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Memory for fictional events and the aesthetics of epiphany
Nigel Fabb
In this paper I explore one explanation for a characteristic but rare type of
aesthetic experience which is momentary and strongly felt. It comes on us
suddenly and can involve emotional arousal, sometimes manifested as tears or
chills, along with a distinctive epistemic feeling of knowing something
indescribable, or of knowing without fully understanding. It can be called
'epiphany' and is part of a family of experiences including the sublime, ecstasy,
awe and peak experience. I am currently mid-way through a three-year project
funded by the Leverhulme Foundation which seeks to explain how these
experiences are triggered, a question to which there are problably multiple
answers. In this paper, I draw on the tradition of examining the relation between
epiphany and memory (cf. Wordsworth, Joyce, Proust, etc.), and ask whether
epiphanies might sometimes be momentary criticalities produced by
complexities and difficulties in forming memories of fictional events.
A standard distinction in the psychology of memory, following Tulving
(1972, 1985) is between episodic memory and semantic memory. Our episodic
memory is memory for events that we experienced, associated with its context of
experience, or an 'autonoetic' sense of personal memory. Semantic memory is
our knowledge for facts, our general knowledge, separated from our personal
experience of acquiring the knowledge. Memories are constructions in the
present, not copies of what happened (Bartlett 1932), and there is no inherent
difference between a memory of something which actually happened, and
something which did not; or for that matter between a memory of a past event
and a 'future memory', an imagining of an event which may occur in the future
(Atance). Similar psychological mechanisms are involved in all cases. This
means that there is no inherent difference between a memory of a factual event
and a memory of a fictional event, an event which we remember because we
were told about it in a fiction. Heuristics (such as source monitoring, reality
monitoring, etc.) tell us whether we are remembering a factual or fictional event:
there is no 'fiction' tag on the event itself. Nevertheless, memories for fictional
events have some problematic characteristics. This has recently been discussed
by Rubin (who in his 1995 book added greatly to our understanding of memory
for oral literature), in an article with Umanath (2015). They argue that memory
for fictional events is not straightforwardly classified either as episodic memory
or semantic memory. The events were not personally experienced, but they are
nevertheless events similar in many ways to personally experienced events, and
yet they can also be part of cultural general knowledge, particularly for events
which are re-narrated many times in oral narratives.
This suggests that there is always some complexity in our memory for
fictional events. Some fictions increase this complexity by further emphasising
the 'semantic' component of the fictional event, for example by allusion and
intertextuality, and in the modes of allegory and myth. Here, a fictional event is
in part specific to this text, but is in part also another, more generally known
event (or set of related events) outside the text, which has become a known fact.
I suggest that these complications of fictional event memory can arouse
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distinctive emotional states (compare the subjective strangeness of another
memory complication, déjà vu). These distinctive emotional states can be
accompanied by epistemic uncertainties, and these may form the core of
epiphanies.
Selected references
Atance, Cristina M. and Daniela K. O'Neill 2001. Episodic future thinking. Trends
in Cognitive Sciences, 5(12), pp.533-539.
Bartlett, F. C. 1932. Remembering: a study in experimental and social psychology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rubin, David C. 1995. Memory in oral traditions. The cognitive psychology of epic,
ballads, and counting-out rhymes. New York: Oxford University Press
Rubin, David C. and Sharda Umanath 2015. Event Memory: A Theory of Memory
for Laboratory, Autobiographical, and Fictional Events. Psychological Review
122(1), pp.1-23
Tulving, E. 1972. Episodic and semantic memory. In E. Tulving and W.
Donaldson (eds) Organization of memory. New York: Academic Press. pp.381403.
Tulving, Endel 1985. Memory and Consciousness. Canadian
Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 26(1), pp.1-12.