begins, follows a course, but ends before closure is reached" (Alexander, 1990, 23). A topic is introduced then abruptly terminated without explanation. Isolation is called by Elms (1994) the "Come Again?" criterion (247). That is, if we find ourselves asking of autobiographical writings, "What is this all about?" or "What is she talking about here?," then we may be dealing with important material. In one sense, isolation is non-sequitor speech--the seemingly irrelevant association or aside. Here Kafka's letter provides yet another example. While talking about his shyness and its eventual manifestations, he parenthetically interjects the lines "Up to now I have intentionally passed over in silence relatively little in this letter, but now and later I shall have to keep silent about some things that are still too hard for me to confess--to you and to myself. . . It is not easy to find a middle way" (1976, 73). He then immediately returns to his prior line of thought. Obviously what Kafka keeps silent about is of tremendous importance. Isolations in material bespeak mysteries. They leave one happily puzzled and wanting to know much more."