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Schultz, William Todd (2002). "The Prototypical Scene: A Method for Generating Psychobiographical Hypotheses." In D. McAdams, R. Josselson, and A. Lieblich, Up Close and Personal: Teaching and Learning Narrative Methods. APA Press: Washington, D.C.

William Todd Schultz, PhD

Department of Psychology

Pacific University

Forest Grove, OR 97116

In trying to understand lives, the medium is text. Taking the long view of a life history, persons are first and foremost what they tell us, their life story. Teaching students how to begin making effective sense of a person therefore requires two things: a system for identifying especially important word-based communications, and a posture for interpreting those communications. This chapter concerns, chiefly, the former. I want to propose a method for singling out key events in personal narratives which can be introduced early on in classes, and serve as an anchor for personological inquiry--something students need more than anything else, in my experience, if we want our efforts to be successful. More specifically, my question is this: from among the numberless scenes recounted by subjects, varying in context, time-frame, affective-tone, and emphasis, can we hope to isolate one--and only one--which, in its essentials, encapsulates an entire life history, or at least the core parameters of an individual life story?

This possibility first emerged during an undergraduate honors class I taught on autobiography, fiction, and self-invention. Both individually and in small groups, we looked in that class at the lives of writers Kathryn Harrison, Jack Kerouac, Franz Kafka, and Sylvia Plath. We poured over journal entries, memoirs, letters, diaries, poetry, secondary literature and autobiographical fiction. Students were fully loaded up with life data and charged with creatively crafting from it some sort of clarifying coherence. Repeatedly, and in a way almost impossible to ignore, a single scene from each life came to assume a kind of super-saliency. Over time we elected to call such scenes "prototypical": in their details we discovered the blueprint of a life (even though their authors did not usually present the scenes in such terms), and, nearly by accident, a method of life illumination. Attention then turned to the identification of similarly prototypical scenes in future instances. We wondered how one could reliably know a prototypical scene when one "sees" it, and if prototypical scenes might provide a promising focus, thereby serving as a guide to the development of psychobiographical hypotheses. In other words, we accorded the concept a central status in our class, and continued tinkering with it to the very end, feeling we had serendipitously stumbled upon an idea of great value.

In this chapter I want to share the fruits of our concerted labor--these being, primarily, a handful of prototypical scene indicators. But before doing so, an immediate reference case for the kind of scene the class isolated might be useful. On several different occasions the writer Truman Capote told a story about his childhood which seems, for various reasons, deserving of prototypical status. It happened when he was two years old, a fact calling into question the memory's authenticity. Perhaps the event was told to Capote, perhaps he recalled it somehow (if it happened when he was three or four, say, rather than two), or perhaps he even made it up--there is no way to say for sure. As Capote's friend, the writer John Knowles, describes it:

Just after I met him, Truman began telling me his life story. This terrible, tragic story. The central tragedy, as he saw it, in his life is a scene. Truman is two years old. He wakes up in an utterly strange room, empty. He yells, but he's locked in there. He's petrified, doesn't know where he is--which is in some dumpy hotel in the Deep South--and his parents have gone out to get drunk and dance. They have locked this tiny little boy in his room. That was his image of terror, and I think it was his way of symbolizing the insecurity of his youth--this image of that kind of abandonment (quoted in Plimpton, 1997, 26)

Capote recounts the same scene to interviewer Gerald Grobel: "It was a certain period in my life. I was only about two years old, but I was very aware of being locked in this hotel room. My mother was a very young girl. We were living in this hotel in New Orleans. She had no one to leave me with. She had no money and she had nothing to do with my father. She would leave me locked in this hotel room when she went out in the evening with her beaus and I would become hysterical because I couldn't get out of this room" (Grobel, 1985, 48).

This memory assumes a super-saliency because of its singularity, its quality of discreteness. As Knowles explains, the scene of abandonment is Capote's "central" tragedy. It is "nuclear"; it summarizes the life story. There is a need, moreover, to recollect it, to repeat it, as though it were especially explanatory. It also has the earmarks of developmental trauma. Capote recalls it with terror. He remembers becoming hysterical (as any two year old would, no doubt). And the scene underscores an obvious life-theme: abandonment fear and consequent efforts to defend against the fear. As Capote himself would later declare, "Because of my childhood, because I always had the sense of being abandoned, certain things have fantastic effects on me, beyond what someone else might feel. . . Every morning I wake up and in about two minutes I'm weeping. . . I'm so unhappy. I just have to come to terms with something. There is something wrong. I don't know what it is" (quoted in Clarke, 1988, 498).

The theme of abandonment showed up in Capote's fiction, too. His most famous short story, "Miriam," concerns a mysteriously motherless little girl who enters then promptly destroys the life of a 61 year-old widow, Mrs. H.T. Miller (Capote, 1969). As the story unfolds, Miriam makes the widow want her. The widow is pathetically powerless to say no. She ends up helpless, under Miriam's thumb, and quite possibly mad. Is Miriam-qua-Capote the motherless cast-off come home to exact revenge, to drive the capricious and crazy-making mother into abject insanity? It seems likely.

One other feature of Capote's memory, and of prototypical scenes in general, deserves notice: neither can be said to possess literal truth. Such scenes are part--or maybe more than part--invention. They get told and retold not only because they really happened, but because of what they represent--the life story writ-small, so to speak. In one condensed package, they symbolize the leitmotif of a life. Their truth is less important than their representativeness.

The Capote example already exposes a number of potential prototypical scene indicators. What I plan to do next is focus on these signals more explicitly, beginning with previous efforts to assemble similar systems of identification, particularly those of Alexander (1988; 1990) and Singer and Salovey (1993). I follow up the analysis of signals with detailed illustrations of the application of prototypical scenes to individual lives--writers Kathryn Harrison, Jack Kerouac, and Sylvia Plath--mostly in order to highlight the concept's usefulness.

As I envision it, the prototypical scene facilitates the teaching of narrative methods in several respects. My students (all undergraduates) tend to respond to a class like psychobiography in one of two ways: they are either thrilled by its interpretive nature and the creative demands it makes, or they are overwhelmed and/or confused by the richness and heterogeneity of the biographical record. They do not know where or how to start, or what is important or unimportant within a life's raw data. First defining then helping students track down scenes that may be prototypical, in the process setting other life-episodes aside, increases the signal-to-noise ratio; the scene can be focused on and worked with in relative isolation initially, giving students something specific to "grasp" and examine. It suggests possible meanings that then give rise to hypotheses worth testing out on life materials. In the best of cases, the prototypical scene becomes a kind of road map. With its lessons in mind, students stand a better chance of making effective sense of a life.

On two or three occasions students have expressed some irritation at what they perceive to be psychobiography's looseness of method and the puzzling multiplicity of interpretations offered for particular life events (for instance, why van Gogh cut off his ear, or factors leading to Picasso's invention of Cubism or Pollock's turn to drip painting). At least in part, the prototypical scene responds to such concerns. As I show later, it provides a method, a set of criteria. It also narrows the field of meaning by training attention on discrete events. If standards can be introduced for the identification of prototypical scenes, and if such scenes can be carefully thought-through, then worries about an apparent lack of method and the correlated sense of lostness in the midst of life materials ought to reduce significantly. Prototypical scenes provide focus and suggest paths to pursue. Their effect should be calming.

One last point is also worth considering. Steeped as most students are in the postmodern tradition, they occasionally try advancing the argument that all interpretations of a life are equal, in effect embracing an ideology of undecidability. We can't really know anything for sure, they say, so what is the point of trying? What can be gained? My view is that this attitude needs to be resisted. Some interpretations are better than others, and some meanings more pronounced, more cogent (Runyan's 1982 paper on van Gogh makes this point effectively). Because, in an ideal sense, prototypical scenes possess such unique significance and lead to particularly effective understandings of lives, they reinstate the real possibility of knowing. They repay our efforts. Students can be made to see that, and when they do, they feel empowered and hopeful, rather than daunted.

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" (Alexander, 1988; 1990). 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 (additional examples of each identifier have been provided by both Elms, 1994, and of course by Alexander, 1988, 1990).

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 (Alexander, 1988; 1990). 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; see Elms, 1994).

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.

Before outlining the core criteria of prototypical scenes which, again, do not always overlap Alexander's saliency pointers, Singer and Salovey's (1993) concept of self-defining memory--a close cousin of the prototypical scene--also warrants consideration. Self-defining memories, of which there may be various subtypes, are just that--self-defining. They are "very familiar, clear, and important memories that [have] been recalled and thought about many times" (Moffitt and Singer, 1994, 26). They also facilitate self-understanding, and "might be the type of memory told to a friend to convey important information powerfully" (26). Self-defining memories evoke strong feelings too, either positive, negative, or a combination of both.

In their book The Remembered Self, Singer and Salovey (1993) draw on extra-psychological sources--poetry, novels, autobiography, and biography--to delineate various specific features indicative of memories rising to self-defining status. These include: affective intensity (memories that often seize one suddenly and with passionate feeling), vividness (memories that appear in consciousness with the perspicuity of an actual experience, creating the illusion of being in another place and reality), repetition (memories that are omnipresent and therefore readily accessible), and likelihood of linkage (the tendency for some memories to "magnify" themes or affects). Finally, self-defining memories either preserve enduring concerns OR organize themselves around unresolved conflicts.

Now to the matter of conceptual comparison. As I see it, all self-defining memories are salient or "vivid"; they stand out. The same can be said of prototypical scenes. On the other hand, salient psychological episodes are not always self-defining, nor are they necessarily prototypical. They are uniquely important--that much is axiomatic--but not so important as to become constellating. In similar fashion, self-defining memories, though closer in form and function to prototypical scenes than any given salient psychological episode, still are not always and inevitably prototypical. This is so chiefly because self-defining memories are a plurality--there may be many of them in any life, some positive, some negative, some suggesting change, some continuity--whereas, as I want to argue, prototypical scenes are by definition singular. Each life contains only one. If we just can find the prototypical scene, exhume it from beneath the scattered events, memories, and episodes in which it is embedded, and then interpret its meaning, we may learn more about a life than hitherto seemed possible.

So with that kind of holy grail-like odyssey in mind, I turn now to the indicators of prototypical scenes, each of which suggested itself after focused examination of the lives and work of a handful of writers, three of whom I discuss in much more detail later (namely, Harrison, Kerouac, and Plath).

First are cues that overlap those already mentioned by Singer and Salovey (1993) and Alexander (1988; 1990)--these are specificity, incongruity, and interpenetration. A striking richness of detail is often met with in prototypical scenes. They are not recalled generically, as concepts lacking content; they are recalled with precision, apparent certainty, and exactitude. Colors are common, props find specific representation, the subject knows who was present and who was not, and the setting--the location where the event took place--is foregrounded with confidence. In most cases dialogue also occurs. The actors are "quoted," and when the scene gets retold, their lines do not vary or else vary only slightly. On meeting Freud the young Gordon Allport reacted to Freud's initial reticence by sharing an anecdote about a dirt-phobic boy Allport had observed on the train ride over. Freud's unsurprising punch line is given by Allport numerous times--in print, on film, and on audiotape--but the words hardly change: "Was that little boy you?" or "And was that little boy you?" Likewise, the boy's description remains the same in each telling: he is "excessively clean and well-starched," as is his mother (see Elms, 1994, 72-73). These scenes have a certain frozen quality to them, like "pauses" in an ongoing movie. To the subject, they stand out--agates in a bag of rocks. And with each new rehearsal, the details are freshly implanted.

Salient psychological episodes stand in isolation from surrounding speech. In much the same way, prototypical scenes seem incongruous. They are interruptions in an otherwise smooth flow of text; they land, as it were, lumpily on the page. Kafka's pavlatche memory is a good example, and so is Kerouac's memory of being slapped by his brother Gerard (described later). Kerouac even places the recollection in parentheses, deliberately setting it off from events surrounding it. Alexander (1988; 1990) draws attention to the quality of "fit." When episodes lack "fit," we need to ask why, and to bracket such episodes for future close inspection. Freud was right: it is a mistake to regard anything in mental life as haphazard, trivial, or accidental. Incongruities are not simple afterthoughts.

Aside from their specificity and incongruity, prototypical scenes draw attention to themselves by virtue of their obvious repetition. They interpenetrate. Like with Sylvia Plath's memory of her first visit to her father's grave, one finds the same scene carefully described and considered in poetry, fiction, journals, diaries, letters, and so on. The scene intrudes. It comes unbidden. That fact partially accounts for its incongruity--prototypical scenes elbow their way into texts like slips of the tongue or fragments of recurrent dreams. They will not be denied representation. Their resulting ubiquity--not mere repetition, but psychologically important repetition--owes its tenacity to strong motive forces. These scenes have an emotionally-unfinished quality. Overdetermined and subtly allegorical, they evolve into especially potent signifiers successfully condensing an astonishing range of core (and probably unconscious) life history elements. To neuroticize prototypical scenes would be a bad idea. On the other hand, they do possess a degree of compulsivity. As with negative self-defining memories (Singer and Salovey, 1993), their pull on subjects may connote attempted mastery of the unconscious trends they so effectively bring together.

Along similar lines, prototypical scenes depict conflict. In every instance identified thus far, relational turbulence plays some part, and interestingly, the characters included are typically family (Capote's mother, Kafka's father, Kerouac's brother, Harrison's mother and father, Plath's mother and father). Because of its almost complete predictability, this fact must be more than accidental. Indeed, what could be more insistent or more summative of life patterns than a memory focused on primary relationships? The conflict, moreover, is sustained. One notices an absence of overcoming. In The Bell Jar, Plath follows the visit to her father's grave with her first very serious and intentionally lethal suicide attempt (then finally succeeds outside the fiction); with his last work, the unfinished Answered Prayers, Capote creates an alter-ego--P.B. Jones--still crippled by abandonment fear, and in the habit of abandoning before himself being abandoned (see Schultz, 2001); and as mentioned already, Kafka never escaped his father's grave shadow. As he writes in the aforementioned letter: "I was not, or, to put it most optimistically, was not yet, free. My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast. It was an intentionally long-drawn-out leave-taking. . . In my childhood it ruled my life as a premonition, later as a hope, and still later often as despair, and it dictated--it may be said, yet again in your shape--my few small decisions" (Kafka, 1976, 87). Family conflict not overcome points to a scene that is potentially prototypical.

So specificity, incongruity, interpenetration, and family conflict all serve as excellent cues. Next in line is developmental gravity. Prototypical scenes find in childhood or young adulthood their temporal setting. Again, this clearly jibes with a long tradition of considering childhood events particularly formative and psychologically influential well into maturity. Capote, Kafka, and Kerouac were all very small children in their prototypical memories; Plath, Harrison, and even Allport were in mid- to late-adolescence. In each instance, what Erikson called developmental crises or "decisive encounters" seem recognizable. Capote's centered on trust, on the question of whether caretakers could be counted on to be reliably supportive; Kafka was shamed in the face of his mild attempt at self-assertion; and Plath went to Otto's grave in pursuit of identity. The Bell Jar is one long identity crisis. Its female minor characters all represent stereotypically feminine role choices for girls growing up in the 1950s. Rather than being promiscuous, a virginal Southern farm girl, or a hat designer, Plath musters just enough courage to call herself a poet. The response--one she got in life, too, especially from her mother--was bewilderment.

The last major pointer is this: prototypical scenes creatively rehearse thrownness. By "thrownness" I do not mean what Heidegger had in mind when proposing the term, but rather the experience of being "thrown into" a situation or quandary requiring an accounting via self examination. They are violations of the status quo, disruptions of the normally taken-for-granted. Kafka was carried out onto the pavlatche, Capote was locked in a room, Kerouac (as shown later) was slapped by his brother, Harrison (also shown later) was taken to a gynecologist for de-flowering. In most cases a highly significant figure does something to the subject, something initially inscrutable and/or even cruel, and the subject is left to make what sense he or she can of the episode. Passive dissonance forms part of the picture--such scenes seem to be determined by the bizarre action of an other--yet freedom, as Kafka glimpsed, lies in the retelling. The narration of protypical scenes also is an undeniably creative act. The safest approach, as mentioned before, is to call them both truths and lies. The literal reality of the scene carries obvious weight, but so does the fictional component provided retrospectively by the subject. We can't know when these scenes first appeared in their authors' mental landscape. Most likely they took gradual shape until, at last, assuming their now frozen form born of infinite rehearsal. One can not altogether rule out the possibility that they did not happen at all, that they possess zero literal reality, but I find that option remote at best. Memory is a construction and can be fallible. Still, the fact that pseudomemories exist does not entitle us to regard all memories as fanciful. Capote says he was locked in a hotel room at age two. Remote memories like his are exceedingly rare (see Fivush, Pipe, Murachver, and Reese, 1997). If the event really happened when Capote was, say, four, then his creative retelling serves to heighten the trauma in psychologically-interesting ways. These scenes are early occurrences, but their construction--the shape they take--is an adult achievement. In that way they are simultaneously past and present, and probably predictive of future conflicts and life-themes, as well.

In summary, prototypical scenes are specific, incongruous interpenetrations of developmental gravity, marked by family conflict and a need to creatively rehearse thrownness. This set of pointers is core. Students can be reminded to stay watchful for them, and allow them to guide their navigations through the inevitably accreting mound of biographical fact. At the same time, I would not necessarily exclude from the list those cues found in the work of Singer and Salovey (1993) and Alexander (1988; 1990), in particular affective intensity and placement. Prototypical scenes can be affectively intense, and as we shall see, their placement in relation to surrounding episodes often reveals their deeper meaning.

With the above identifiers now in place, I want to show how they might be employed in examinations of individual instances. Once pinpointed, do prototypical scenes really illumine lives as uniquely as advertised?

Kathryn Harrison

Kathryn Harrison's visit to a gynecologist's office at age fifteen when, as she says, "my mother made me get my first diaphragm," represents an exemplary prototypical scene (Harrison, 1991, 179). First of all, the scene interpenetrates. Harrison includes it in her autobiographical novel Thicker Than Water and in her memoir about an affair with her own father, The Kiss. It also (a) possesses an abundance of specifics (e.g., dialogue, and colors of gray, blue, and green), (b) concerns a mother-daughter conflict (with father lurking sinisterly off-center), and (c) depicts an experience of being thrown into a situation through the bizarre action of an other. Placement--one of Alexander's pointers--also marks the scene off. In Thicker Than Water, the incident seems deliberately bookmarked by memories of sex. Harrison speaks of "being fucked" for the first time, and thinking of her mother, of the "whole brilliant unknown territory of sex traversed in somnambulence." She says she "drove men to violence so that perhaps they could awaken me" (178). Then the scene appears.

[My mother] drove us to the gynecologist's gray-walled office on the fifteenth floor of a skyscraper in West Los Angeles. Through the tinted windows and the summer smog, the city below looked cool and elusive, half-hidden under a blue shroud. Toward the ocean, where the pall lifted, I could see traffic crawling on the tiny distant freeway.

My mother was in the examining room when the doctor broke my hymen so he could fit me properly for the device. He used a series of graduated green plastic phalli. First a tiny, little boy-sized one, then larger and larger ones, until he withdrew one whose shaft had been discolored by a smear of blood. My mother leaned against the wall, watching. She stood just to the left of a poster that revealed the most intimate, cellular level of human communion, one triumphant sperm breaking through the egg's thin, eager wall.

I writhed on the table as the doctor swabbed my genitals with disinfectant. Then, after producing the correct size of diaphragm and instructing me on its insertion, the doctor left the room, taking my mother with him, so that I might climb painfully down from the table and try to put it in correctly by myself.

. . . It sprang out of my grasp, skidding along the floor, twice before I got it in. . . But I didn't use it. I thought of it as hers. She was the one who had wanted it (179-180).

Harrison follows this with more about her sexual history, recalling "all the boys who fucked me, some reaching for me with love on their faces, some with anger, one disgustedly." She says she continued to think of her mother every time and of "the constant message of my childhood. Do not make the mistakes your mother did. Do not get involved with the Wrong Boy" (180).

This one scene contains a wealth of compressed meaning. There is the culpability of the misguided mother. There is the doctor-father the mother leaves with (Harrison's father is also a doctor, but a PhD). There are the alien green, weirdly unnatural phalli and the large one bloodily withdrawn. Might these symbolize Harrison's later, also "unnatural" affair with her own father--the supremely "Wrong Boy"--likewise engineered by a mother who "drove" her to it? In a recounting of that affair in her memoir The Kiss, Harrison gives us the same scene, with placement again suggestive of importance. Thoughts of mother and sex precede the scene, and Harrison repeats--in exactly the same words--the message of her childhood, "Don't make the mistakes your mother made" (1998, 41). This time the doctor seems reluctant to use the green plastic penises--of a color that "exists nowhere in nature"--and asks the mother if that's what she wants. Yes, she says. Harrison reaches the inevitable conclusion: "This doctor deflowers me in front of my mother" (43). The very next scene has Harrison talking to her father on the phone in preparation for his visit, a visit culminating in a highly sexual kiss at the airport which commences the affair.

A few other details drawn from the memoir refer back to the gynecologist scene. First, Harrison expresses shock at discovering her father's uncircumcised penis, which she "can't help but find alien, unclean"--just like the alien-appearing green phalli. Second, she connects a later suicide attempt by overdose to the gynecologist visit, saying "I think I took [the pills] so that my body would die along with what else was murdered that day--girlhood, hope, any notion of being safe anywhere, with anyone" (186).

For Harrison, then, this scene embeds a life history of loss of innocence and descent into unnatural sex. It is an indictment of the mother, signalling an immensely conflicted relationship. It recurs in locations within a larger narrative which serve to increase its significance. Its developmental gravity is clear--the experience leaves Harrison with a sense of being unsafe anywhere, with anyone. And its emotional tone is one of anguished dyscontrol, with Harrison passively submitting to a "thrownness" precipitated by a well-meaning but disturbingly oblivious parent. Freud (1918) once said that a full understanding of any single life might allow for a full understanding of human mental life in general. A similar possibility applies to the prototypical scene. Understanding it may actually allow us to understand the "myth" which is its author.

Harrison's was the first prototypical scene identified in the class. As such, its emergence as a possibly generalizable notion met with considerable excitement. I asked the class (in small groups) to brainstorm criteria sets, and deliberately avoided imposing any of my own nascent ideas. They enjoyed the enterprise, articulating a set of roughly twelve markers (many resembling Alexander's saliency cues, which we had already discussed at length). We then trimmed the list down, settling on eight cues that seemed especially promising. These became a rough template we planned to apply to future cases (we eventually dropped a few more cues along the way). The class already had grasped the idea's usefulness; once we had agreed on the centrality of the gynecologist scene, they immediately--and spontaneously--noticed how it illuminated additional features of Harrison's life and writing (for instance, we spent some time examining contexts in which Harrison foregrounded the color green). They saw the scene, in other words, as a particularly valuable clue, and as an organizing structure with which to make connections.

Conceptual questions also arose. Students wondered whether the prototypical scene really was so singular. Why just one prototypical scene? Why not a handful? They asked, too, whether the scene might change over time. Could one prototypical scene gradually give way to another? Once constructed by its author, did the scene remain fixed, or was it relatively plastic or, at least, modifiable? All these questions--each fascinating in its own way--became "teachable moments." They led to a consideration of the nature of personality and the scriptedness of identity. Answers were not quickly forthcoming, but even so, the class seemed to recognize that this was an idea in progress, and rather than shutting the conversation down, that recognition generated added excitement. As I said before, they felt "on to something," and looked forward to working with the idea more as the class continued.

The name Jack Kerouac usually calls to mind blissed-out rucksack wanderers shouting frosty haikus from mountaintops or getting drunk in jazz-inflected San Francisco bars. Yet when one looks more closely into the writings--the novels and recently published sets of letters, and the intimate journal reproduction Some of the Dharma--it is hard to discount a far more dominant theme: grief. Kerouac pictured his life unfolding in the complex shadow of a saintly and probably highly idealized brother named Gerard, who died at age nine when Jack was four-years-old. Kerouac's Visions of Gerard densely explores Gerard's loss, and holds the key to Kerouac's entire "Duluoz Legend," the myth of Kerouac's life (see Schultz, 1996). As Kerouac says there, "For the first four years of my life, while he lived, I was not Ti Jean Duluoz, I was Gerard, the world was his face, the flower of his face. . . I would deliver no more obloquies and curse at my damned earth, but obsecrations only, could I resolve in me to keep his fixed-in memory face free from running off from me" (Kerouac, 1991, 1-2). All Kerouac's writing, in fact, served the aim of resuscitating Gerard--loving the image back into some kind of life--for as Kerouac also declares, "the whole reason why I ever wrote at all and drew breath to bite in vain with pen of ink, great gad with indefensible Usable pencil, because of Gerard, the idealism, Gerard the religious hero--'Write in honor of his death' (as one would say, write for the love of God)" (112). But Kerouac could not shake the idea that he somehow had betrayed Gerard by not dying himself, at one point writing in a long confessional letter to Neal Cassady, a probable brother substitute, "Judas is me, Jesus is Gerard. What have I gone and done, and what hath God wrought?" (Kerouac, 1995, 282).

In light of Gerard's importance to Kerouac, plus Kerouac's obvious ambivalence towards Gerard's hallowed image, one might expect to find a prototypical scene centering on just this conflicted relationship. The best candidate, in my view, revolves around a slap that calls to mind Judas's kiss, yet a slap delivered, not by Jack, but by Gerard. Here is how Kerouac tells it in Visions of Gerard:

"Always be careful not to hurt anyone," [Gerard advises Jack], "never get mad if you can help it--I gave you a slap in the face the other day but I didn't know it when I did it"--

(That'd been one of the last days when he felt good enough to get up and play with his erector set, a gray exciting morning for all-day work, gladly he'd at the breakfast crumb-swept newspapers of the table begun to raise his first important girder when I importunately rushed up tho gleefully to join in the watching but knocked the whole thing over scattering screws and bolts all over and upsetting the delicate traps, inadvertently and with that eternal perdurable mistakenness we all know, he slapped my face yelling "Decolle donc!" (Get away!) and must have instantly regretted it, no doubt that in a few minutes his remorse was greater than my disappointed regret--) (Kerouac, 1991, 104).

In a famous letter to Neal Cassady Kerouac repeats the same scene, this time with small but significant additions and alterations:

Just before he died he slapped me in the face. It is the last thing I remember before he died. It was a gray morning, my sister was going to school, breakfast was being removed from the table. Gerard sat at his erector set before the most magnificent structure of his brief career. . . But I had to come along and grab at his little arrangements, . . . disturbing him so suddenly that with understandable rage he impulsively tightened inside and his hand shot out and slapped me in the face. "Get away from here!" he cried. . . I don't know what happened from there. Bill Burroughs claims according to his amateur psychoanalysis of me in 1945 that I resented the slap in the face and wished Gerard would die, and he died a few days later (Kerouac, 1995, 259).

So the scene interpenetrates, thus lending it an unfinished, emotionally-tugging quality. It is specifically rendered. Among other details, the color gray recurs, as does the blurted reaction from Gerard, "Get away from here!" The scene possesses a striking incongruity owing chiefly to Kerouac's puzzling use of parentheses. And it depicts a state of thrownness, with Kerouac left to make sense of this final--and fraught--memory of his brother. One might also add that the memory is unique in the terms outlined by Alexander (1988; 1990). Kerouac makes a point of telling us that it is the last thing he recalls before Gerard dies.

In Visions of Gerard the scene is preceded by thoughts of death, explicit declarations like "death is the only decent subject, since it marks the end of illusion and delusion" and "the whole world has no reality, it's only imaginary, and what are we to do?---Nothing---nothing---nothing" (Kerouac, 1991, 103). Gerard's loss has become the engine behind Jack's art and his quest for meaning which led, eventually, to Buddhism and the mind-created nature of everything (in the book, Gerard is portrayed as a kind of Jesus/Buddha hybrid, as though Jack hopes to find in him a validating condensation of Catholicism and Zen). Notable is the weird use of parentheses referred to above. Do they suggest a textual denial, an emotional distancing? Perhaps Kerouac failed at the time to appreciate the episode's decisiveness, something he seems far more understanding of in the letter to Cassady.

The letter places Gerard's actual death just after the scene, with Jack eagerly exclaiming to his yet uninformed father, "Gerard is dead! Gerard is dead!" This heightens the slap's significance. It may really have been the last thing Jack recalls about his relationship with Gerard. That makes rehearsal of the scene even more necessary, since conflict requires resolution. Searching for some way to minimize his brother's culpability, Kerouac obliquely concludes: "If Gerard died it only meant he went to Canada, and God knows what else I knew about death and what I'm trying to hide this minute" (260). The last isolated comment--"what I'm trying to hide this minute"--elicits a "come again?" reaction (Elms, 1994). It tells us Burroughs was probably right. At some level Jack wished for Gerard's death, and when he got what he "wanted," he could not live with himself.

This particular scene's emergence as "prototypical" came about in a slightly different fashion. Here I instructed the class to watch for such scenes in Kerouac's life and ouvre. A single student seized on this one example, advancing an argument for its singularity. I saw the promise in the idea, and encouraged additional conversation. Other scenes also had been mentioned as candidates, but after mulling over the alternatives, and extending the slap scene's apparent meaning to related features of Kerouac's biography and his literary preoccupations--characters, themes, and motives--we came gradually to regard it as uniquely constellating; the class naturally reached agreement on it. I took this opportunity to point out the iterative nature of the psychobiographical process. We talked about how, once an idea begins to form, it then takes its cue from surrounding life history features; a goodness-of-fit is sought between the emerging hypothesis and the facts it hopes to make effective sense of. The facts lead to additional tinkering, and the additional tinkering slowly comes to better account for the facts. Flying in the face of pre-existing ideas about the nature of the scientific enterprise, this was a slightly new idea for many class members. Nonetheless, it served as a nice example of narrative method. We allowed our understanding to evolve in "real time," thereby modelling, almost inadvertently, how psychobiographers go about their research.

The poet Sylvia Plath lost her father, Otto, when she was barely eight years old. His death must have been particularly confusing because of the fact that it was avoidable. Out of fear of a cancer diagnosis, Otto Plath ignored a leg wound which eventually grew more and more disabling. A doctor finally diagnosed diabetes--yet the news came too late. Otto died from the disease. There was the sense, in addition, that he gave up the fight, that he crumbled, achieving a suicide by indirection (suicidologist Shneidman calls this "subintentioned death," 1996, 63). Like Kerouac did with Gerard, Plath claims responsibility for the loss. In her journals she writes: "I have lost a father and his love early; feel angry at [mother] because of this and feel she feels I killed him" (1983, 278). About her psychotherapy she says: "Facing dark and terrible things: those dreams of deformity and death [her father's gangrenous leg had been amputated before he died]. If I really think I killed and castrated my father may all my dreams of deformed and tortured people be my guilty visions of him or fears of punishment for me? And how to lay them? To stop them operating through the rest of my life?" (299).

Otto was Sylvia's unlaid ghost. She tells herself cryptically, "Must do justice to my father's grave" (300). Her prototypical scene represents an effort to do just that. In her journals, her poetry, and her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, Plath describes a visit to the cemetary where her father is buried. First is the journal account, registered on March 9, 1959--three years before Plath's suicide of February, 1962:

Went to my father's grave, a very depressing sight. Three graveyards separated by streets, all made within the last fifty years or so, ugly crude block stones, headstones together, as if the dead were sleeping head to head in a poorhouse. In the third yard. . . I found the flat stone, Otto E. Plath: 1885-1940, right beside the path, where it would be walked over. Felt cheated. My temptation to dig him up. To prove he existed and really was dead. How far gone would he be? No trees, no peace, his headstone jammed up against the body on the other side. Left shortly. It is good to have the place in mind. . . (1983, 298).

Eleven days later Plath records finishing her poem "Electra on Azalea Path," about her father's death, and "this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead/ Crowd foot to foot, head to head. . ." (1981, 116). She begins, "The day you died I went into the dirt,/ Into the lightless hibernaculum,/" and so underscores the twenty year "wintering" her father's loss occasioned, "as if you [Otto] had never existed, as if I came/ God-fathered into the world from my mother's belly" (116). The image, like Gerard's, refuses to rest: "I lay dreaming your epic, image by image./ Nobody died or withered on that stage./ Everything took place in a durable whiteness./ The day I woke, I woke up on Churchyard Hill./ I found your name, I found your bones and all/ Enlisted in a cramped necropolis,/ Your speckled stone askew by an iron fence" (116-117). Plath borrows "the stilts of an old tragedy," comparing Otto to Agamemnon--the latter murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, in retaliation for Agamemnon's sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia--but then avers, apparently finding the myth unsatisfactory: "The truth is, one late October [Plath was born October 27], at my birth-cry/ A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing;/ My mother dreamed you face down in the sea" (117).

The poem concludes with the sort of searing psychological imagery so characteristic of Plath: "I brought my love to bear, and then you died./ It was the gangrene ate you to the bone/ My mother said; you died like any man./ How shall I age into that state of mind?/ I am the ghost of an infamous suicide,/ My own blue razor rusting in my throat./ O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at/ Your gate, father--your hound-bitch, daughter, friend./ It was my love did us both to death" (117).

This poem "makes meaning" through creative rehearsal. If Plath is subdued in her journal account, here she is inflamed. Suicide is one obvious subtext. The "wintering" referred to in the wake of her father’s death was only "good for twenty years"–at twenty Plath made her first suicide attempt (described faithfully in The Bell Jar). When Plath writes "I am the ghost of an infamous suicide," she seems to be speaking of two "suicides" at once: her own failed attempt at twenty (which actually became a newspaper story) and her father’s subintentioned death by diabetes.

The poem also assigns blame. In this case, like many children do, Plath accepts responsibility–"it was my love did us both to death." Yet by including the myth she manages to blame her mother, as well. And the symbolism does not stop there. For if Plath is Electra, then she will help to kill her own mother. Here the poem’s title contains a concealed clue. It is hard to read "Azalea Path" and not think "Aurelia Plath" (Plath’s mother’s name). Electra is "on" Azalea Path/Aurelia Plath. The poem is "on" or "about" the mother, whom the author is "on" in the sense of "on top of" or "stamping on" (Plath would write other poems like "Medusa" in which she clearly "tramples" the mother image).

So by re-imagining the graveyard scene the poem recapitulates each central conflict of Plath’s short life: father loss, mother hate, murderous feelings, suicide, and self-blame/self-loathing. Prototypical scenes compress a host of life-history features. This one from Plath is absolutely exemplary.

As I said, the scene appears yet again in Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, placed between a half-hearted, passive suicide gesture and the sudden thought "I knew just how to go about it," followed immediately by Plath’s first genuine suicide attempt by overdose (of her mother’s medicines, fittingly enough). That is, directly after describing the visit to her father’s grave, Plath’s alter-ego Esther Greenwood tries to kill herself. This justifies our asking, What role does the father and the graveyard visit play in the suicide attempt? Why did Plath structure the episodes this way? Focusing in on the prototypical scene alerts us to possible subtexts.

As written in The Bell Jar the scene includes moments of insight not apparent from previous iterations. By this time, Plath may have made some headway in self-understanding. The passage begins with Esther/Sylvia searching for the graveyard but finding it difficult to locate. She imagines entering the Catholic church, and going to some Boston priest with suicide on her mind, asking, "O Father, help me" (135).

She recalls how her mother had not allowed her to attend Otto's funeral, and how his death had always seemed "unreal" to her: "I had a great yearning, lately, to pay my father back for all the years of neglect, and start tending his grave. I had always been my father's favorite, and it seemed fitting I should take on a mourning my mother had never bothered with" (135). Whether Plath noticed the irony of this first line I do not know, but when she speaks of paying her father back, it reads like "getting even with him," not "making up with him." Did she resent his abandonment through death? It seems likely.

At last she finds the gravestone, described almost exactly as it is in the poem: "Then I remembered that I had never cried for my father's death. My mother hadn't cried either. . . I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain" (136-137).

Whereas the mood of the poem is anger or angry confession, the mood in the novel is grief and mourning. There is a release, a sense of doing what she should have done before. Mourning will allow her to move on. But again, it isn't so simple, because what she moves on to, in the novel and in life, is suicide. As noted, the sentence quoted just above is followed by the recognition "I knew just how to go about it": she swallows her mother's pills directly after returning home. This contiguity finds a motive in Plath's most famous poem, "Daddy." She writes, in intentionally primitive rhyme: "I was ten when they buried you./ At twenty I tried to die/ And get back, back, back to you/ I thought even the bones would do/ But they pulled me out of the sack,/ And they stuck me together with glue./" (1981, 224). Killing herself to join her father serves at least two aims, both possibly unconscious: one, she is punished for "killing" her father in the first place, by "loving him to death," and two, she leaves her mother alone in her selfish grieflessness, preferring death with a dead father to life with a live mother, who in "Medusa" she calls an "eely tentacle," squeezing the breath from her (224).

Plath's prototypical scene contains nearly all the earmarks outlined previously--specificity, interpenetration, family conflict, developmental gravity, and thrownness in the sense that the death is something that happened to Plath too, something she must make sense of before consolidating her own identity. The scene even appears a little incongruous, beginning jarringly with a quote from Esther--"Which way is the graveyard?"--and ending with "I knew just how to go about it." The "it" is suicide, of course, but also something a little more nebulous. Plath moved forward by going back. As her final poems make clear, the thrill of dying or coming close to it allowed her to rise, like Lazarus. She needed to kill something in order to be free.

Plath's was the last life we looked at in our class. By this time, we had discussed the prototypical scene at length. Now broader questions began to emerge, and they became, in a fruitful way, more critical, more skeptical. These gave rise to some valuable discussions.

Some class members introduced the cross-cultural dimension. What about cultures that do not conceptualize identity in Western terms? Some cultures have a more relational model of self. Anthropological research shows that the concept of self does indeed vary cross-culturally. Could we expect to locate prototypical scenes cross-culturally? Is the idea universal?

Or, on a different note, since we are all to some degree multiple selves, with multiple roles in life, does each role or each identity require its own prototypical scene? Can one scene validly represent all these differing self-presentations?

Finally, students wondered about lives that seemed to include an abrupt re-formulation of self. In cases where subjects radically re-defined who they were, how could an earlier prototypical scene adequately capture this new identity? Wouldn't the new identity require a new prototypical scene? Likewise, for lives in progress, like those of the students in the class--lives that were unfinished and relatively undefined--at what point or, more chronologically, at what age is it possible to begin the process of evaluating candidate scenes in terms of their potential prototypicality?

All such questions identified ways in which the concept needed a certain amount of reconsideration. They nicely problematized the idea. I chose, in this case, not to seek any sort of premature foreclosure on earlier formulations, and certainly not to dismiss these insightful qualifications, but rather to re-affirm the initially provisional nature of novel observations, and the need to continue asking difficult questions as a means of moving the idea in a direction most useful. I reminded the class, yet again, that this was a concept in its early stages. Much work remained to be done. And they seemed appreciative of that acknowledgement, and maybe gained a renewed sense for how such ideas come into being and, only slowly and thoughtfully, reach a sort of finished form.

In classes centered on lives apprehended through text, what most students want more than anything else is a way to situate themselves within the endless proliferation of biographical fact. The idea of "interpretive free-play" usually leaves them unmoored and directionless. That can be a problem, because it encourages giving up, or else what I consider a kind of synonym for giving up--the sense of uninterpretability. Students need to understand the advantages of adopting a narrative approach; they need to experience its intrinsic value as a means of engaging stories, any life's basic data. The prototypical scene gives them something specific to work with. They might explore the scene individually or in small groups, teasing out its possible meanings. From there, meanings that have been generated can be compared, with significant agreements noted and applauded, and disagreements either struggled through in an attempt to reach consensus, or set aside for future consideration. With the prototypical scene in mind, students may then step back into the flow of life data--yet this time armed with expectations, leads, hunches and hypotheses. In the neverending iterative process, some inspirations pay off and some come up empty, just as it happens when other, more conventional methods are employed. This is the so-called hermeneutical circle: we work from part to whole, then back to part, allowing each to inform the other till we find a "goodness-of-fit" between our evolving understanding and the story of a life.

For reasons we ought to take seriously and not dismiss as mere naivete, students want from psychobiography some sort of conclusion, an answer, however tentative. I am always happy to see this. Their impulse is correct. If the life begins and ends in incoherence, if every single interpretation gets qualified into oblivion, we risk mutiny or, worse, surrender. My feeling is that the utilization of concepts like saliency cues, self-defining memories, and/or prototypical scenes steers students in the direction of finding cogent coherences. The facts converge on such saliencies, in effect demonstrating their power. What had been mere coincidence or accidental intertextuality now possesses undeniable meaning, and this meaning is an answer, an outcome students take pride in generating.

So in the end, identifying prototypical scenes serves a twin function: they confirm what we feel we already know about a life's myth--a very useful function, one might add--and they send us off in directions not previously taken. Is it asking too much of subjects to require, or expect to find in their work, one shining encapsulation of a life's parameters? Obviously, I don't think so. Or to put it differently, much will be gained and little lost by encouraging students to search out scenes that seem uniquely revealing. After all, narrative aims at self-mythology. In telling our story we hope to lend it coherence, generativity, and a kind of helpful simplicity of aim and purpose. In some ways the prototypical scene is the principle of parsimony in action. It draws webs of meaning together into one concise package, providing a handy touchpoint we can return to when a need arises to quickly remind ourselves who we are. Because they leave behind relatively thorough records of thought and communication, creative writers may be especially prone to producing prototypical scenes or to increasing the likelihood of their identification, but that fact alone does not make the concept artifactual. There is nothing to suggest that those less gifted do not feel the same need. At any rate, future research should resolve the question.

As concept and as method, the prototypical scene offers a promising orientation for life writers. By keeping its identifiers in mind and staying on the look-out for its often incongruous appearance in biographical material, we increase our chances of striking personological paydirt. Narrative always reveals itself, but before we can ask the right questions or develop the right interpretations, we need to single out those features worth pondering. Salient psychological moments, self-defining memories, and prototypical scenes start us on our way. They clear out a path and in so doing reveal a possible destination.

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