Prototypical Scenes as Keys to the Life Story (article)

In trying to approach a life psychobiographically, often the very first step in the process pertains to relevancy, but relevancy of a specific sort. That is, what in the sprawling and endlessly iterating data of a life—the life’s biographical record—must be singled out for especially careful consideration? After all, much of what we do is relatively trivial. Today I drank three cups of coffee. Does that reveal me? Probably not as much as a set of other things I said or did. So, the first puzzle a psychobiographer must solve is how to identify what Irving Alexander has called “primary indicators of psychological saliency,” those life-episodes that stand out from surrounding data.

Then, even within a set of salient episodes, one can isolate two or three perhaps, which become, so to speak, super-salient. In fact, the question sometimes arises: Can a single scene encapsulate the core parameters of an entire life-story? My feeling is that it can. In my most recent writing, I have come to regard such scenes as prototypical: they effectively condense the myth of a life.

Thus far I have identified what I think of as

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prototypical scenes in the lives of Franz Kafka, Jack Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, and Kathryn Harrison, all writers. As expressed in these literary lives, such scenes possess certain telltale features. They 1) interpenetrate, or recur in a variety of contexts; 2) are recalled with a great deal of specificity, often imbued with color, details related to setting, and snatches of verbatim dialogue; 3) possess developmental gravity in that they highlight crises specific to stages in the life-course; 4) are affectively intense—one does not construct a lukewarm prototypical scene, in other words; and, furthermore, 5) allow their author to creatively rehearse “thrownness.” They are, that is to say, artful responses to something done to their creator under the assumption that situations we get “thrown” into relatively passively require heightened efforts towards narrativity or story-making; we are drawn to adduce reasons for things that happen to us not of our own doing but through external agency.

The Southern writer Truman Capote represents an excellent reference-case for the prototypical scene concept. Repeatedly he described an incident—replete with detail—of being locked in a hotel room at age two by his mother, who went out on the town looking for men and social cache. This abandonment, he said, became a theme of his psychological life—he lived in a state of anticipatory anxiety lest friends or lovers might leave him. The image also embodies the kind of “thrownness” referred to above: something was done to the young Capote, something puzzling and initially inassimilable. He was moved, therefore, to narrate the event, both by talking about it to others—which he did on numerous occasions—and by incorporating it into his fictions. In Capote’s unfinished final work Answered Prayers, the main character, P.B. Jones, a Truman alter-ego in a number of different respects, suffers early abandonment, then speaks of his later tendency to abandon others pre-emptively whenever they begin to stop loving him. In Capote’s most famous short story “Miriam,” the focus is on a mysteriously motherless little girl—also resembling Capote—who enters, then promptly destroys, the life of a widow, Mrs. H.T. Miller. In no time at all the widow is under Miriam’s thumb, powerless to refuse her wishes; the crazy-making little girl reduces the widow to virtual psychosis. Is this Capote’s fantasized, table-turning revenge against a mother who failed adequately to love him? It seems likely. Via displacement, the widow gets the just desserts Capote may have wished—unconsciously—for his mom.

Did the scene in the hotel really happen as Capote described it? We can’t be certain. Research reveals that complex narrative memories from before age three-and-a-half are exceedingly rare. Did Capote simply make the memory up? Possibly, but from the standpoint of how the recollection functions in Capote’s psychological life, it may not even matter. Regardless of the scene’s veridicality, Capote still employed it as a means of self-understanding. It became the dominant picture of his childhood. He cast himself in the role of unloved child and then projected that image forward into his adult life. The hotel abandonment, fact or fiction—or part fact and part later embellishment—captures the core parameters of Capote’s life-myth. He played it out in life with friends and lovers, and he wrote it out in fiction.

Staying on the lookout for such scenes in the lives of psychobiographical subjects should serve several useful functions. Prototypical scenes reduce the signal-to-noise ratio; they encourage a discrete focus and allow for a kind of winnowing. They also help in the generation of psychobiographical hypotheses that can be tested out on subsequently emerging life data. The scene and the life stand in a reciprocal relationship: the scene anchors the life, and the life refers back to the scene. In some respects the strategy of isolating single scenes and regarding them as especially explanatory may be seen as excessively reductionistic. This is not the case. The scene is a top down construction, narrated from the vantage point of adulthood. It is continuously caressed, so to speak, retaining all the while a certain degree of flexibility. One keeps making it up—adding and/or subtracting—as needs be. It is a dynamic entity, responsive to current concerns and life conflicts.

A longer article on the prototypical scene concept will appear in 2002 in Volume 2 of Narrative Study of Lives (APA Press).

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