Cultural Memory, Consciousness, and The Modernist Novel

By Robert McParland

Cultural Memory, Consciousness, and the Modernist Novel is a study of the novel and consciousness in James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. This volume focuses on novels of the 1920s and engages in a study of Joyce’s epiphany and language play, Yeats’s esoteric philosophy, Lawrence’s vitalism, and Woolf’s stream of consciousness techniques. In this book readers enter the minds of Joyce’s characters Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in the modern city, the esoteric quests of William Butler Yeats, the vitalism and explorations of D. H. Lawrence, the interiority of Virginia Woolf, and the artistic perspectives of the Bloomsbury Group.
Within the field of intellectual history, Robert McParland’s groundbreaking study places Joyce, Yeats, Lawrence, and Woolf within the cultural and historical context of the first half of the twentieth century. McParland takes a philosophical humanist approach to the innovative techniques and quests of literary modernism and draws from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as the inquiries of Arthur Schopenhauer and Henri Bergson. This work also follows from the work of intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes, the studies of James Joyce by Richard Ellmann and Helene Cixous, and David Lodge’s Consciousness in Fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Release date: Feb 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781680538854

Book preview

Preface

This book has been written primarily for general readers and for students who wish to inquire into the relationship between the modernist writers James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and consciousness and the notion of cultural memory. Each of these writers has left a remarkable record regarding the movement of their minds.

Literary modernism engages a concern with consciousness, perception, time, memory, and language. This concern is an important feature in the literary accomplishments of the modernist writers considered here. The first chapter provides a broad overview of the topics of consciousness, memory, and pivotal thinkers and themes and aims to contextualize this study. Chapters follow on James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. These chapters explore the ideas and creative insights of these writers and their literary expression. In this regard, literary criticism meets with cultural history, focusing primarily on a period of high modernism from about 1910 through the 1930s.

This study is, in some respects, similar to works by Michael Levenson, Stan Smith, and Sanford Schwartz as it leans toward intellectual history and poetics. As in the collection The Origins of English Modernism 1870-1914 (Academica, 2009) edited by Gregory F. Tague, this study includes an exploration of writers’ uses of mythology and impressionism. However, it also stretches into Joyce’s language play, Yeats’s occultism, Lawrence’s vitalism, and Woolf’s philosophical musings. The matter of cultural memory, which has been a growing concern among historians since the 1980s, is here focused primarily on the context of Ireland and Great Britain, from which the authors considered here emerge.

I am indebted to the biographers and critics who have examined the lives and writings of Joyce, Yeats, Lawrence, and Woolf. This book takes its keynote from studies by Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce, Daniel J. Schneider, The Consciousness of D.H. Lawrence, and Gregory F. Tague’s Character and Consciousness. This work has been written for readers with a lively interest in modernism. The discussions are an exploration presented as a guide for reading, reflection, and further study. The bibliography is intended as a resource for students of this subject. Readers are encouraged to consult the stories and poems of Joyce, Yeats, Lawrence, and Woolf.

Chapter One

Modern Consciousness and Cultural Memory

Consciousness

Consciousness is at the center of the mind-body problem. It remains as fascinating a puzzle now as it has been across the many years that humans have reflected upon their minds. Scientists explore the physical basis of consciousness, its neuronal correlates, its sensory inputs, and processing. Metaphysicians assert that mind is expansive and is something other than matter, brain chemistry, and phenomenal states within the brain. Consciousness is a mystery.

In The Consciousness of Joyce, Richard Ellmann defines consciousness as the movement of the mind both in recognizing its own shape and in maintaining that shape in the face of attack or change. William James held that one’s knowledge of things is an understanding of relations (Tague 34). Steven Rose points out that consciousness is a process that is essentially social, being constituted in the relationship between a person and his or her social and physical milieu (218). This appears central to the understandings of D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. They see human consciousness transformed in relationships. Maurice Merleau-Ponty affirmed that the world is not only what I think is out there but what I live through (Tague 19). Merleau-Ponty would say that consciousness is a combination of the sedimentation of personal history (character) and spontaneity, observes Gregory Tague (130). William Butler Yeats pointed back to a cultural archetypal consciousness. By looking at Yeats’s dreams of a Celtic renewal one might consider the intersections of cultural forms, cognition, and consciousness. Merleau-Ponty refers to this as a field of perfect fullness (Merleau-Ponty 323) in which consciousness is an energy of transcendence (Merleau-Ponty 376; Tague 168). He observes that sensation is inexhaustible (219). In 1991, Daniel Dennett wrote, Human consciousness is about the last surviving mystery (Consciousness Explained, 21). Consciousness is epistemic light, notes Paul M. Churchland. It is like light coming in different wavelength profiles and radiant intensities (209). Or, as Antonio Damasio writes, stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness (Feeling 3).

Literature can bring that epistemic light and create an aesthetic pleasure. Poetry and story can have an impact upon cognition and emotion. This registers in the autonomic nervous system and can be studied via brain imaging. A reader or listener responds to sound, rhythm, pattern, and imagery, and makes cognitive sense of language and the expression of ideas. Lisa Zunshine proposes that cognitive cravings are satisfied in literature (4). She turns to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, among several other works, to provide examples of mind-in-interaction with a literary text. One may explain human behavior through examining thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires, or our mind-reading of others’ expressions and actions (6).

Writers like Joyce, Lawrence, and Woolf were quite interested in the relationships between subjectivity and our experience of the objective world. William James, in 1890, observed what he called a chasm between the inner and outer worlds of life (I:146). About two-hundred and fifty years earlier, Rene Descartes emphasized that split. Descartes, in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), sought to base his philosophy firmly upon axioms that were beyond doubt. He determined that the conscious, thinking being was not material. There was the thinking self and the extended world of objects. Writers and philosophers were left to deal with this dualism. Merleau-Ponty, for example, turned to phenomenology to overcome the problem of how the mind interacts with the body. Phenomenologists following Edmund Husserl argued that one ought to go back to the things themselves. The perceiver bracketed out inferences about the rest of the world and focused on the object of perception, the thing-in-itself. The conscious experience is then about the object or event viewed through one’s intentionality.

James Joyce, like Merleau-Ponty, shows us the human-in-the-world. There is a phenomenology of perception, a structure of dynamic, lived behavior. Merleau-Ponty writes: The structure of behavior as it presents itself to perceptual experience is neither thing nor consciousness; and it is this which renders it opaque to the mind (28). Descartes’ cogito suggests that we would not know any thing unless we first knew our own thinking. However, Joyce, like Merleau-Ponty, shows us that human behavior is constituted in relations. Merleau-Ponty tells us: Situation and reaction are linked internally by their common participation in a structure in which the mode of activity proper to the organism is expressed. These are moments of a circular process (The Structure of Behavior 136). The forms of experience are lived as realities […] rather than known as objects (The Structure of Behavior 168). Human behavior includes symbolic forms. In Joyce’s Ulysses, the act of shaving becomes a ritual mass, an unfolding of signs. The human being in a milieu of clothing, chairs, tables, bottles of stout, or cultural forms like books, is consciousness in action. Joyce gives us momentary perceptions, a series of impressions. Merleau-Ponty points out that a human is not limited by his or her physical body but has a symbol-making capacity, a power of being able to observe a situation from various points of view.

Yet, the problem of consciousness persists. Three hundred years after Descartes, Gilbert Ryle, in Concept of Mind (1949) called Cartesian dualism the ghost in the machine. For Ryle, mind is a series of processes. Our talk of the mind as an entity is a category mistake, Ryle contended. The brain produces mind. The self is epiphenomenon of brain activity. To suggest soul is dualism. The neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran wrote that the barrier between mind and matter is only apparent and arises as a result of language (qtd. in North).

In his theory of consciousness, Daniel Dennett (1995) views the human mind as invested with ‘memes’ (341). He sees the human brain as capable of working like a serial machine. He refers to this as a Joycean machine, named after Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness method in his fiction. We think about one thing, then another and another. The mind, in this materialist approach, is an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes (365).¹ Even so, the comparison of the human brain to this Joycean machine itself makes use of metaphor. Philosophers like David Chalmers and Colin McGinn argue that qualia, or subjective experiences, call upon a different language system than that of naturalistic science. Joyce’s wordplay expresses the human engagement with metaphor and simile. Gregory Tague seeks to relate ontology of character […] and an epistemology of consciousness (12), to show consciousness is part of character (13). He draws upon examples from George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence. Here we will approach a similar concern with Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf.

The challenge that philosophers like Chalmers and McGinn consider is subjectivity and qualia. The word qualia itself suggests quality. That is, it points toward the unique way in which Leopold Bloom sniffs tea, or Stephen Dedalus feels the rain. It tells of a private experience. Qualia are related to the physical world. Dualists will ask if there is a separate mental world. Merleau-Ponty critiques the subject-object dichotomy. He also critiques empiricist prejudices. In the dynamic structure of life or form, he asserts, consciousness and nature-world are united. One may see and describe this phenomenologically. He writes: If one understands by perception the act which makes us know existences, all the problems which we have just touch on are reducible to the problem of perception (The Structure of Behavior 224). Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, in all his wandering thought, and Leopold Bloom, in all his bawdy earthiness have what Merleau-Ponty calls presence to the world (The Phenomenology of Perception 165). They have been tossed or inserted into this world of Dublin. Their bodily existence places them within this world-process. Words express their thoughts and feeling amid change, a world in flux.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, in his probing of the neuroanatomy of human feeling, states his view that consciousness is an evolved brain property, dependent on particular brain structures (The Feeling 16). However, as Stephen Rose points out, neuroscientists divide the field of consciousness studies with philosophers (Rose 165). Some philosophers, following Merleau-Ponty, have countered that a naturalist description of the mind presents only one side of the story. There is also the complexity of a novelist’s inner processes that is revealed in Joyce’s text. Molly Bloom’s soliloquy is an example of this. David Lodge, in Consciousness and the Novel (Secker and Warburg, 2002) confirms this with examples from Henry James and other writers, as well as from his own writing process. Lodge writes that literature is a record of human consciousness (10). The novel describes human beings moving through space and time (10). The experience of literature [engages] readers qualia through metaphor and simile (Lodge 13). Fiction in the human mind is expressed in qualia. In Joyce, each sensation gives specificity to the next. Ulysses unfolds with a sense of simultaneity the theme of modern journey. It flickers before us and within its readers with symbolism, flashback, dramatic dialogue, and stream of consciousness.

Cultural Memory

Cultural memory is a collective awareness of what a community or nation has experienced historically. Present concerns may affect our perceptions and understanding of the past. However, the past influences our present. The Time Passes section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse embodies not only the shock of the Great War but also the many past experiences we have encountered as readers reflecting upon the Ramsay family. Cultural memory and history of collective memory can be distinguished, as Pierre Nora has pointed out. Cultural memory is supported by representation in symbol, ritual, parades, written texts, or songs. Modernization, urbanization, industrialism made society complex. This called for textual, visual, and auditory explication in history, a version of the past, and popular reception. Cultural memory can be found and preserved in texts and intertextuality. One sees a relationship to tradition, as in T.S. Eliot’s many allusions. There are, from culture to culture, particular interpretations, in which consciousness, cognition, and memory are brought to bear.

A culture embodies its memories in archives. There are library repositories and many forms of information storage. A culture is recalled in recordings, photograph collections, film and tapes, memorial books, microfilm, inscriptions, public monuments, gravesite markers, buildings, obelisks, sculpture, and landscapes. There are re-enactments of battles, revivals of plays, paintings which present artistic images of the past. Memory is preserved in documentaries, novels, poems, and plays. Individuals record the social dynamics of memory in diaries, journals, letters, meeting minutes, baptismal and wedding records, and scrapbooks.

These objects represent and mediate memory. They are available to us and reflect how we interpret the world and the past. Andreas Huyssen emphasizes this in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (1991). Collective memory is enshrined in events that recognize continuity with the past, that there is in a community a sense of shared experience, traditions, and a sense of origins. Benedict Anderson (1983) has asserted that imagined community emerged from the circulation of texts. Eric Hobsbawm (1983) has emphasized invented tradition. Pierre Nora, in Sites of Memory (1984-92), has given attention to the French nation’s past. David Lowenthal (1996) suggests that a society becomes possessed by the past. Each of these writers considers how one tells the story.

Story and narrative may shape our understandings of the past of a culture. Books, periodicals, and electronic media transmit this story. Through stories adapted across time the power of myth is engaged; stories can mobilize people. Myth becomes reconfigured and reconstituted. That is, as Raymond Williams points out, the audience or readers share with the artist the capacity to transmit […] descriptions (Long Revolution 26). Memory is active when shared. We make sense of experiences, events, or biography. People recall and articulate their experiences, formulating a sense of life-stories. Images and words tell these stories and give them an accessible form. (Stephen Greenblatt (1988) refers to a social energy in which one collects and circulates stories from the past in an act of memory.) These memories may be embodied in texts, such as poems and stories. Perhaps some of these memories become more memorable through repetition.

The past, then, is actively reconstructed in memory. Theories of memory are presented in Pierre Nora’s Realms of Memory and in Dominick LaCapra’s Rethinking Intellectual History (1983). Both scholars reflect on the interactions between text and historical context. In his introduction to Realms of Memory, Nora tells us that history is needed when people no longer live within memory but recall the past through the assistance of documents that help to recall it (iv). Dominick LaCapra offers six ways of looking at the intersection between text and culture. LaCapra’s first two points issue a call for us to consider the relation between authorial intention and the text and the relation of the author’s life to the text. He then points to the need to examine the relation of society to texts and the relation of culture to texts. Finally, we are encouraged to observe the relation of the text to the corpus of the writer, and the relation between modes of discourse and the text. As Maurice Halbwachs states, The past is not preserved but is reconstructed on the basis of the present. As La Capra notes, The question of ‘impact’ is best seen in terms of a complex series of readings and uses which texts undergo over time, including the process by which certain texts are canonized (v).

Pierre Nora indicates that there is an acceleration of memory because of technologies like the Internet, telephone, television, and recordings. In Present Pasts (2003), Andreas Huyssen also speaks of a conflation of memory and history at the end of the twentieth century. Huyssen observes that technological change, mass media and new patterns of consumption, work and global mobility prompts one to seek to slow down to heal wounds of past mistakes and create a livable future (94). Jay Winter, in Sites of Memory, Sites of Modernity (1995), considers collective remembrance after the Great War. Oona Frawley and Kathleen O’Callaghan bring the theme of memory to bear specifically upon James Joyce in Memory Ireland: James Joyce and Cultural Memory (Syracuse University Press, 2014).

Joyce and Yeats are different in this respect. While Yeats embraces a romanticism of the Celtic twilight and nationalism, Joyce is ambivalent about Irish nationalism. When Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan are at the Martello Tower, which was built to repel Napoleonic invasions, Mulligan speaks of a new aesthetics for Ireland. However, Mulligan believes that Ireland ought to be Hellenized and to aspire to Greek heroism. He appears to dislike the Celtic revival, although he chants bits of song and legend, poetry, and parody. Buck Mulligan, called by Stephen the usurper, and Blazes Boylan, are the foils and melodramatic villains of Ulysses, as David Trotter points out (92).

Joyce, in The Dead, writes of Gabriel Conroy’s vision of treeless hills, a barren wasteland, and a place of bondage lost to memory and recalled only in song. Ireland – indeed the modern world- is likened to an arid land and to Hebrew literature through the character of Leopold Bloom: out of the land of Egypt and into the land of bondage. Joyce is antipathetic to the constrictive limits of religion, to the censorship of his art. Yet, like Dante in exile, his place of origin clings to him and he carries his memories of Ireland throughout his work. Joyce once told Frank Budgen, that imagination is memory (Budgen 187). This idea may follow Giambattista Vico’s notion that art is a reworking of memory.²

Cultural memory can be romanticized. One may recall Eamon De Valera’s rhetoric regarding Ireland in On Language and the Irish Nation (1943) and his radio broadcasts. He asserted that the Ireland we dreamed of is characterized by romantic notions, heroes, athletic youths and happy maidens, by the romping of sturdy children, firesides, St. Patrick, folklore, and the wisdom of serene old age. This is the Ireland of cultural memory sustained by images of the harp, the Celtic cross, the shamrock, and the cottage. It is the Ireland of William Butler Yeats’s plays and his turn toward myth, poetry, and legend.

A version of the past, or a point of view prevailing in popular reception, characterizes cultural memory. Cultural memory is a collective awareness of what a community or nation has experienced historically, observed Pierre Nora (iv). Nora distinguished between cultural memory and history. Present concerns may affect one’s perceptions of the past. Cultural memory is engaged in representation. It can be expressed in symbol, parade, rituals, commemorations, ceremonies, or in texts, songs, films, or landscape. A culture embodies its memories in archives, memorials, and in books. Memories are present in family heirlooms and photo albums. Libraries preserve cultural memory with information storage, computer records, tapes, films, inscriptions in written form or in digital forms. Memory may be preserved in physical objects, such as buildings, statues, or artworks like Keats’s Grecian urn. There are re-enactments of battles, revivals of plays, paintings, and artistic images of the past. Families preserve letters or seek through records of genealogy. There are gravesite markers to remember those who have passed on. A quilt, a tablecloth, homemade clothing, a treasured vase of crystal, or a collection of beer bottles from the pub are all signs of experiences and memory. These objects represent and mediate memory. They reflect how we interpret our world and the past.

Cultural memory connects the imagined communities we call nations. Historian and political scientist Anthony D. Smith, in Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999), emphasizes the role of the past in the creation of the present (Smith 180). For Smith, memory itself is a cultural force that helps to redefine community life. Myths of courage and of a national golden age foster ethic and cultural identity (61-62). Myths relate to identity narratives: heritage and traditions and how people relate to the past (180). Smith regards remembrance as a cultural force that helps to redefine and connect the imagined communities of nations. This is the type of cultural memory often referred to in the work of William Butler Yeats. Maurice Halbwachs observed in 1925 that social frameworks precede and shape memory. People wish to hold onto the highlights