The Limits of the Mind: Cognition and Narrative Form in the Modernist Novel By James Edward Harker A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor David Bates, Chair Professor Kent Puckett Professor Ann Banfield Professor Ramona Naddaff Spring 2010 The Limits of the Mind: Cognition and Narrative Form in the Modernist Novel by James Edward Harker Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric University of California, Berkeley Professor David Bates, Chair The modernist novel displays a recurrent interest in the limits of perceptual and cognitive faculties. Exploring this “cognitive thread” I reconsider terms for understanding literary modernism (difficulty, “unknowing,” inwardness, stream of consciousness) as well as terms fundamental to narratology (frame, character, focalization, discourse). Chapter One addresses the difficulty of tracking the thoughts of a large number of characters. This challenge is also at work in narratology’s communicative frame. Modernist narratives and the narratological frame for understanding them approach cognitive limitations in tracking multiple consciousnesses, resulting in a pragmatic “functionalizing”—a readerly practice of reducing characters and agents from sources of consciousness to discrete functions. Chapter Two addresses the functionalizing tendency of modernist experimentation in the single character. I reinterpret E.M. Forster’s distinction between “flat” and “round” characters as the basis of a computationalist theory of character rather than a mimetic theory. I show how this conception of character is at work in A Passage to India. By foregrounding artifice rather than mimesis, Forster gives a new dimension to modernist “unknowing,” the tendency for modernist narratives to dismantle the Bildungsroman structure of a subject coming to know itself. Chapter Three addresses the critical debate between “inwardness” and the external world in the works of Virginia Woolf. I argue that in Woolf’s essays and fiction, forms of misperception are an index of her understanding of the inherent connection between the inner life and the outer world by a fallible human body. The limits of the sensory apparatuses run parallel to the limits of what can be conveyed in narrative. Perceptual limitations form the basis of Woolf’s experimentation with focalization—the narratological term for the vantage from which a narrative is told. Chapter Four focuses on the minimum threshold of consciousness itself—moments of not thinking at all—in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes. The novel uses familiar stylistic strategies such as free indirect discourse but not in the service of the “inner voice” or the “stream of consciousness.” Instead, the novel focuses on the “core” element of consciousness—what Antonio Damasio explains as “a sense of self about one moment—now—and about one place.” Despite the focus on core consciousness, Lolly Willowes is nonetheless a novel of self-discovery in which Laura comes to understand herself to be a witch. In Warner’s version of epiphany, I show how insight comes not from a process of reasoning but from core consciousness—an emanation from the lowest limit of the mind. 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgments page ii Introduction iii Chapter One: Framing Modernism’s Difficulty 1 Chapter Two: “Am I a machine?” E.M. Forster, Functionalism and Character 15 Chapter Three: Misperceiving Virginia Woolf 37 Chapter Four: “The secret country of her mind”: Discourse and Consciousness in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes 52 Notes 67 Works Cited 70 i Acknowledgments I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee, David Bates (chair), Kent Puckett, Ann Banfield, and Ramona Naddaff, for their advice at all stages of the dissertation writing process and for their careful reading of, in many cases, multiple drafts. Dorothy Hale and Karen Feldman also provided welcome support. Discussions with Rachel Buurma, Jessica Davies, Colin Dingler, Amy Jamgochian, Stacey Moran, Julie Napolin, Kris Paulsen, and David Simon were the sources of numerous ideas and clarifications. I would also like to thank the Rhetoric Department for financial support through Block Grants and Wollenberg Grants during the writing phase. The Rhetoric Department, UC-Berkeley Graduate Division, and the Modern Language Association also provided funds so that I could present portions of the dissertation at several conferences. More personally, I’m immensely grateful for the longstanding support of my parents Dan and Sue Harker, my sisters Julie and Jessica, and Linda and Les Plack. Finally, I thank Paul Festa. ii Introduction British modernist novels created new narrative forms to depict consciousness. In this study, I seek to broaden our understandings of novelistic innovation and of literary renderings of consciousness by showing how cognitive limitations act as the fulcrum for the modernist novel. Novels at the peak of high modernism, the 1920s, exhibit a wide range of experiments in the representation and manipulation of cognitive and perceptual capacities—wider than common conceptions of modernism allow. I open by considering the ways in which modernist novels manipulate the reader’s limited ability to comprehend and track the thoughts of multiple characters or “agents” such as the narrator or author. Then, in readings of E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, I associate formal properties of narrative style with specific topics and theories in the cognitive sciences that give shape to the limits of cognition. I argue for a “cognitive” thread in novelistic experimentation in the era of high modernism: perceptual and cognitive processes and their limitations serve as the inspiration for stylistic and thematic innovation. A focus on consciousness and a desire for formal innovation are not specifically modernist interests. These are the constitutive features of the novel form in British literary history. Pointing out the former in his classic study The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt argues that the primary characteristic of the novel is “truth to individual experience” (13). The emergence of the genre reflects a move from a “unified world picture” to “a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places” (31). Earlier literary forms made use of character types and mythic plots, the generality of which reflected the universality of the human condition, and of moral and social conduct. British novels of the late eighteenth century, however, adopted what would later be called literary realism, which Watt defines as “a full and authentic report of human experience…under the obligation to satisfy its readers with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms” (32). The move from universals to particulars has its correlative in the philosophical realism of the same point in the late eighteenth century. Hugh Kenner, supporting the association, writes, “the philosophy which has stood behind all subsequent philosophies, and which makes the whole of intelligible reality depend on the mental processes of a solitary man, came into being at the same time as the curious literary form called the novel” (17). That philosophy is Cartesianism, the significant element of which is that the route to knowledge is through the individual’s apprehension of the world. For Descartes, one’s own experience, rather than abstract principles or tradition, forms the basis of philosophical reasoning and of the understanding of what is real. The novel’s attention to the particulars of an individual’s experience developed in tandem with the genre’s formal innovations. As an individual’s experience, Watt observes, is always “unique and therefore new,” so the novel put “unprecedented value on originality” (13). Early novels did not borrow traditional plots from mythic or scriptural courses, and characters took on specific psychological and social contours. Mikhail Bakhtin has a concurring understanding that “the novel is the only developing genre and therefore it reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of its unfolding” (7). Paul Ricoeur, following these claims, asks, “Is not the novel an antigenre genre…?” (154) While more recent critics such as Franco Moretti have cast suspicion on the notion that the genesis of the novel is iii always in innovation (Moretti observes that early novels in most parts of the world were actually imitations), he makes an “exception” for the Western European novel, and specifically the British case. (“Conjectures” 60-61) The emphases on individual experience and innovation make the British novel the “modern” literary genre. Its most distilled form, though, is the modernist novel of the early twentieth century. Of the particularized characterization that Watt sees in the novel, “The most obvious and extreme example…is the stream of consciousness novel” (22). For Ricoeur, the history of the novel can be understood in three stages of development: “the novel of action, of character, of thought” (13). The final stage is that of the modernist novel: the ultimate account of the individual experience is in the