The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism

Judith Ryan

INTRODUCTION

In studies of Austrian literature, Hermann Bahrs phrase about the unsalvageable self has long been a catchword. Derived from Ernst Mach and cited in one of Bahrs most ingluential essays, it is generally linked with the crisis of language characteristic of turn-of-the-century Austria. the customary depiction of the crisis makes it seem like what we would call today an existential problem: yet Mach was no existentialist. Similarly, in studies of modern English and American fiction, William James is identified as the creator of the term stream of consciousness and thus as an important influence on writers whose techniques are in fact as different as those of Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Stream of consciousness techniques are sometimes held to be an excellent way of presenting psychological depths: yet James was no deth psychologist. Finally, work on writes such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf has made us familiar with those privileged moments in which experience is suddenly illuminated and which have come to be called by Joyces term for them, epiphanies. Yet this pervasive mystical streak, this obsession with inexplicable flashes of insight, scarcely seems to accord with the modern sciences that developed at the same time as modernist literature.! The answer to these puzzles can be traced back to the simultaneous emergence of modern psychology and modernist litarature. When we think of the relation between psychology and literature, most of us think of Freudian psychology or one of its more recent modifications, such as that of Jacques Lacan. But James and Mach are representatives of an earlier kind of psychology whose impact on twentieth-century writing was much greater than is generally realized. It is this earliest of modern psychologythe psychology of the 1870s and 1880s that this book attempst to rescue from its relative neglect. If Freud plays only a small role here, it is because so much more work has been done on the relation of Freudian and post-Freudian psychology to literature; the subsequent preeminence of Freud has tended to obscure the importance of pre-Freudian psychology for the beginnings of literary modernism.! The very fact of this psychologys unfamiliarity raises a number of problems for the present-day reader, however. To begin with, early psychology was much more closely affiliated with philosophy than it is today: the late nineteenth century

was the period when psychology began its struggle to emancipate itself as a discipline. Many of the early psychologists concerns, their discussion of the ontological and epistemological bases on which their work was grounded, appear to us today as essentially philosophical concerns. Indeed, a good deal of their thinking was indebted to the philosophical tradition: arguing against nineteenthy-century positivism they attempted to revive in newly modeified forms ideas that had been espoused in the eighteen century by Berkeley, Hume, and Locke.! For this reason, they throught of themselves as empiricists or, to use the term favored by the Austrian psychologists, critical empiricists. We generally think of an empiricist as someone whose ideas are based on experience, especially, though not necessarily, on scientific experiment. This definition is too broad, however, to reflect the debates about psychological methodology that were taking place in the late nineteenth century. We need to distinguish between experimental psychology, based on sicentific experiment: empirical psychology, as a particular group of theories that attempted to revive eighteenth-century british philosophy as a conceptual basis for psychology. Wilhelm Wundt was the initiator and perhaps the greatest representative of the experimental method in the nineteenth century; Franz Brentano, who opposed experiment and espoused introspection as the best way of arriving at psychological truths, was the firt great proponent of the empiricist method. William James and Ernst Mach, who will be central figures in this book, conducted some very important early psychological experiments, but their work also aimed to establish the philosophical underpinnings of psychology, and in this enterprise they were preeminently empiricists. What did it mean to be an empiricist in the late nineteenth century? Primarily, it meant that the only admissible evidence for the existence of something was that of our senses; the only reality was that of our consciousness. The empiricists attacked metaphysics as postulating a reality behind or beyond that of the senses. Similarly, they rejected the dualism of subject and object. For them, there was no separate object-world: everything that was, subsisted in consciousness itself.! Like empiricism, the word pragmatism may also pose problems for the modern reader. I use it here to refer, not to common practicality, but to a specific philosophy developed by William James in the early years of the twentieth century and shared, to some extent even avant la lettre, by his Austrian contemporary Ernst Mach. As we shall see, it was a way of bringing the new psychology and philosophy to bear in a positive, rather than a negative way, on the actions and decisions of living.

! Although there are documented examples of writers who studied the work of the nineteenth-century empiricists, the relation of empiricist thought to modern literature should not be regarded as a one-way influence, as if a certain stock of ideas were somehow being transferred from one vehicle to another. RAther, the wristers respond creatively to some of the questions posed by the philosopher-psychologists. The new conceptions of consciousness and subjectivity had implications that tempted writers to explore them in their own ways. If, as the empiricists claimed, the subject was purely evanescent, how could literature be written at all? Many of the mosst striking formal innovations of early twentieth-century literature can be seen as responses to this challenge.! Some writers, like Gertrude Stein, play with empiricist ideas; others, like the early Franz Kafka, parody them; others again, like Musil, extend them in new directions. But however these writers interact with empiricism, they turn it into something that is not simply philosophy in disguise. In response to the empiricists dissolution of familiar categories of thought, they invent new linguistic techniques and experiment with new literary structures. If there is no subject in the conventional sense, there can be no conventional language; similarly, if there is no self, there can be no traditional plot, no familiar character development. To look in the works of these writeres for attempts to delve into the psyches of their characters is to miss the point of this kind of literature entirely. More important to them was the presentation of consciousness and sensory perception. To be sure, these last are still important topics of psychology today; but problems of optics, for example, are rarely what comes to mind when we think of the relation between literature and psychology. For the early modernists, however, theses questions were crucial. If we know a table to be rectangular but see it as trapezoid, shouldnt literature really represent it the way we see it? This, in essence, was the position they took with respect to every aspect of literary creation. How to present a table without even allowing the notion of rectangularity to arise? Clearly, this would involve a radically new approach to language and form. ! To study these writers in a coherent fashion presents its own problems, however. Empiricist psychology is very much a product of the late nineteenthe century; it can hardly be understood divorced from its time. Nonetheless, precisely because it is not simply a question of philosophy being channeled into literature, not simply a question of a thinker influencing a writer, the literary responses to empiricism do not occur in lockstep with the development of empiricist psychology itself. The interaction is much more complex. In the decades around the turn of the century, empiricist ideas were very much in the air. Most of the writers I treat had at least some minimal contacdt with the new psychologists, and some were deeply

steeped in theri thought; but it was by no means necessary to have studied their work to know something of their ideas. Much turn-of-the-century discourse was markedly empiricist in flavor, and the popularity of lecturers such as Mach and James helped to spread the ideas among the educated public. Some writers began to participate in this discourse sooner, others surprisingly late. In any event, we should not think of turn-of-the-century literature as a continuing philosophy seminar. Rather, it was an attempt to engage with new modes of thought in specifically literary ways, to respond creatively to the challenge posed by the new psychologies, and to exploit their consequences by totally reshaping familiar structures. My chapter on Gertrude Stein comes closest to an influence study in the traditional sense; but it also shows the extraordinary alchemy by which her writing turns empiricism out of abstract philosophy and into language and form. Like Steins, the works of the other authors treated here are never mere containers for empiricist thought; they enact its often problematical movement through their own formal innovations.!