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The Vanishing Subject: Empirical Psychology and the Modern Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Judith Ryan
Judith Ryan*
Affiliation:
Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts
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Abstract

The interaction between literature and psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is an important factor in the transition from realism to modernism. Empirical psychology, as developed by William James and Ernst Mach, unmasked the traditional concept of “self” as a delusion, replacing it by a new emphasis on the intentionality of consciousness. Writers such as Henry James, Robert Musil, and Hermann Broch had direct contact with empirical psychology and experimented overtly with modes of rendering this new understanding of consciousness; others, like Alfred Doblin or Virginia Woolf, while less directly influenced by empiricism, nonetheless reflect in their novels a similar attempt to abolish the “self” as a discrete entity. In this respect they differ radically from other modern novelists (e.g., Joyce and Faulkner), and they also resolve quite differently the technical problem of presenting consciousness in fiction.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 95 , Issue 5 , October 1980 , pp. 857 - 869
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1980

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References

Notes

1 A provocative and controversial recent account of one aspect of the transition that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century—the shift from aestheticism to the avant-garde—has been put forward by Peter Burger in his Théorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974). The movement toward subjectivity receives a highly sophisticated sociological analysis from Theodor W. Adorno, whose starting point is the “administered world” and the concomitant alienation of the individual. Adorno argues that the reduction of narration to subjectivity ultimately leads to a sense of impotence that renders the individual so overwhelmed by the world from which he is alienated that he in effect liquidates himself (“Standort des Erzàhlers im zeitgenossischen Roman,” Noten zur Literatur [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1958], i, 71). This vanishing subject of Adorno's literary sociology is different from the epistemologically based phenomenon I deal with in this essay. Charles L. Glicksberg, in The Self in Modern Literature (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1963), attacks the problem from an existentialist angle and treats an entirely different corpus of literature, stemming from Kierkegaard and Sartre. Richard Brinkmann shows, in the conclusion of his Wirklichkeit und Illusion (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1957), how the relativizing of reality that had begun to take place in German realism through the recognition of the individual perspective gave way to a thoroughgoing subjectivism that in his view is characteristic of twentieth-century literature (see esp. p. 327).

2 James's first discussion of consciousness, which later became Chapter ix (“The Stream of Thought”) of his Principles of Psychology, was printed in essay form in 1884; see Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890), I, 224. Mach, Analyse der Empfindungen, 5th ed. (Jena: G. Fischer, 1906), is quoted in the text with my own translations.

3 Woolf, The Waves (1931; rpt. London: Hogarth, 1976), p. 204.

4 Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, 1925), p. 212. According to Altenberg, the emphasis was to be placed on “sehe” (see Wolfdietrich Rasch, Zur deutschen Literatur seit der Jahrhundertwende [Stuttgart: Metzler, 1967], p. 160), an emphasis that reflects the contemporary interest in perception; but the “ich” is nonetheless important as the central organ through which Altenberg's sketches of 1896 are filtered.

5 See the Introduction to Mach's Analyse der Empfindungen, esp. p. 9. Similar points are made by William James in his essay “Is Radical Empiricism Solipsistic?” (1905; rpt. in Essays in Radical Empiricism [London: Longmans Green, 1912], pp. 234–43).

6 Robert Humphrey, in Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1954), gives a pragmatic definition of the term that covers the entire spectrum of its common application. In his view, Dorothy Richardson, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner are part of a single pattern of development. Lawrence E. Bowling had earlier taken a different approach when he distinguished between “stream of consciousness” and “interior monologue,” in “What Is Stream of Consciousness Technique?” PMLA, 65 (1950), 333–45. An entirely new typology has recently been presented by Dorrit Cohn, in Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978). In her subtle and persuasive analysis, she describes Joyce an interior monologue as a distinctive variety of “quoted monologue.”

7 William James, Psychology (1892; rpt. Cleveland: Holt, 1948), p. 217.

8 Walter Besant and Henry James, The Art of Fiction (Boston: De Wolfe, Fiske, n.d.), p. 66.

9 For an analysis of this aspect, see Richard A. Hocks, Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1974), p. 80.

10 The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York: Scribners, 1934), pp. 145–46.

11 Ora Segal, The Lucid Reflector (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), p. 235.

12 Hocks sees James's pragmatism as the essential distinction (p. 67). See also John Henry Raleigh, “Henry James: The Poetics of Empiricism,” PMLA, 66 (1951), 107–23.

13 Walter Pater, Renaissance (1873; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1901), pp. 235, 239.

14 Bahr, Theoretische Schriften 1887–1904 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1968), pp. 33–102, 181–98.

15 I treat these two conflicts in “Die andere Psychologie: Ernst Mach und die Folgen,” in Osterreichische Literatur ges'tern und heute, ed. Wolfgang Paulsen (Bern: Francke, forthcoming).

16 “Die Unendlichkeit der Erscheinungen leidend zu genieβen und aus leidendem Genieβen heraus die Vision zu schaffen,” Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, Prosa, ii (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1951), p. 282.

17 Doblin, Aufsätze zur Literatur, ed. Walter Muschg (Freiburg i. Brsg.: Walter, 1963), p. 16.

18 I do so in the paper cited above (n. 15) and in “From Futurism to Dôblinism,” Monatshefte (forth-coming).

19 On this subject, see Peter Demetz, Formen des Realismus: Theodor Fontane (Munich: Hanser, 1964), esp. pp. 17–28.

20 On ambiguity in Henry James, see Shlomith Rimmon's provocative study The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977).

21 Adorno regards the reintroduction of a distancing narrator in the modern novel as the sign of an inevitable capitulation to “reality,” which asserts itself, over fiction, as the real object of social changes that fiction can only adumbrate (p. 72).

22 On this concept, see Leo Kreutzer, Erkenntnistheorie und Prophétie: Hermann Brochs Romantrilogie “Die Schlafwandler” (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1966).

23 Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1952), p. 246.

24 See Marilyn Fries, “The City as Metaphor for the Human Condition: Alfred Dublin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929),” Modern Fiction Studies, 28 (1978), 41–64.

25 Sallie Sears makes this point in greater detail in The Negative Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1963), p. 21.

26 Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt, 1976), pp. 70–72.

27 See Jean Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her Works (New York: Harcourt, 1976), pp. 33–34.

28 The designation “stream of consciousness” was used throughout this period (following May Sinclair's review of Richardson's Pointed Roofs) to refer to Richardson's technique, although Richardson herself disliked the term and condemned it roundly in her preface to Pilgrimage (ed. Walter Allen [London: Knopf, 1967], I, 11).

29 Caesar Blake, Dorothy Richardson (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960), p. 10.

30 James Naremore presents a highly differentiated discussion of a related point (the attenuation of Lily's consciousness and its mediation through Woolf's voice) in The World without a Self (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), p. 148.

31 Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, 1927).

32 For reasons explained by empirical theory, I do not agree with the view put forward by several critics (most recently by Dorrit Cohn in Transparent Minds) that the six voices of The Waves all emanate from a single character, Bernard. True, Bernard's final reflections provide the framework in which the relationships between the soliloquies are to be viewed; his insights are farther reaching than those of the other figures. But the other voices are less inventions to “articulate his memories” (Cohn, p. 265) than overlapping fields of consciousness from which his own voice is not “one and distinct.”

33 This essay was written with the assistance of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.