The Fictional Minds of Modernism

Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood

Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781501373701
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501359781
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Challenging the notion that modernism is marked by an "inward turn" – a configuration of the individual as distinct from the world – this collection delineates the relationship between the mind and material and social systems, rethinking our understanding of modernism's representation of cognitive and affective processes.

Through analysis of a variety of international novels, short stories, and films – all published roughly between 1890 and 1945 – the contributors to this collection demonstrate that the so-called "inward turn" of modernist narratives in fact reflects the necessary interaction between mind, self, and world that constitutes knowledge, and therefore precludes any radical split between these categories. The essays examine the cognitive value of modernist narrative, showing how the perception of objects and of other people is a relational activity that requires an awareness of the constant flux of reality. The Fictional Minds of Modernism explores how modernist narratives offer insights into the real, historical world not as a mere object of contemplation but as an object of knowledge, thus bridging the gap between classical narratology and modernist experimentation.

1

Introduction

Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso

In 1966, Roland Barthes famously opened one of his essays by declaring that “there are countless forms of narrative in the world,” forms that materialize in “a prodigious variety of genres, each of which branches out into a variety of media, as if all substances could be relied upon to accommodate man’s stories.”¹ As a statement about the importance of narrative for human life, Barthes’s words reflect a universal human need that has become increasingly clear in modern times. The centrality of narrative as a way to articulate and explain the meaning of the real world, from its most basic aspects to its most complex structures, is today the focus of studies of different kinds and from a variety of theoretical standpoints. The formalist approaches of the early twentieth century, such as structuralism or stylistics, have been gradually replaced by more comprehensive and integrative theories, notably cognitivism, which seek to provide descriptions and elucidations of the world-making abilities (in the broadest sense of the term) of the human mind. This is why terms such as “cognitive aesthetics” or “virtual narratives” have become common currency in studies of art and literary theory. The recent works of David Herman, Alan Palmer, Brian Richardson, Patrick Colm Hogan, and Lisa Zunshine, among many others, testify to this renewed interest.

A theory of such narrative forms is supposed to encompass and explain most, if not all, human attempts to communicate at a verbal level. And since communication is always preceded by a singular act of mind, whatever its purpose, studying narrative becomes essential for our understanding of the mind itself. Recollection, desire, judgment, manipulation . . ., all of them are structured and communicated according to narrative patterns, as are other more complex emotions and intentions. In this sense, there is a close connection between narrative and the expression of mind, the former being the natural vehicle of the latter both in the real world and in artistic, fictional compositions. This expression of a subject’s consciousness is what we have traditionally called the author’s “vision.” Its interpretation has always constituted the starting point—and, for some critics, the ultimate objective—of literary criticism, since it comprises the writer’s broadly political, religious, and philosophical ideas. The analysis of narrative reconstructs these ideas by revealing the way in which they are organized and expressed.

The mind is, therefore, the origin of narrative constructions as much as of everything else in the world of human inventions. From computers to philosophical treatises and short stories, the mind is the necessary starting point of any creation. All man-made objects derive from acts of the mind that seek to satisfy motivations of all sorts, from love to entertainment and from curiosity to bewilderment. And narratives are no less “artifacts” than any physical object. The motivations of the mind are obviously varied, perhaps even limitless, but most of them find their natural outlet in language, and this is particularly true of stories. This does not mean that objects and stories are equivalent. In fact, we can safely say, against popular belief, that a certain narrative organization precedes even the creation of any object, however big or small. The complex act of mind involved in the conception and design of an object of any kind often implies a previous narrative, however simple, of how that object in particular has to be constructed in order to be effective (even recipes and do-it-yourself instructions are written in narrative form). This means that rather than preceding thinking, narrative works simultaneously with it by organizing it and giving it its final expression. Otherwise, there would be no coherence.

Stories, as Jonathan Gottschall has recently argued, are an essential part of our comprehension of the world and the transmission of knowledge, to such an extent that our capacity to create them can be said to constitute one of our most primary instincts as human beings.² Stories seem to work very much like the physical objects we create, that is, by satisfying some specific necessity or lack. But although both of them fulfill this requisite, again there is no equivalence between them. The needs that a story can satisfy are mostly intellectual and affective rather than biological, and still all of them are a crucial part of human history. As Terence Cave has recently argued, literature (in all its complexity and variety) is central to human life because it provides readers with “affordances.” Affordances, a term Cave takes from the American psychologist James J. Gibson, are “the potential uses an object or feature of the environment offers to a living creature.”³ This object can be created by necessity or adapted from another, more primitive one, but its function is to make it easier to adapt to the ecosystem and to solve problems and overcome obstacles. From the cultural point of view, language is the first and most crucial of these affordances. Literature is what we may call a “second-degree affordance” in that it uses language to reflect on reality (and also on the potentials of language itself). In other words, literature is one of the virtually limitless scenarios that the ecosystem offers us to try out our beliefs, judgments, and, in general, ideas.

There is a common agreement among scholars of both linguistics and literature that the role of narrative in human life is that of bestowing order and meaning on the otherwise-random phenomena among which we live. Yana Popova, to use one recent example, claims that narrative “organizes particular events (mostly human motives and actions) through establishing a necessary connection or a causal link between them.”⁴ This causal relation has been the epistemological basis not only of fictionwriting but also of other humanistic disciplines such as history or philosophy. In the literary field, especially when it comes to the novel and the short story, this has been not just a desire but a compositional principle in itself. With notable exceptions, the quest for mimetic realism has been a constant aspiration for both literary writers and critics from Aristotle to the realist and naturalist literature of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The underlying assumption in the privileging of “realism” and “objectivity” in storytelling has to do with the pursuit for truth, a philosophical and moral criterion that often has little to do with fiction. As Jerome Bruner has argued, “Unlike constructions generated by logical and scientific procedures . . . narrative constructions can only achieve ‘verisimilitude.’ Narratives, then, are a version of reality whose acceptability is governed by convention and ‘narrative necessity’ rather than by empirical verification and logical requiredness.”⁵ But a certain degree of correspondence with reality remains the ideal of fiction writing as a product of the human mind.

For many decades now, narratology has studied not only the nature and structure of narrative—fictional or otherwise—but also its influence on our perception of reality, its relevance for other disciplines, and its place within the general human sciences. In so doing, it has attempted to systematize the many different ways in which storytelling accounts for how we organize our perceptions of reality. A linear, cause-effect relation has been the usual theoretical pattern to interpret how we make sense of real phenomena. Barring overtly self-conscious works—from classics such as Cervantes’s Don Quijote and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to contemporary works by Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, Robert Coover, or Julio Cortázar, among many others—the “realist” interpretation of narrative has been taken to be a natural epistemological condition of reading. In many literary theories, from structuralism to the new historicism, this has become an unquestioned a-priori principle.

Since our understanding often works by establishing causal relations among phenomena, we have applied the same principle to narrative; and since narrative is a central instrument for the comprehension of the outer world, we have assumed that a literary text must necessarily follow the same pattern; that is, it must be organized according to the same principles that govern our thinking about the real world. The classical idea of mimesis is the product of this assumption. But it is important to remember here that the origins of the relations in a fictional work are also mental, and therefore the study of narration must take into account the mind that produces a story. The study of narrative, or literature in general, cannot be divorced from authorial intention, historical situatedness, or cultural influences, but only the former can give us access into the creative undertaking that a narrative involves. In this sense, a story is first and foremost an encounter between minds, and it is so in two interrelated senses: on the one hand, it is articulated on the dialogic relation between the characters’ voices, which provides the most immediate information (or lack thereof) we need to interpret it; on the other, and this is equally fundamental, a story also records the primordial encounter between the author’s consciousness and what we may call “the consciousness of his world.” Popova has argued that narrative is a form of thinking that shapes “our understanding of other people and their actions.”⁶ Similarly, novelist David Lodge claims that literature, especially the novel, “creates fictional models of what it is like to be a human being, moving through space and time.”⁷ Therefore, to say that our mind has a natural ability for world-making implies that it has the capacity to imagine minds and voices other than the author’s and can keep a dialogue among them.

These and other definitions stress the role of narrative in creating lifelike worlds that help us evaluate our own. The fact that these worlds are fictional makes no substantial difference when it comes to their understanding, since they are nearly always modeled on real-life minds (science fiction and horror fiction are notable exceptions, even though their relation to the historical world is often present, although it remains implicit rather than explicit). The reader’s perception of the characters’ minds rests on his or her previous experience in the real world, an experience that appears in his or her mind as an ideal narrative against which the reader has to match other narratives. This is why the most recent approaches to the reading of narrative stress its enactive nature. According to the enactivist approach, texts acquire their full meaning when our patterns of consciousness attribution in the real world are transferred to the act of reading, the only difference between their respective contexts being that “[the character’s] originating experience . . . is created by readers in their interaction with the text.”⁸ This is what we may call a dialogic relation, one in which our experience of the world finds a natural (because analogous) correlate in a constructed fictional world. Reading, therefore, becomes a process of recognition, identification, and—in most cases—criticism by dissent.

To study narrative, therefore, is to explore the workings of the human mind from the stage of pure perception to the articulation of structures of knowledge, opinion, and judgment. And to study fictional narratives means to a large extent to find out to what extent those workings apply to the reality we know, whether past or present. The “ideology” of a text (in the broadest sense of the term) is always a reflection of the author’s mental structures. And here “reflection” does not mean a mimetic copy but a particular vision of it. This is why the term “realism” appears out of date, and it is more appropriate to regard narrative as a fundamental form of “critical realism,” that is, not as a way of providing factual representations but rather as a way of revealing what Patrick Colm Hogan has labeled “distortions.”⁹ These distortions constitute the actual substance of literary narrative, and not the mere re-presentation of the external world. As we will see later, modernist fiction took this predicament to an extreme.

Understood this way, the work of narrative is to both embody and provide cognitive knowledge. But this knowledge cannot be isolated as just a product of one author’s particular mind. Embedded in that mind are intuitions, ideas, emotions, and value judgments of different kinds. The mind is essentially a subjective construction, but it cannot be understood only from within. The historical and cultural context in which people move modifies constantly their perception of the “ecosystem” they inhabit. A person’s narrative, whether mental or written, is many times an account of the symbiosis between his or her mind and the world. David Herman has explained this exchange in the following terms: “Storytelling practices take their plac e within a wider array of cultural institutions, norms, and procedures, technological innovations, and embodied engagements with built as well as natural environments that provide crucial scaffolding for intelligent behavior.”¹⁰ While institutions shape the human mind, the human mind engenders narratives that provide a critical view of those institutions. This is one of the most complex kinds of “intelligent behavior” that Herman mentions, for it requires not only a mature and balanced vision of the world but also the mastery of language, the skill to appeal to the reader, a certain set of ideals, the ability to provoke thinking, and so on.

The ideological misrepresentations Hogan ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword: Cognitivism and Modernist Narrative Acts: Our Arrival
• 1 Introduction
• 2 On the Cognitive Value of Modernist Narratives
• 3 Metaphor and the Place of Mind in Three Modernist Novels
• 4 Narratives of the Mind: Henry James’s “The Private Life,” Locke’s Private Language, Wittgenstein’s Public Privacy, and the Emergence of a Modernist Language of Mental Life
• 5 Henry James and the Crypto-Psychological Novel: Remarks on the Mindfulness of The Awkward Age
• 6 The Mind, “a Room of One’s Own”: An Epiphanic Moment in Virginia Woolf
• 7 Complexities of Social Cognition in Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs
• 8 Atmospheric Changes: Proust, Mind-Reading, and Errancy
• 9 Weimar Cognitive Theory: Modernist Narrativity and the Metaphysics of Frame Stories (After Caligari and Kracauer)
• 10 Reading Minds in Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories
• Notes on Editor and Contributors
• Index
• Copyright