Understanding James, Understanding Modernism

David H. Evans, David H. Evans

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501302756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Psychologist, philosopher, teacher, writer-William James stood closer than any other thinker to the center of the confluence of intellectual and artistic forces that defined the culture of modernism. The outstanding feature of this volume lies in its intent to investigate James's influence on both American and International Modernism. It provides, on the one hand, a multifaceted introduction to students of history, philosophy, and culture, and on the other, a compendium of some of the most up-to-date thinking on this central figure. James's first book, Principles of Psychology (1890) immediately established James as the leading psychologist of his time, at a moment in history when psychology seemed to offer the promise of finding some definitive answers to eternal philosophical conundra. James's innovations would register a clear effect on much modernist art, most evidently in the stylistic prose experiments of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and their imitators. James's tentative skepticism concerning the concept of consciousness as such, and the post-Cartesian ego that was its foundation, also anticipates the questioning of the subject that would be the theme of much modern, and indeed postmodern thought. The contributors to this volume explore James's most essential texts as well as his influence on contemporary writers, artists, and thinkers. The final section is a glossary of James's key terms, with entries written by leading experts.

Part One

Conceptualizing James

1

The Character of Consciousness

Owen Flanagan and Heather Wallace

Literary flow

There are, to put matters somewhat simplistically, literary works that are behavioristic. The reader is invited to speculate about the inner lives of the characters, but the focus is on the public events and public places where the action occurs—where marital or heroic fates are sealed, where fortunes rise and fall, and where adventures of multifarious sorts happen. Other literary works invite depth psychological theorizing about unconscious sources that might explain why a character thinks or acts as he or she does. Modernist stream of consciousness literature does not simply invite the reader to go into the character’s mind if he or she wishes, or if it is deemed necessary to get the plot. Stream of consciousness literature depicts interiority, specifically the way consciousness unfolds in the person whose consciousness it is.

Consider the crescendoing final passage of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The book ends:

And Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.¹

Molly Bloom’s thoughts tumble by in a rush of prose. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway also achieves this quick-paced, chaotic effect: “In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”²

Joyce and Woolf portray features of the familiar stream of consciousness. It is sometimes simple, sometimes complex; sometimes polyphonous, often cacophonous; sometimes reflective, memorial, accompanied by a foreboding sense of being watched; other times, simply a flow of first-order experience, a mostly perceptual phenomenal flow. Images pile on images, while the grammar falls apart in fragmented or run-on sentences. In Joyce there is no punctuation at all, in Woolf a few semicolons. This makes things difficult for the reader who likes images right-sized, but it is perhaps more realistic, more representative of the way inner life is.

Just as we might connect psychological behaviorism and literary style, we can consider the relation of stream of consciousness narration and psychological theory. William James’s famous chapter “The Stream of Thought” from The Principles of Psychology (PP; 1890) is often cited in introductions to modernist literature.³ Here we provide a reading of James’s famous chapter. At the end we reconnect his analysis of the stream with its literary doppelganger.

The stream of consciousness

The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume work intended to provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of the state of the new science of the mind, which some date to 1879 and the work of pioneers like Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig. James reports, in the 1892 condensation of the book, that the new science consists mostly of “a string of raw facts; a little gossip and wrangle about opinions ... but not a single law”⁴ and that it drips—perhaps it always will—with philosophical assumptions.

James’s chapter on the stream is a masterpiece of phenomenology. In chapter VII, “The Methods and Snares of Psychology,” James says, “Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always.”⁵ “The Stream of Thought,” chapter VIII, opens: “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” (PP, 1.219).

James presents a phenomenology that is true to the way mental experience actually seems. He writes, “No one ever had a simple sensation by itself” (PP, 1.219). Experience does not appear as ideas built on simple components. Even in a flash, I do not see red and a roundish shape. I see a red apple. James was worried that the brass instrument psychologists assumed a view of mind where experience breaks down into and is built from component sensations. James notes that attention to components is a deliberate action: “What we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention pushed often to a very high degree” (PP, 1.219). Instead, ordinary experience appears to us as “a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations” (PP, 1.219). Phenomenology, for James, reveals five characteristics of the stream of consciousness:

1. Every state is part of a personal consciousness.

2. Consciousness is in constant change.

3. Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous.

4. Consciousness deals with objects independent of itself.

5. Consciousness is selective, attentive, and interested. (PP, 1.220)

James’s famous master metaphor is the stream. A metaphor cannot confirm itself, and it inevitably has features that limit it. Yet the metaphor, ‘a stream of thought,’ stands up to quite a bit of extension. A stream is not merely its waters or its banks; both, as well as the flora and fauna in and around the stream, constitute it. The metaphor of the stream helps shift our focus from the way the stream looks from a certain perspective on the shore (although it allows that—it is after all only a metaphor). It directs our awareness to the water itself, its texture, contour, froth, foam, shallows and depths, and its inner shores, to what and how it is contained.

Streams might be slow and calm, filled with eddies and ripples, or tumble over waterfalls. This variability is one of the key strengths of the metaphor. In his chapter on the stream he repeatedly refers to the individuality of each unique flow, but overall James focuses on identifying the universal features of all streams. The universal phenomenal stream is the shared experiential scaffold inside which what it is like to be a particular individual or type of individual—first-generation immigrant or transgender teenager or cognitive scientist—appears. Our streams of thought can differ in pace, volume, clarity, direction, and so on. But if we are conscious, we have a stream.

Mental states are irreducibly first personal

According to James, introspection is not merely a reflective pose. It involves directed attention as a participant observer to the way things seem for you. If you do this, you should notice that your consciousness appears to you in an intimate, personal way. James conjoins this observation with a non-phenomenological one. We do not have each other’s experiences in the same ways we have our own. He writes:

In this room—this lecture-room say—there are a multitude of thoughts, yours and mine, some of which cohere mutually, and some not ... no one of them is separate, but each belongs with certain others and none beside. My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your thought with your other thoughts. Whether anywhere in the room there be a mere thought, which is nobody’s thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have no experience of its like. The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I’s and you’s. (PP, 1.220–1)

James begins with the simple observation that all thoughts are owned by particular organisms. They do not hang about disembodied, and they are grouped by belonging to the same personal consciousness. James continues, “No thought ever comes into the direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law.” Another person cannot have my thoughts in the same first personal way I have them. Only I am hooked up to myself in the right way to directly experience my own mental states. The separation is not one of distance or time, or even of the content of the thought. We can both see and experience the same red apple in essentially the same way. But the experience is had separately by each of us. James notes that neither “similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thought together” (221). Rather the “barrier [is] of belonging to different personal minds” (221).

James describes our basic situation as individual minds among other minds. We each think only our own thoughts. For James, the barrier between thoughts describes our ordinary separateness. It is not a reason for skepticism or despair. The barrier is a condition of multiple minds existing; some thoughts belong to one and other thoughts to another in an “irreducible pluralism.”

Consciousness is in constant change

The second feature of the conscious stream is this: Within each personal consciousness, states are always changing. To make this point James appeals to both the way things seem to the individual and theoretical considerations. First, a moment’s attention reveals that consciousness is constantly in flux. James observes, “Now we are seeing, now hearing; now reasoning, now willing; now recollecting, now expecting; now loving, now hating; and in a hundred other ways we know our minds to be alternately engaged” (PP, 1.225). Any individual can confirm this by reflecting on his or her own conscious processes, noticing the succession of mental states, some more stable and some very transitory. He or she also might read some stream of consciousness writing and consider whether it strikes home. Joyce and Woolf’s examples move at a pace where the succession of thoughts is quite rapid. They leave behind complete sentences as units of meaning. Their words flit by just as our quicker, unarticulated thoughts might. Molly Bloom thinks, “shall I wear a red yes ... he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower ... yes I said yes I will Yes.” Her questions do not complete themselves as her thoughts move forward faster than the questions can be formed. Her refrain “yes” adds layers of emotional reaction to her thoughts.

James seems confident that his readers will agree consciousness is characterized by many changes of state. What readers may not recognize, he thinks, is that every state is a totally new one. Suppose we have a recurring dream image or a recurring desire for chocolate, or a recurring thought that 2+2 = 4. James does not accept people’s introspective judgments that a current state is the same as one they experienced in the past, at least not the exact same one. He discusses the greenness of grass. While one might think the greenness of the lawn that one sees is the same as the green that was observed a few minutes ago, one would be mistaken (PP, 1.223). Though James values introspection as a crucial psychological method, he overrides it in this case with considerations about the effects of context and daily life.⁶

James explains, “When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared. And the thought by which we cognize it is the thought of it-in-those relations, a thought suffered with the consciousness of all that dim context” (PP, 1.227). James’s notices the effects of context on the stream. With these observations, James captures the ordinary truth that we bring previously acquired experience as background to each new experience.

Literature is uniquely suited to provide evidence for James’s position. The same image used again in a narrative gets its force from the context in which it appears. Further repetitions transform the image. The new contexts update the impact. Joyce’s short example achieves this effect with its variations on mountain flower: “Flower of the mountain yes,” “rose in my hair,” “yes my mountain flower.” In the pages leading up to the end of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, she thinks of roses, flowers in nature, the effect of having a roomful of roses, how nature is refreshing. Her thoughts flow, “flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning.” The flower imagery returns, “he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life.” By the end of the paragraph, the image of Molly herself as a mountain flower has a particular impact following these other flower images. The penumbra of surrounding images gives “a mountain flower” connotations that are specific to its appearance here. The effect of repetition and transformation of images increases when they reappear over the course of an entire work instead of a few pages.

Though we judge recurring states to be the same, James argues that the states are constituted in part by their distinct contexts and so cannot be absolutely the same. He marshals general considerations about physiology to illustrate the point. He writes, “Every sensation corresponds to some cerebral action. For an identical state to recur it would have to occur the second time in an unmodified brain” (PP, 1.227). James tells us that this is a “physiological impossibility” (PP, 1.227). Small physiological changes occur in the brain over even very short intervals of time, and they rapidly accrue to add up to systematic change. In one way or another our systematic networks constitute thought and feeling, and the baseline states of the network affect how incoming signals are experienced. As systematic changes take place, present states vary, and new impressions (even if they could in some way be identical to previous impressions) enter and interact with the current states in different ways.

Literature and physiology show us that analysis of consciousness does not rest simply on how things seem on first pass. How things seem bears reflective scrutiny. Sometimes reflection will shift the seemings, so we will admit that indeed what first seemed like an identical perception of a red apple or green grass is at most similar in certain, but not all respects. At other times the seeming will not shift, but we will have powerful theoretical reason to judge that the experiences are not exactly the same.

Sensible continuity

The third feature of the stream, the one that makes it especially streamy, is that “within each personal consciousness thought feels continuous (PP, 1.231). This claim that thought feels continuous raises the question of whether consciousness is continuous. Many circumstances provide counterexamples to the objective continuity of consciousness, from anesthetics to fainting to sleep. James explains what is meant by continuity and how it persists despite all of the relevant objections.

James takes the subjective continuity of consciousness to mean two things: “That even where there is a time-gap the consciousness after it feels as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as another part of the same self” and “that the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt” (PP, 1.231). Both aspects of continuity of consciousn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Introduction Unstiffening All Our Theories:: William James and the Culture of Modernism
• Part One Conceptualizing James
• Part Two James and Modernist Culture
• Part Three Glossary
• Contributors
• Index
• Copyright Page