Chapter 5 - Virtual Subjects

Summary

I cannot help vanishing and disappearing and dissolving. It is my foremost trait.

— Stephen Crane, Letter to Ripley Hitchcock, 1896

A psychologist cuts out a lobe of my brain … and then, when I find I cannot express myself, he says “you see, your faculty of language was localized in that lobe.” No doubt it was; and so, if he had filched my inkstand I should not have been able to continue my discussion until I had got another. Yea, the very thoughts would not come to me. So my faculty of discussion is equally localized in my inkstand.

— C. S. Peirce, 1905

Stephen Crane’s apology to his editor for a missed appointment and C. S. Peirce’s description of an important thesis of his philosophy might seem at first glance to have little in common. I juxtapose them to illustrate what I take to be a central preoccupation of American literature and American letters from 1876 to 1910: the virtual subject. Developing for philosophy a theological idea formulated by Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other American thinkers and writers before him, Peirce emphasizes that the mind is virtual. Thought is a capacity or a faculty, rather than an essence, because reasoning uses symbols, whose essential property is not their fidelity to an idea “in” the mind, but their capacity or potential to be interpreted “outside” the mind. Importantly, since symbols are composed of signs that have an exterior and material component to them, mind or spirit is virtually present both “in” the brain and “in” material things.¹ Crane claims virtuality paradoxically as a property of his identity. His “foremost trait,” that which is permanent and lasting in him, is evanescence and fleetingness. But in some sense, following Peirce, all writers – and readers – are virtual. The self or subject in the act of writing or reading a text is always “vanishing, disappearing, and dissolving,” as the outside – the words on the page, the lines of ink, and the movement of the pen – helps to create what is inside – new thoughts and ideas.