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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 philosopherpsychologists. 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 twentiethcentury literature can be seen as responses to this challenge.
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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.
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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.
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