The Intelligent Unconscious in Modernist Literature and Science

Thalia Trigoni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367550905
• eBook ISBN: 9781000226713
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book reassesses the philosophical, psychological and, above all, the literary representations of the unconscious in the early twentieth century. This period is distinctive in the history of responses to the unconscious because it gave rise to a line of thought according to which the unconscious is an intelligent agent able to perform judgements and formulate its own thoughts. The roots of this theory stretch back to nineteenth-century British physiologists. Despite the production of a number of studies on modernist theories of the relation of the unconscious to conscious cognition, the degree to which the notion of the intelligent unconscious influenced modernist thinkers and writers remains understudied. This study seeks to look back at modernism from beyond the Freudian model. It is striking that although we tend not to explore the importance of this way of thinking about the unconscious and its relationship to consciousness during this period, modernist writers adopted it widely. The intelligent unconscious was particularly appealing to literary authors as it is intertwined with creativity and artistic novelty through its ability to move beyond discursive logic. The book concentrates primarily on the works of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, authors who engaged the notion of the intelligent unconscious, reworked it and offered it for the consumption of the general populace in varied ways and for different purposes, whether aesthetic, philosophical, societal or ideological.

Shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) First Book Prize and for the 2021 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize.

1 Introduction
The Intelligent Unconscious in the Modernist World

This book reassesses the philosophical, psychological and, above all, the literary representations of the unconscious in the early 20th century. This period is distinctive in the history of responses to the unconscious because it gave rise to a line of thought according to which the unconscious is an intelligent agent able to perform judgements and formulate its own thoughts. The roots of this theory stretch at least back to 19th-century British physiologists. Despite the production of a number of modern studies on modernist theories of the relation of the unconscious to conscious cognition, the degree to which the notion of the intelligent unconscious influenced modernist thinkers and writers remains understudied. The intelligent unconscious was particularly appealing to literary authors as it is intertwined with creativity and artistic novelty through its ability to move beyond discursive logic. In The Unconscious Mind, published in 1901, Alfred T. Schofield summarized some of the reasons behind the appeal of the intelligent unconscious:

The value of the unconscious not only to consciousness but to the man himself is enormous. It guides him aright when otherwise he would go wrong, it inspires him, it warns him, it furnishes him with names, facts, and scenes from the stores of memory. It is really not only the guiding power of the body; accomplishing tasks so intricate, that no conscious mind, even if it had the power, has the capacity for; but it also guides behind the scenes the direction of his thoughts, his tastes.¹

Modernist writers developed this strand of thought, and often present us with an understanding of the unconscious as an independent and intelligent entity that does not fit into the theoretical models we currently employ in order to unlock contemporary representations and articulations of unconscious processes. That said, this is no attempt to underestimate the pervasive influence of Freudian psychoanalysis in the modernist period but rather to bring to light another mode of understanding of the unconscious, which took different forms and names in the literature and the burgeoning sciences of psychology, neurology and physiology during what Alan Gauld has referred to as “the golden age of the subconscious, 1889–1914.”² William Carpenter (1813–1885), for example, was the originator of the notion “unconscious cerebration,” Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was a major theorist of “unconscious memory,” George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) theorized the distinction between “consciousness” and “consciousness of consciousness,” Alfred Binet (1857−1911) propounded the existence of an “unconscious reasoning,” Fredric William Henry Myers (1843–1901) was a major theorist of “subliminal consciousness,” Pierre Janet (1859–1947) was the originator of the term “secondary consciousness,” and Morton Prince (1854–1929) coined the concept “coconsciousness” and analysed the nature and processes of a “subconscious intelligence.”

Accordingly, this book has two overarching aims. First, to uncover a hitherto understudied theory of the unconscious and unknown lines of reception. Second, to explore how literary writers adapted this theory in order to achieve their respective aesthetic, philosophical and/or ideological purposes. To satisfy these two aims, the book includes a substantial focus on the theoretical/historical context of the period, while each chapter discusses first the place of the literary writer under discussion within the theoretical/philosophical context before engaging with their literary work.

The “intelligent unconscious” is used to denote a mechanism able to execute complex reasoning processes, often more effectively than deliberate thought, while operating outside conscious awareness. These processes are rational in aim and physiological in origin. The intelligent unconscious does not simply reproduce mental contents, it further processes them on a complex level and influences one’s conscious ideas and beliefs, and it even possesses the ability to perform independent decisions and actions. It therefore involves a similar mode of reasoning, complexity and rationality as the conscious mind. It only differs in terms of availability to conscious awareness. The term “intelligent unconscious,” used in the title of this book and throughout its main body, is taken from the essay “Unconscious Intelligence” published in 1914 by William James Sidis, the child prodigy and son of the psychiatrist Boris Sidis, who was named after his godfather William James. Like Sidis, I use the term to encompass the ensemble of the unconscious mind’s cognitive abilities which are indicative of the existence of a second consciousness or intelligence whose thinking powers not only resemble those of the personal consciousness but often exceed them. The use of an umbrella term, like “unconscious intelligence,” is instructive because as we will see in the pages that follow, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this concept came under an entire rubric of multiple terms, including “reflex thought,” “latent thought,” “subconscious,” “subliminal consciousness,” “coconscious,” “subwaking consciousness,” “latent consciousness,” “obscure perception,” “the hidden soul,” “reflex action of the brain,” “unconscious psychical activity,” “unconscious psychical processes” and “unconscious sensual and volitional processes.”

Freud’s topography of the unconscious partially overlaps with the psychology studied here. Freud’s theory of the unconscious is approached through the lens of modernist writers, such as Lawrence, Woolf and Eliot. Partial and incomplete as their views of Freud’s theory as they may be, it is instructive for our historical understanding to tap into the ways in which such literary authors understood Freud as well as into the ways in which they attempted to formulate alternative theories of the unconscious which they perceived to stand in opposition to the Freudian paradigm. As we will see in this book, these writers believed their theories to be more congenial with, for example, William James’s (1842–1910), Pierre Janet’s and F.W.H. Myers’s rather than Freud’s (1856–1939).

For Rilke, Freud was “to be sure, uncongenial and in places hair-raising.”³ For Pound “the Viennese sewage” had been going 40 years “and not produced ONE interesting work,”⁴ while for Joyce psychoanalysis was “neither more nor less than blackmail.”⁵ As late as in 1973, Joyce’s close friend, Maria Jolas, was asked at the Joyce Symposium in Dublin about Joyce’s attitude towards Freud and Jung. She responded that “it was a remarkable sign of his intelligence that he didn’t fall for psychoanalysis when it was so current. He started beyond it.”⁶ Joyce found an agreeable theory of human subjectivity in the work of Morton Prince, who formulated his theory as an alternative to the Freudian model. Prince’s famous case of Miss Christine Beauchamp “proved a fascinating resource for Joyce, and it is densely woven into the textual fabric of Finnegans Wake.”⁷ Wyndham Lewis had also rejected the “dogma of the Unconscious” and levelled several major critiques against psychoanalysis across The Art of Being Ruled, Time and Western Man and Paleface,⁸ while Thomas Mann characterized the relationship as an “official meeting between the two spheres” of literature and science, an “hour of formal encounter.”⁹ In a 1934 letter to Laurence Binyon, Ezra Pound wrote, “My use of ‘idiotic’ is loose […] Have always been interested in intelligence, escaped the germy epoch of Freud and am so bored with all lacks of intelletto that I haven’t used any discrimination when I have referred to ‘em.”¹⁰ Pound, Lawrence and Lewis made direct addresses to their readers in their work which often took on a particularly aggressive tenor when the reader was perceived to be psychoanalytically inclined. In Lawrence’s posthumously published novel Mr Noon, for example, the narrator admonishes:

you sniffing mongrel bitch of a reader, you can’t sniff out any specific why or any specific wherefore, with your carrion-smelling, psycho-analysing nose, because there is no why and wherefore. If fire meets water there’s sure to be a dust. That’s the why and the wherefore.¹¹

There are even various examples of modernist writers who refused analysis because they felt it could be damaging to their inspiration. Like Woolf, Rilke’s struggle with depression, exhaustion and hypersensitivity made him consider undergoing analysis, but he spontaneously reacted to the idea of “getting swept clean,” which would lead to a “disinfected soul.”¹² The view of psychoanalysis as damaging to creativity also led to another reaction in the form of caricatures of the psychoanalytic technique. Along with Lawrence’s and Huxley’s extensive parodies, Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain caricatured psychoanalysis through the character of Dr Krokowski. Similarly, Italo Svevo’s The Confessions of Zeno (1923)—a memoir—started as part of the psychoanalytic treatment to cure the protagonist’s addiction to smoking but the novel only takes shape as it escapes the control of Dr S. and his Oedipal interpretations.

In the summer of 1922, Mina Loy was introduced to Sigmund Freud by Scofield Thayer, poet and editor of The Dial, who was at that time in therapy with the father of psychoanalysis. As Loy and her daughter Joella were staying in Vienna for several weeks, she was able to meet with Freud on a few occasions.¹³ For Mina Loy, psychoanalysis was a typical product of the age of mechanical reproduction representing a mechanized form of mysticism, one trafficking in “readymade” absolutes.¹⁴ She was suspicious of the pseudo-religious role that analysts had assumed in American and European culture. In “Conversion,” Loy jokes that if Freud isn’t on the Church payroll already, he certainly ought to be.¹⁵ Rather than following closely the work of Freud, Loy and her friend, writer and patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, both immersed themselves in the work of Frederic Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Loy’s letters to Dodge suggest her sense of the limitations of the Freudian apparatus: “Freud who seems to have been a sort of wet nurse to sub-c[onscious] would not leave much room in it for evolving creative inspiration.” To Loy, the Freudian subconscious sounded like “a dumping ground for cast off impressions” and she endorsed instead Dodge’s new notion of a limitless, imaginative “superconsciousness.”¹⁶

While the ambivalence of numerous authors towards Freud has been acknowledged,¹⁷ there is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: The Intelligent Unconscious in the Modernist World
• 2 The Psychology of Unconscious Consciousness
• 3 D.H. Lawrence on the Intelligent Unconscious and the Allotropic State of Being
• 4 Virginia Woolf’s Stream of (Un)Consciousness: The Ontology of Unconscious Androgyny
• 5 Feeling Unconscious Thoughts in T.S. Eliot
• 6 Conclusion: From Modernism to 21st-century Cognitive Science
• Index