Elizabeth A. Kensinger, ‘The Future Can Shape Memory for the Present’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 179-80.

It’s an everyday scenario. Imagine I show you a series of images – of, say, boats, and, oh, I don’t know, cacti. You’ll remember some of the boats and some of the cacti. But if I were to show you a second series after the first, in which each boat image is accompanied by a moderately unpleasant electric shock, here’s the thing: you’re likely to remember the boat images from the second list better, because of the shock association, and you are also likely to remember the boats from the first list better too. So that is what is meant by the ‘future’ shaping memory for the ‘present’, though those terms are difficult to use precisely, and always fleeting. Categories and significances can intervene in our memorial processes as if in retrospect; the reasons for remembering something well at the time can be filled in later.

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If a character coughs on page 74 we may have an inkling that it will become significant later; good writers and bad writers may all enable this. If a character dies of a terrible lung disorder on page 97 a bit of hindsight bias may lead us to claim that we saw the significance of the cough first time around, even if we didn’t. What Kensinger is suggesting, perhaps, is that sometimes it’s possible that we genuinely will remember things because of the significance they acquire later. For a while the cough is suspended, along with numerous other things, in a time-limited rememberable state, awaiting some future trigger to seal its fate. This is surely something that novelists work with; often there are layers of irony. In Martin Amis’s The Information, for example, I remember that he pauses in a knowingly laboured way on a quirk of one character’s speech, because it will become pivotal in the plot, toying with the reader’s perspicacity but also with a reader’s desire for a surprising turn.

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It makes me think of Shakespeare again, and of a scene I have written about more, perhaps, than any other: the coming-to-life of Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale, which may alternatively be seen as the discovery that she has never been dead, or a statue, at all. I have already written in this blog about surprise and spoilers in relation to this scene. The post is even called ‘Spoiler Alert‘; it’s about how we might understand the quality of audience surprise in the scene. One thing that could be added to the picture is the way in which this essay suggests our memories for details may be affected by later significance. If we decide that the whole thing is a big trick, then we may be all the more retrospectively alert to certain clues. In a providential drama like The Winter’s Tale, the outcome might be the thing that matters, and everything that precedes it is either rendered significant, or rendered invisible.
      It made me think of rhyme, too: how the first rhyme word is made into a rhyme, remembered as such, only when the second rhyme word appears. Perhaps the patterns of literary form, not just plots and events, exploit this future-retrospect in all sorts of interesting ways.