Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem

By Jennifer L. Fleissner

An examination of the nineteenth-century American novel that argues for a new genealogy of the concept of the will.

What if the modern person were defined not by reason or sentiment, as Enlightenment thinkers hoped, but by will? Western modernity rests on the ideal of the autonomous subject, charting a path toward self-determination. Yet novelists have portrayed the will as prone to insufficiency or excess—from indecision to obsession, wild impulse to melancholic inertia. Jennifer Fleissner’s ambitious book shows how the novel’s attention to the will’s maladies enables an ongoing interrogation of modern premises from within.

Maladies of the Will reveals the nineteenth-century American novel’s relation to a wide-ranging philosophical tradition, highly relevant to our own tumultuous present. In works from Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter to Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, the will’s grandeur and its perversity emerge as it alternately aligns itself with and pits itself against a bigger Will—whether of God, the state, society, history, or life itself. Today, when invocations of autonomy appear beside the medicalization of many behaviors, and democracy’s tenet of popular will has come into doubt, Maladies of the Will provides a map to how we got here, and how we might think these vital dilemmas anew.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226822037

Book preview

Cover Page for Maladies of the Will

Maladies of the Will

Maladies of the Will

The American Novel and the Modernity Problem

JENNIFER L. FLEISSNER

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82201-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82202-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82203-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226822037.001.0001

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Indiana University toward the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fleissner, Jennifer (Jennifer L.), author.

Title: Maladies of the will : the American novel and the modernity problem / Jennifer L. Fleissner.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022014515 | ISBN 9780226822013 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226822020 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226822037 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: American literature—19th century—History and criticism. | Will in literature.

Classification: LCC PS217.W45 F54 2022 | DDC 810.9/353—dc23/eng/20220616

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014515

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my B. and my Z.

Contents

Preface

The Book’s Organization

Chapter Descriptions

Introduction: The Novel and the Will

Literary-Critical (from Lionel Trilling to Zadie Smith)

Historical (from Augustine to Romanticism)

Theoretical (from Locke and Sentimentalism to Pragmatism and Affect—and an Alternative to Both)

1  Before and After the Novel: Abyssal Modernity and the Interior Life of the Will

The Strange Problem of Too Much Interiority

The Awfully Expanded World: Seventeenth-Century Selfhood and Its Precursors

The Eighteenth Century Tames the Self

The Return of the Wilderness Within, from the Gothic to Kant

Law and Freedom in The Scarlet Letter

2  Vitalizing the Bildungsroman

The Bildungsroman as a Body’s Story

The Birth of Medical Vitalism: The Body as Wayward Will

Vitalist Legacies, I: Sensibility, Romanticism, and the Birth of Psychology

The Morgesons as Vitalist Bildungsroman

The Reflex and the Return to Mechanism

Vitalist Legacies, II: The Alternative Neovitalisms of Goldstein and Canguilhem

3  General Willfulness: Moby-Dick and Romantic Sovereignty

Modernity’s Two Wills

Ahab, or Anatomizing the Romantic Will (Hegel, Fichte, Lukács)

Ishmael and Intensity (Spinoza, Schopenhauer)

The General Will (Rousseau, Arendt)

Coda: Pip’s Dissent

4  The James Brothers at Century’s End: Mysticism, Abstraction, and the Forms of Social Life

William and the Will

Four Visions of Sociality: Intermingling, Fusion, Intersubjectivity, Form

William and the Sick Soul

The Social Phantasmagoria of The Ambassadors

5  Begin All Over Again: Naturalism, Habit, and the Embodiment of the Will

Evolutionary Economics and the Moral Danger of Doing Nothing

The Brute’s Two Faces: Frank Norris’s Vandover

Subjects of Interest and Habit in Contemporary Theory: Sedgwick, Berlant, Foucault

Nietzsche’s Return to Vitalism

Coda: Humanization Run Wild

6  Narrative and Its Discontents: Racial Justice, Existential Action, and the Problem of the Past

The Racial Politics of Temporality, Then and Now (Hopkins and Dunbar)

The Realist Insistence: Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition

A Certain Distance: The Uncanny Everyday (Spillers and Freud)

Du Bois and the Moment of Hesitation

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

That the will is a problem is, today, a surprisingly widespread view. The right suggests democracy may have been a mistake. The left moves to curb notions of untrammeled freedom on behalf of justice. Meanwhile, an increasingly neurology-based account of human behavior deems the entire notion of will a form of wishful thinking. In literary criticism, these tendencies have played out in an increasing attention to that which exceeds the individual—to collectivities, on the one hand, and the nonhuman world, on the other. Yet such approaches can never simply define the study of the novel, the present book argues, because of the form’s distinct interest in confronting, rather than ignoring or overcoming, the complex and indeed often problematic features of the will as such.

The will as problem is an idea with a long history; indeed, it is an idea as old as that of the will itself. Moreover, many writers, again from a wide range of positions, have seen that problem as defining of the modern world. Individual freedoms go too far, encroaching on those of others; alternatively, society’s very complexities produce a state of apathy or lack of interest. A temptation thus repeatedly presents itself: why not just move past this will idea altogether? The other two human qualities perhaps more commonly associated with modernity, reason and sentiment, can each seem to promise a fairer future, one opening out beyond the desires of particular persons, or even those of distinct smaller groups, to what is shared among them. And yet the question remains of how to think about that particularity, which has learned, within the same modern framework, to assert its rights to be heard.

The real effect of the will, then, is to open up a persistent conflict. This conflict, moreover, is embedded within the very conception of will itself. The philosophical trajectory of the will begins in Saint Augustine, who finds his own will to be divided between his own inclinations, which he finds at times inexplicable, and his yearning to give himself to God. Modern philosophy finds other ways of expressing this split, such as Wille as maxim versus Willkür as the power of spontaneous action in Kant, or the stages of right in Hegel, with God replaced by more secular manifestations of a higher principle, such as the state or the social world. At the same time, as modernity advances, the foundationless will that so distressed Augustine gets taken more and more seriously as a crucial contributor to freedom’s advent. The question begins to be raised, most pointedly by Nietzsche, of whether that will ought itself to be the primary object of interest, not as a generalizable good, but more as an amoral force of life.

The present study argues for these issues’ centrality to the novel during its nineteenth-century heyday. Of course, we have long imagined the novel as centered on the notion of the autonomous individual able to chart a path toward self-determination, and therefore a crucial contributor to the imagination of Western modernity, whether this is understood in positive or ideological terms. As suggested, in today’s intellectual landscape, multiple phenomena have collaborated to render that notion suspect, in a double sense: such a figure no longer appears desirable, on the one hand, or plausible, on the other. Yet the novel remains vital, Maladies of the Will argues, precisely because, from its earliest instantiations, its engagement with the idea of the individual will has not taken the simply idealizing form we assume.

Rather, as the literary critic Lionel Trilling put it, still startlingly, back in 1973: "A chief subject of the literature of the nineteenth century was the physiology and hygiene of the will . . . what were its pathologies of excess or deficiency, what were its right and wrong goals" (Moral 502). Far from simply celebrating the will as modernity’s triumph, the novel has conceived it as a subject for (indeed sometimes physiological) investigation, a site of enduring maladies of extremity or insufficiency—from obsession to indecision, wild impulse to melancholic inertia. To the extent this is so, then, the novel has been less a mere booster for modern autonomy than a form of ongoing interrogation, both invested and critical, of modernity’s core premises from within.

The central question here concerns the fit or misfit between the individual will and some greater Will understood to provide that will’s ideal telos. At times, one such larger Will can appear to offer a refuge from another: God or nature become alternatives to a constraining society or state (though the reverse may just as often be true). The will’s maladies, its excesses and insufficiencies, may result from a tension with a higher aim, as originally in Augustine, but the novel can also conceive them as the result of believing oneself to be coincident with that higher Will. Alternatively, the trouble may lie in the very demand to decide at all. In all of these forms, the novel’s interests overlapped with those of the many other arenas in which such issues were central—theology, moral and political philosophy, medicine, criminology, and the nascent social sciences—and thereby contributed to a broader discussion that remains more consequential today than we often realize.

The present book is organized as an investigation of these maladies of excess or deficiency across the history of the novel during its nineteenth-century apogee. While I have been saying the novel, however, this book departs from most contributions to the theory of the novel (from Lukács to Watt to more recent instances like Margaret Doody and Thomas Pavel) in its focus on the often more philosophically minded American novel—both canonical instances like Hawthorne and James, and important, often still insufficiently recognized voices like those of Elizabeth Stoddard and the Black novelists Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. It is, of course, no surprise to say that the question of the individual, in both a positive and negative sense, has possessed particular salience in American cultural history. Moreover, the novelistic tradition in the nineteenth-century US has long been argued to stand in an oblique relation to the very category of the novel; its authors have been associated just as much with the older mode of the romance. In fact, this book argues, this duality simply renders their works akin to the novels of nineteenth-century France, Russia, and Germany (as Ralph Ellison suggests in his reference to the philosophical writings of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and Melville [760]); it is the British tradition, so often taken to represent the novel in English departments, that is perhaps the outlier in its more wholehearted resolve to embrace—with, of course, notable exceptions, including Britain’s own pre-Victorian novels—the realist mode. The other traditions’ hesitancy to do so may be understood as part and parcel of a more equivocal relation to modernity itself, whether due to skepticism toward its aims or to a sense of those aims’ insufficient fulfillment.

At its broadest, then, this book aims to offer not only a new interpretation of the novel, but a way of reconceptualizing our understanding of the modern individual. It maintains, further, that these subjects remain critical to the world we inhabit, for our relation to them remains as complex as these writers show them to have long been. The problem with modernity continues to be cast as too much freedom (as in critiques of libertarian propensities) or not enough. We regret the lack of will to act on urgent matters, or alternately deplore the demand for constant engagement and insufficient room for the slower pace of reflection. Fiction expresses a similar ambivalence in its typical focus on figures whose fascination is inseparable from their problematic and often enigmatic natures—whether the maniacal focus of Melville’s Ahab or the impenetrable recalcitrance of his Bartleby. Or, as the novelist Zadie Smith has put it in a recent essay, The conflicted, the liars, the self-deceiving, the willfully blind, the abject, the unresolved, the imperfect, the evil, the unwell, the lost and divided. Those were once fiction’s people (Fascinated).

This is scarcely the rational autonomous subject against which so many of our current posthuman endeavors pitch their interventions, powerful though these may otherwise be. Indeed, Maladies argues, the appeal of the more-than-human aggregate that simply acts, rather than reflects, may not be separable from its ability to circumvent the enduring dilemmas of human agency to which the notion of maladies of will refers. Instead, individuals are at times simply imagined as subsumed into a greater enveloping Will—if not, now, that of God or the state, then Life, or History—in a way that the novels and thinkers who have explored these issues in greater depth always warned of as a move possessing its own dangers. From this vantage, the will’s maladies are unavoidable because of their tie to what remains most serious about human life: the need to render judgments of value. The novel, this book contends, has been a crucial contributor to our recognition of this enduring task.

The Book’s Organization

The six chapters of Maladies of the Will tell a historical story about the relation of the will as a problem to the development of the novel as a form across the long nineteenth century. As stated, the book focuses on American novels, though these are discussed with reference to defining works of European, and sometimes British, fiction by such writers as Goethe, Balzac, Zola, and Eliot. At the same time, the chapters actively engage the multiple intellectual traditions that contribute to the fictional exploration of will, from theology (Augustine, Edwards) to philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Sartre, Arendt) to psychology (William James and his precursors) to social theory and medical vitalism. This engagement occurs within the framework of modernity theory in a more general sense (as in the work of Hans Blumenberg, Sylvia Wynter, and Robert Pippin); hence, at its broadest level, Maladies aims to make a meaningful contribution to our ongoing grappling with this category and its significance for both history and thought.

To offer a general overview: The book’s chapter-length introduction has two aims, to make the case for the significance of the novel and the will to contemporary discussions about personhood in both the humanities and the sciences and to lay the groundwork for the book’s historical account of its subject. With respect to the former, I show how a range of arguments about the death of the novel have turned for a century on claims of its supersession by a more biologically materialist psychology, which I counter by demonstrating the still vexed status within that psychology of the category of will. The will functions in the novel, I argue, as the site of a struggle over value that, as I further demonstrate, risks being abrogated by leading intellectual frameworks in the humanities and psychology alike. The introduction then historicizes the will concept by discussing Augustine’s role as, in the view of some critics, the first subject for his intensive, retrospectively narrated self-exploration in the Confessions. This investigation, as I emphasize, centers on the puzzle of the wayward will, whether as disobedient, willful excess (his famous theft of a neighbor’s pears) or lackadaisical insufficiency (the reluctance to embrace God). The early novel in English has often been understood as influenced by the Augustinian-inflected mode of the Protestant spiritual autobiography; in a brief look at Robinson Crusoe, I demonstrate how the Lockean, protocapitalist individual usually thought to emerge from such fictions is in fact portrayed as in ongoing struggle with a more Augustinian conception, in which Crusoe’s deepest motives remain a bedeviling question for him.

The book’s first half, then, traces out the legacy of these Augustinian ideas in a surprising series of instances, all key to mid-nineteenth-century American fiction in its turn away from the increasingly realist British example: protolibertine and gothic writings, eighteenth-century vitalism and its successors, and Romanticism. In each of these cases, the more Faustian, willful dimension of Augustine’s paradox, which appears the most threatening in this still essentially religious context, takes center stage. Libertine and gothic writings are shown to grow perversely out of spiritual autobiography’s intense plumbing of the dark corners of the human soul, helping to explain Hawthorne’s decision to situate his modern novel of adultery in the seventeenth century. Vitalism, as first developed within German Pietism, argues against modern science’s mechanistic account of life by theorizing a life force that acts as an embodied version of the unaccountable Augustinian will; these ideas would influence novelistic bildungsromans like Elizabeth Stoddard’s as well as, later, the philosophical work of Schopenhauer (and, through him, Nietzsche). And Romanticism builds directly on these vitalist arguments to conceive creative power and the quest for freedom as inseparable from Sturm und Drang, darkness and torment—conceptions that would be crucial to Melville in his formulation of Moby-Dick as a work of romance.

The second half of the book turns to the later nineteenth century, a period during which the ideal of will as self-restraint began to seem outmoded compared to that of will as effective power. In this context, the will plagued by maladies appeared in the form less of willfulness than of inaction. Writers began to argue that civilization’s emphasis on reasoned deliberation was stymieing the ability to act decisively, while the Victorian ideal of self-sacrifice threatened the springs of enterprise. The era’s realist fiction, I suggest, complicated these ideas by portraying social outliers as sites of a critical take on the era’s fast-changing mores. Thus, Henry James’s late novels of manners typically situated an uncertain individual observer on the social world’s margins as a kind of artist or philosopher manqué. Frank Norris’s naturalism took its cue from Zola in reimagining the supposed social degenerate not as a violent brute but as an individual without the will to participate in an economic world given over to rapacious appetites. Finally, Charles Chesnutt joined other writers, during the first sustained efflorescence of African American fiction around 1900, in placing the nation’s relentless drive toward historical progress alongside a hesitancy born of the unhealed wounds of a continuing legacy of oppression.

The book thus traces a trajectory from maladies of excessive will, in its first three chapters (in the context of a more Victorian encouragement of will as self-inhibition) to ones of the will’s deficiency, in its second three (in the context of a late nineteenth-century revaluation of will as robust force). The first half considers the experimenter’s amoral curiosity, the youth’s outsized avidity for worldly pleasures and success, and the Romantic will of the Byronic individual and its collective counterpart. The second examines the indecisiveness of the thinker, the lassitude of the daydreamer, and the inertia of the melancholic. Each is mapped onto a different mode crucial to the novelistic tradition: the gothic, the bildungsroman, the modern epic or romantic adventure, the realist novel of manners, naturalism, and the historical or documentary novel. And each is considered, as well, in relation to a different representation of the Big Will with which the individual is enjoined to merge: God, life, the state, society, the economy, and history. The exploration of these questions means that each chapter considers its literary examples in the company of key writings from the multidisciplinary tradition of exploring the subject of will, from theology and moral philosophy in chapter 1, to vitalism and the philosophy of biology in chapter 2; political theory in chapter 3; social theory in chapter 4; economic theory in chapter 5; and theories of history in chapter 6.

In every instance, it is important to stress, the book maintains a nuanced stance toward the maladies it describes, because its position is that it is often far too easy simply to celebrate or decry the will, and particularly the individual will. As the introduction argues in more detail, contemporary critical attempts to think past these issues can end up simply replicating them in a less complex form. Moves beyond the person, that is, can enable more idealized forms of agency by evading the difficulties constitutive of the will as such. This book’s very different aim—both a historical and a theoretical one—is to recover a long tradition, for which the novel is central, of understanding that will as the central problem of modernity, in a genuine sense. As such, it appears not as something to overcome but as that which we have no choice but to continue to think through.

Chapter Descriptions

Chapter 1, Before and After the Novel: Abyssal Modernity and the Interior Life of the Will, argues that we have been wrong about the modern individual. The familiar Enlightenment versions thereof, predicated on reason or feeling, in fact represent attempts to tame and manage earlier, Augustinian conceptions of the person based on will. Influential on the wilder interiorities of seventeenth-century spiritual autobiography and the early novels these inspired, such conceptions would then resurface, following the realist consolidation of self and world, in gothic fiction. Yet how to explain this transformation of the pious into the demonically profane? I argue that the modern subject’s freedom must be seen as emerging within the context of a powerfully alien totality that is at once that of the radical Protestant God of Will and of modern science’s infinite, inhuman cosmos. In writings from Pascal’s Pensées to John Bunyan’s protonovelistic spiritual autobiography, we see how this sense of being left to oneself can prompt both existential anxieties and a newly expansive curiosity, engendering an intense probing not only of cosmic mysteries but of the inner self and its potentialities. In their relentless focus on human failings, however, these Augustinian writings would improbably begin to inform more libertine detailings of the fascinatingly rich panoply of evils that men do. The chapter then traces the afterlife of this strange conjuncture: on the one hand, in the eighteenth-century Lockean and sentimental accounts of the self (more familiar to novel studies) that attempted to conceive of an individual more naturally inclined toward social order, and, on the other, in a range of opposed writings, from gothic novels to Kant’s moral philosophy to, finally, Hawthorne’s strangely premodern/hypermodern The Scarlet Letter, that refuse such solaces in order to plumb both the pathologies of will and the serious quests for freedom and knowledge emerging from the sense of a radical rift between human beings and a given, generalizable law.

Chapter 2, Vitalizing the Bildungsroman, discusses the novelistic bildungsroman’s eighteenth-century emergence, in Goethe’s writings, out of the biologized discourse of the Bildungstrieb (or developmental drive). Here, I argue, we see the origins of the sense of will not as an inner relation to the good but, as in the later writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as a pure life force. Clearly, this counternarrative alters our usual sense of the bildungsroman as a story simply of the individual’s indoctrination into social norms, and we can see the effects of this dual construal of it in a Romantically inflected bildungsroman like Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. The Bildungstrieb concept is bound up with the development of vitalism, a theory that, beginning in the early eighteenth century, reacted against Cartesian mechanism to insist on the specificity of life. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that its Pietist progenitors made their case by describing the vital force as an embodied version of Augustinian will—irreducible to mechanism because subject to irrational tendencies that could prove harmful for self-preservation. This chapter focuses on Elizabeth Stoddard’s 1862 novel The Morgesons as a vitalist and feminist bildungsroman, written against the renewed mechanistic thought of the mid-nineteenth century (and the fiction it inspired). Suggesting that the book’s Augustinian, medically rooted vitalism finds an echo in the mid-twentieth-century writings of Kurt Goldstein and Georg Canguilhem on the organism, the chapter contrasts these to a range of contemporary new-materialist neovitalisms that often resemble the less conflictual eighteenth-century sensibility theory and Naturphilosophie.

Chapter 3, "General Willfulness: Moby-Dick and Romantic Sovereignty, focuses on Herman Melville’s modern epic" Moby-Dick, seeing it as a staging ground for historically enduring ambivalences about the Romantic subject, which I discuss as especially pertinent to Americanist criticism as to its literature. While readers often oppose the book’s mad Captain Ahab as exemplar of the maladies of individualism to the crew of the ship Pequod, this chapter maintains that they need to be understood as a collective version of the same dilemma of Romantic will posed by their leader. Hegel, I demonstrate, sets the stage for a long tradition of skeptical treatments of the Romantic will as absolute self-sovereignty in his account of Fichte, which strikingly resembles his treatment elsewhere of insanity as a form of subjectivity defined by monomania (the same diagnosis Melville gives Ahab). The individual is meant to overcome this stance by recognizing that true freedom entails self-subjection to that which lies beyond the person—finally, the state. Yet, as Rousseau’s writings show, the theory of the political reopens these same questions about the general will’s relation to right. And Hegel’s own writings on the aesthetic transition away from heroism toward the prosaic present offers a more equivocal account of the rise of a bureaucratic modernity. The chapter explores Melville’s charged ambivalence about these questions of heroism, sovereignty, and art by examining, in turn, Ahab himself; the book’s narrator, Ishmael; and the crew in their differing rationales for turning away from the everyday world to enter the more romantic space of the hunt for the white whale.

Chapter 4, The James Brothers at Century’s End: Mysticism, Abstraction, and the Forms of Social Life, finds us in a late Victorian period in which the moral ideal of self-restraint and impulse controlled by reason had begun to seem effete, a way of avoiding active participation in life itself. Current critical trends, I argue, have followed William James’s personal trajectory in positing pragmatism and sociality as antidotes to the potential pathologies of philosophical abstraction, a tendency attributed by William and others to the writing of his brother, Henry. When the social as Big Will is simply embraced, however (in a move that, I show, links contemporary criticism to turn-of-the-century social science), its own irrationalities and violences tend to fade in the vision of an idealized communion. By contrast, the novelist of manners as embodied by Henry, I argue, maintains the view of the social as something into which the individual observer is drawn and yet toward which he also maintains a self-protective distance. The social, as a result, becomes here not thought’s other but its primary object. The result, as seen in the protagonists of Henry’s turn-of-the-century fiction, is a finally aesthetic attempt to map the social, one that grows manic in its hope to manage the abysses intuited. This project is portrayed (not only in Henry’s fiction of this era, and the writings of Balzac that inspired it, but in William’s contemporaneous work on religion and abnormal psychology) to be, at its best, beautiful and admirable in ways inseparable from its artifice. I suggest, in conclusion, that this may be true of many of the utopian models of relationality in current criticism as well.

Chapter 5, ‘Begin All Over Again’: Naturalism, Habit, and the Embodiment of the Will, is situated amid the more dramatic turn away from Victorian conceptions of the strong will as self-restraint that led to moralized invocations of the will as bodily power in turn-of-the-century Europe and the US. The result was a new exhortation to strengthen oneself through exercise and diet, and a denigration of earlier religious views as forms of weak-willed sentimentality. I show how these ideas worked together with a Darwinism-inspired conception of economic growth as a form of common good driven, rather than threatened, by internal conflict. The chapter’s question is how to conceive these developments in relation to the era’s naturalist fiction, which in the hands of writers like Zola and his American disciple Frank Norris has often been thought similarly to conceive characters as bodies struggling in a Darwinian world. In fact, I argue, Norris’s Vandover and the Brute, like Zola himself, critiques this ruthless construal of common life through the depiction of lazy individuals who opt out of a rat race depicted as producing not supermen but automatons. Similarly, Nietzsche’s writings, which can appear to overlap with the conception of will as bodily power here described, are shown to move past such ideas by raising value itself as a question. I finally consider whether contemporary critical tendencies to affirm the reduction of will to embodied habit can risk making such questions harder to ask.

Chapter 6, Narrative and Its Discontents: Racial Justice, Existential Action, and the Problem of the Past, considers the fear of history as stagnation rather than progressive motion that began to emerge in the movement toward modernism. As scholars of British literature have discussed, these concerns produced a revival of romance at century’s end, a return to stories in which heroic figures could be understood as fulfilling their own and their people’s destinies at one and the same time. It has been insufficiently appreciated, I argue, how much Black novelists, writing in the aftermath of the failures of Reconstruction and amid the growth of Jim Crow law, contributed to the development of a related phenomenon in the US. A sense of impasse in the wake of an incomplete freedom, that is, led to a sense, in the work of novelists like Pauline Hopkins and Paul Laurence Dunbar, that history writing might require more mythic or tragic forms. I contrast their works to an important documentary novel of the period, Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, which meditates at once on realism’s importance and the lure of romance alternatives before turning to modalities that I argue predict the fictional modes of the coming century. Specifically, Chesnutt evokes the moment of existential world-shattering as a way of imagining action in the face of trauma; I thus read his work together with the later philosophical explorations of Sartre and Fanon, on the one hand, and the oeuvre of Freud, on the other. In conclusion, I turn to W. E. B. Du Bois’s meditation On the Meaning of Progress in The Souls of Black Folk to explore why a move away from assumed ideas about progress, without yet succumbing to despair—a combination I describe through the notion of hesitation—might have been a crucial gesture for Black writers at the end of the Victorian era.

INTRODUCTION

The Novel and the Will

In a world situation where the organic was the all-dominating category of existence, to make the individuality of a living being, with all its limitations, the starting point . . . to represent [an individual life] as the vehicle of values rather than their substratum . . . would have been an act of the most ridiculous arrogance.

GEORG LUKÁCS, Theory of the Novel

It is at the outset of the self-emancipating modern subject’s self-reflection . . . that we find the divergence of insight and action paradigmatically laid down. The more the subject turns into a being-for-itself, the greater the distance it places between itself and the unbroken accord with a given order, the less will its action and its consciousness be one.

THEODOR ADORNO, Negative Dialectics

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

SAINT PAUL, Romans 7:15

What does the novel have to do with the will? In one way or another, we have long understood this to be its subject, as novels, perhaps more than any other literary form, foreground the question of the individual amid a social setting. While it may appear that recent criticism has moved away from both of these—replacing individuals with collectivities and the social world with bodies merging in physical space—the present book contends that these moves have not resolved the issues at hand but merely relocated them, and in ways that can make their defining complexities harder to address. Such approaches arguably amount to the latest salvos in what we will see is a century-old history of attempting to cast the novel as an outmoded form, one purportedly tied to lost Victorian idealizations of human will. In fact, I argue, it is the novel’s core engagement with the will’s inherent perversity—which this book will give both a history and a philosophical framework—that renders it indispensable in a contemporary era when we confront, in multiple realms, individuals’ paradoxical and divided relations to their own interests.

This introduction offers an alternate genealogy for the emergence of the modern subject. So doing, it aims to provide a way into current debates about individualism and the hope of moving beyond it that can acknowledge this topic’s genuine and enduring knottiness. It is structured in three parts. The first considers what the philosopher Robert Pippin has termed the modernity problem in its two main forms, both often figured by the concept of will—the problem of autonomy and the question of persons’ scientific explicability. The novel’s powerful and ongoing responses to both of these, I argue, have too often been occluded, in literary studies, by an account that treats the form as an outgrowth of a just-so story of modernization rather than as a serious participant in that story’s ongoing theorization.

Here I turn to such thinkers as Hans Blumenberg, Hans Jonas, and Sylvia Wynter, writing in the wake of World War II and the move to decolonization, for whom the central question posed by modernity lay in its liberation of human will from any determining fealty to a greater Will (initially, that of God or, by extension, that of nature). Freedom thus became at once an aim, a risk, and a possibility, one that critics writing on literary subjects around the same time—from Lionel Trilling to Ralph Ellison to James Baldwin—saw the nineteenth-century novel as particularly devoted to exploring.

While for the modernity theorists, Renaissance humanism was usually understood as the decisive moment of break, some with a more phenomenological background, such as Jonas and Hannah Arendt, would trace the emergence of these existential questions back to the original thematization of human will by the North African theologian Augustine in his fourth-century Confessions, a work that has often been understood as an important urtext for the novel as a form. In my second section, drawing on these writers, I offer a counterhistory of the modern subject based not on reason or feeling but on will, showing how doing so renders the category of the person a persistent difficulty. I then consider, briefly, what it might look like to rewrite the story of the novel’s modern ascendance through this different view.

In the final section, accordingly, I ask what it would mean to introduce these ideas into a contemporary intellectual landscape that, both within the academy and beyond it, can sometimes appear bent on conceiving a humanistic thought devoid of the distinct complexities raised by human beings. In an era racked by social fragmentation and inequality, we are understandably drawn to envision, in our seemingly ever more common utopian moments, forms of relation that circumvent, rather than confront, what W. E. B. Du Bois once termed the incalculability of human will (Sociology 41). The novel, this book suggests, can offer crucial reminders of what stands in the way—both for good and for ill—of that project.

Literary-Critical (from Lionel Trilling to Zadie Smith)

THE PROBLEM, I: AUTONOMY’S DESIRABILITY

It might appear easy enough to answer the question: What does it mean to think of the novel in relation to the will? In English departments, discussions of the novel’s modern advent as a culturally central literary mode have focused, unsurprisingly, on the form’s efflorescence in eighteenth-century Britain, and, at least since Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel in 1957, have understood that emergence as inseparable from that of the modern individual, an entity conceived as striving to fulfill its own self-interest in an increasingly secular world. (Robinson Crusoe, which we will briefly consider later in this introduction, provides the emblematic example.) This conception considerably outstrips the specific context of the novel, moreover; when Talal Asad seeks to define the way cultural theory treats the concept of an agent, for example, the terms used are much the same.¹

And yet the novel’s defining subject has also been defined in essentially opposite terms, as the person who has learned to subsume his or her own interests on behalf of a larger totality, a higher Will. Here, to have a strong will is not to go forthrightly after one’s pleasure, but, rather, to exercise will power over precisely those desires. Social contract theories are in this regard exemplary, but the work of Michel Foucault has probably had the greatest influence on this conception of subjectivation as, essentially, self-subjection.² And what makes these two construals of the novelistic subject odd to consider side by side isn’t simply that they negate one another. It’s that each has called forth strong critiques of that subject (as overly self-defined, on the one hand, or overly constrained, on the other)—critiques that can then have the effect of returning us to the opposing version.

These issues persistently reemerge beyond literary studies, as questions endemic to modernity as such—variants on what Robert Pippin terms the modernity problem.³ Has the insistence on freedom gone too far? The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, focusing specifically on will, writes of this as the distinct pathology of America: What is immortal in the United States . . . is precisely the will, he states, as we see it enshrined in the voluntaristic clichés of American culture: the sky’s the limit, never say never. . . . With its impious denial of limit . . . this infinite will represents the kind of hubris that would have made the ancient Greeks shiver and glance fearfully at the sky (After 187–88). Yet the flip side of this sort of claim insists, as Pippin notes, that modernity has failed us by not going far enough, that its flaw lay in just the sense of limitations or finitude it presupposed (Modernism 6). For such critics, the emblematic vision of will to be discarded is that enjoined by Kant, will as the imposition of the moral law over oneself, as in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s account of Odysseus as already on the way to becoming a bourgeois subject, tying himself to the mast so as to resist the lure of the Sirens: the self who always restrains himself and forgets his life, in whom the wish must not be father to the thought (55–57). Here, in other words, the problem is not willfulness but its purported antidote, will power, will as the strength to resist. The feminist critic Sara Ahmed, in her book Willful Subjects, thus enjoins her readers to ever greater acts of willfulness, identifying the category as such with protest against constraining norms.

No matter which position is taken here, then, one claim is constant: both the novel and its defining subject appear—if not subjected to apocalyptic renovation—as exhausted forms, unable to do more than index the Enlightenment epoch from which they sprang.⁴ Suppose, however, that these characterizations’ uncertainty regarding the nature of the problem—too much willfulness, or too much control?—in fact bespoke the opposite? Suppose they attested to the novel’s expression of an ambivalence around these questions that, as our conflicted responses demonstrate, we continue to share? From such a vantage, the novel becomes not simply a symptom of its era, but itself a resource for helping us think through Pippin’s modernity problem as a living question. And its interest in will becomes the preeminent sign of this very capacity, for, as the concept’s philosophical history makes plain, the significance of will has long split between our capacity for self-restraint (as in Kant and Hegel) and a morally neutral galvanizing energy, at times indeed attached to a project of self-assertion (in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Romantic tradition more broadly). An important project of the present book is to portray these traditions as more deeply intertwined than they might seem.⁵

How might a focus on will, then, expand how we think of the novelistic rather than affirming our sense of its limitations? Probably more than any other critic, Lionel Trilling recurred to a language of will in his work on the novel, with results that are instructive to consider here. A brief glance at essays from Art and Fortune (1948) to Art, Will, and Necessity (1973) suggest a familiar enough exaltation of the category; Trilling fears for the novel’s future due to its association with the great former will of humanism, a will described as presently dying of its own excess in a postwar era with no use for the nineteenth-century virtues of character, or will-power (Liberal 255; Moral 515). (In the second essay, this lament responds to the movement away from the human individual already evident in structuralist criticism and postmodern art alike.) And yet, on a closer examination, the subject is one that repeatedly leads Trilling into an irreducibly dialectical mode.

This dialectic appears most strongly in his characterization of the nineteenth-century novel as recording the clash between the aristocracy and the emergent bourgeoisie. On the one hand, it did so literally, which accounted for Trilling’s famous (or infamous) assertions that Americans, with both their disbelief in class’s structuring force and lack of a royalist past, were at a disadvantage when it came to the writing of novels.⁶ On the other hand, more pertinently to the longer-lived conflict between views of modern freedom sketched above, Trilling’s portrayal of the confrontation between class sensibilities appeared, in a more Nietzschean vein, as one between two broadly construed sets of warring values: one based on power and pleasure, the other on self-denial on behalf of a greater good.⁷ Both of these, it turned out, could be oriented through the category of the will.

Thus, for Henry James (the one American writer Trilling saw as able to write well about class), art spoke . . . of the imperious will, with the music of an army with banners; it was not a friend of the democratic virtues, and if this made James a snob, then, Trilling rejoined, he is of the company of Rabelais, Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, Balzac, and Lawrence, men who saw the lordliness and establishment of the aristocrat . . . as the proper condition for the spirit of man (Moral 170).⁸ Yet Trilling’s point was not at all simply to uphold this allegiance to the imperious will—a stance that in Art, Will, and Necessity appeared in its less glamorous form as that of the willful toddler, or egotist, lacking in the mature will-power necessary to coexist in the world with other persons and physical necessity alike (Moral 515). His point, rather, was that out of a foundational ambivalence around this divide—one that, again, clearly inflects the opposed views on modern freedom with which we began—the novel’s dialogic project grew (Liberal 250). This could explain the importance of Don Quixote at its outset. In Quixote, the world of ordinary practicality appears to be mocking that of knightly romance—until Cervantes changed horses in midstream and found that he was riding Rosinante (Moral 107–8). And suddenly, what had appeared as madness began to seem, instead, a fealty to a denied ideal.

In the example of Quixote, we begin further to see how Trilling’s point about competing modalities of will might be connected to his sense elsewhere of the novelistic will as prone to maladies, pathologies of excess and deficiency (Moral 502). He thus describes the novel as having been invested in "the celebration and investigation of the will" (Liberal 254). The novel, that is, did not merely uphold an ideal of the will that critics would later be able to probe and, as we saw, most typically reject. The novel itself conceived the will as its primary object of investigation—exploration, theorization, questioning—for the very reason that it took that object so seriously (including, at times, as an object for celebration). In this way, it undid the boundary so often thought to inhere, these days, between appreciation and genuine critique.

The novel’s critique of the will, then, was a critique of the pathological excesses inherent in its aristocratic version and the deficiencies in the bourgeois—but, in either case, that critique depended on taking the potentials of each seriously. And thus—though Trilling would not have framed it this way—the novel became a meditation on modernity itself, which could be understood as a repudiation of the willful, aristocratic will, but also as a potential democratization of it. (This was evidenced by Lawrence’s place among Trilling’s lordly figures, and might be further attested to by any number of pop-cultural examples, beginning with the defining attitudes of both rock and hip-hop.) As such, it could be seen, again, not simply as a historical artifact for others to critique, but as itself a serious participant in the theorization of the modernity problem.

Ralph Ellison, in his rejoinder to Trilling’s Manners, Morals, and the Novel, made a version of these very arguments in order to refute the claim that the novel was losing its moorings in the face of the moral shocks of the twentieth century. And for Ellison as an American novelist, this became a way, further, to reject Trilling’s insistence on the characteristic thinness of the American novel since its inception. If, Ellison argued, we recognized that Trilling’s value struggles were really the great questions posed by modernity itself—where shall we draw the line upon our own freedom in a world in which culture and tradition and even history have been shaken up? (728)—then it became clear that American fiction had posed these with particular clarity from the start, for, in his words, "in no other country [was] change so swift and continuous and intentional (705). For this reason—and centrally, Ellison underscored, because of the radical gap between its ideals and its realities made plain by chattel slavery—American novels already in the nineteenth century meditated on the potentially tragic" aspects of progress itself that the twentieth century often conceived itself to have discovered (728).

Writing in the wake of World War II, these thinkers offer crucial resources to the present study, precisely for their sense of freedom as enduring dilemma rather than either self-satisfied modern accomplishment or hoary humanist shibboleth of which we are glad to be—well, free. (More on that problem anon.) Indeed, for this very reason, they were perhaps most suspicious of claims to have gotten beyond the problem of will altogether. We are likely most familiar with the Cold War versions of such claims, as in Trilling’s critique of totalitarianism for cherish[ing] the idea of revolution as the final, all-embracing act of will which would forever end the exertions of our individual wills, exertions that were by definition so exhausting, frustrating, and endless (Moral 511). The dream was that the malady-ridden will might go away, that a larger, more dependable Will, both more right-minded and more efficacious, would take its place. It might be easy to imagine that to critique such a view was to produce a ringing endorsement of American freedom as its dependable opposite. This was, however, not simply the case, as Trilling made clear he saw the very liberalism he held dear as prone to a related problem—that of conflating one’s own will with the greater good, and thereby aggrandizing oneself in the name of virtue.⁹

In both cases, then, dangers arose when the dilemma of the two wills—moral and imperious, collective and individual—was solved by claiming them simply to be one and the same. Trilling was onto something here, as it can fairly be stated that some version of this ideological project has buttressed the greatest crimes of Western modernity, from slavery to colonialism to Hitler’s Germany. Like most white critics of his era, Trilling had little to say about the first two of these, although Sacvan Bercovitch would not long after him critique American Manifest Destiny, its genocidal sweep across the continent, in similar terms as the invocation of a solemn duty to self-expansion, and thus a conveniently self-serving fusion of political-spiritual opposites (xvii, xxxvi). As Sylvia Wynter, Lewis Gordon, and other scholars of racialization would later argue much more broadly and resoundingly, the modern West’s potentially revolutionary rejection of Absolute Being (or overarching Will) in the form of the all-powerful God of late medievalism seemed irresistibly to bring in its train the temptation for human beings—in particular, Westerners eager to justify their own imperial depredations on moral grounds—to conceive of inhabiting that position themselves.¹⁰

Arguments like these have so powerfully shifted the intellectual landscape that it can be tempting simply to conceive them as superseding that of their midcentury predecessors—the inhabitants of what Mark Greif has termed the age of the crisis of man.¹¹ Such narratives, however, risk obscuring the strong ties and continuities between the two with respect to the issues of concern to us here. A mutual interest in affirming human autonomy and thus rejecting the temptation to reinstall—or, worse, reinhabit—various forms of what we might term Big Will can be discerned in all of the above writers. One might characterize their work broadly as critiquing modern premises on behalf of a continued commitment thereto. Wynter is in fact a rare and important example of a thinker whose work grows directly out of these earlier debates to extend into our own present, which may account for her continued investment in the category of the human—in an era often invested in dispensing with it—as a means of getting away from the problematically racist and sexist connotations of Western Man.¹² She can be understood as the meeting point of two powerful traditions for thinking the question of modernity as freedom: the writings of Caribbean intellectuals from C. L. R. James to Orlando Patterson to, in our own epoch, Anthony Bogues, on the one hand, and, on the other, those of German Jewish ones like Hans Blumenberg and Hans Jonas who wrote on these subjects in the aftermath of Nazism. All of these writers, and others adjacent to them—including Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, and Kurt Goldstein, whose work would be so formative to the philosopher of biology Georg Canguilhem, himself in turn a touchstone for the early Foucault—have important roles to play in the project that follows. The challenges they pose are enduring ones, for, as we begin to see above, the problematic Big Wills they contest range from those appropriately anathematized today to others still visible in political and academic discourse.

Most pertinently for contemporary literary studies, perhaps—as we will later discuss in more detail—a number of these writers extend this critique to the presently widespread desire, in the face of climate change, to move beyond the human to speak on behalf of a larger, more impersonal realm. As Jonas, himself an early ecocritic of a sort and a student of Heidegger’s, put it, the latter’s shifting the initiative to Being [may be] in fact the most enormous hybris in the whole history of thought. For it is nothing less than the thinker’s claiming that through him speaks the essence of things themselves . . . that in principle the basic human condition, that of being at a distance to things which we must bridge . . . can be remitted, avoided, overcome (Phenomenon 257). Arendt, in her great book on will, wrote similarly about the Stoics: "It is only when will power . . . can will what is and thus never be ‘at odds with outward things,’ that it can be said to be omnipotent" (Life 81). Such critiques are thus skeptical that the problem of the imperious will has been solved, rather than perhaps magnified, by a move beyond it. Surely what we need, Trilling wrote, in response to Sartre’s call for a novel written as if without an author (a call that, for him, tended simply to reinforc[e] the faceless hostility of the world and teach us that we ourselves are not creative agents) is the opposite of this, the opportunity to identify ourselves with a mind that willingly admits it is a mind and does not pretend that it is History or Events or the World but only a mind thinking and planning—possibly planning our escape (Liberal 258).¹³ Or, as Wynter would more succinctly put it, The buck stops with us—that is, with the species she dubs Homo narrans, the being that creates narratives for itself (Toward 331; Ceremony Found 194).¹⁴

These recognitions should not at all be taken to deny the crucial importance of confronting the devastations, both for human beings and the nonhuman world, of looming climate catastrophe. They remind us only that doing so will still require the same number of complex choices as any human activity, choices for which an ultimate blueprint remains unavailable. Moreover, for the philosopher of biology Jonas—as for Wynter, who has drawn on both cognitive science and systems theory—an emphasis on will did not deny the role of embodiment but, in fact, possessed a strong organismic dimension (which will receive more attention in chapters 2 and 5). The point was simply to take the will seriously as both necessity and potential threat, rather than imagining such dilemmas might be avoided through merger with some greater Will.

In the present book, then, I draw on this panoply of ideas to plan our escape from an epoch that can seem in danger of forgetting the gap between will and Will and denying the multiplicity of wills that, as both Trilling and Arendt argue, by definition constitutes the novel just as it defines modern political life.¹⁵ Similarly, for Zadie Smith, to whom we will return, ambivalence is the novel’s very keynote—the rationale for its characteristic focus on the conflicted, the self-deceiving, and the willfully blind, as she puts it in her own recent Defense of Fiction. For we are, she suggests in another essay, both the prisoners and perpetrators of the will (Feel 135). Fiction here is motivated by conflict, both between individuals and within them, because of genuinely competing conceptions of how best to live, as the differing accounts of the modern project above began to suggest. The novel—a riot of subjectivity, in Smith’s phrase—is also a riot of wills (Book). To stress will’s relation to individuality, then, can be the opposite of a rejection of the many, in Alex Woloch’s term. It is also a way to insist on the ineradicability of meaningful human difference—for the novel, the very stuff of both joy and sorrow alike.

Yet Smith was once again, in 2019, doing what Trilling had been: defending the novel against the threat of its demise. For her, the question was whether the novel’s distinct capacity for extending sympathy to multiple positionalities—and especially those of a morally vexed nature—could survive a resurgence of the moral imperiousness Trilling saw as liberalism’s constant companion. In this sense, her concerns resembled not only his but those of James Baldwin when he argued that the protest novel, an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene—he was writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but also of Native Son—risked distracting us from the disquieting complexity of ourselves. It did so, he wrote, in two registers—by conceiving the individual as "merely a member of a Society or a Group or, should they seem enigmatic, as a conundrum to be explained by Science" (Notes 19, 15, emphasis mine).¹⁶ Here, too, we find echoes in Smith’s more recent worries, as she ends her Defense of Fiction by querying the political platitudes of social media and the algorithms feeding on these, as two intertwined means of simplifying the problem of self-reflection in our present age. In the path from Baldwin to Smith, then, the second set of recurring arguments for the novel’s (and subject’s) obsolescence, which we will now consider, begins to emerge.

THE PROBLEM, II: AUTONOMY’S POSSIBILITY

Indeed, if a surprisingly long history stands behind the claim that fiction’s interest in the will renders it irrelevant to a more enlightened age, the same can be said of a related argument: that science might render the novel’s view of the person superfluous. Typical of our own era, a 2009 New York Times article states that while for centuries, artists and writers have led the exploration of identity, consciousness, and memory, neuroscientists are now racing ahead, poised to alter the understanding of human nature in ways artists and writers have not (Carey A1). Such claims, however, did not require the techniques of contemporary neurology in order to be made. In the modernist era, the influential Spanish critic José Ortega y Gasset could already be heard asserting that Darwinism and other scientific determinisms had made the novel’s focus on human striving irrelevant by the time of late nineteenth-century naturalism. And when Ortega returned to these ideas around the same time as Trilling in 1951, he reiterated them even more strongly, asserting that twentieth-century advances in the science of psychology had made the novelist’s art appear naive. Now that we knew psychological phenomena, like the phenomena of experimental physics, obey factual laws, Ortega explained, we could hardly expect to turn to novels for an informed view of human motivation (Notes 313–14). Novelists’ only hope lay in somehow finding a way to make such discoveries their own.

Such claims speak to the second way Robert Pippin asserts that modernity can appear as a philosophical problem: if the first entails the meaning and legitimacy of human autonomy, the second regards its viability in a universe governed by natural law.¹⁷ For Marco Roth, writing in our own century, the advent of what he terms the neuronovel (books in which characters’ eccentricities can be ascribed to brain disorders) bespeaks the novel’s diminishing purview in an era of medical-materialist forms of explanation. Mark McGurl thus wittily dubs the novel a zombie mode, a dead genre walking despite having outlived its life as a cultural form. In his account, the recent fascination with books featuring literal zombies (like those introduced into the narrative of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, to popular effect) confirm our inhabitation of a neurologically informed world of suspended agency—no longer one of individuals making rational decisions, let alone the enchanting inwardness of an Elizabeth Bennet. In sum, no less than for Trilling decades earlier, the will, no less than the novel, looks from this perspective to be merely a relic of nineteenth-century ideals.

In fact, the category of will did abruptly vanish from psychological discourse around 1900, a dramatic turnaround given its centrality to debates within the nascent field over the previous several decades.¹⁸ It is no doubt easy enough to look back and concur with W. L. Burn that one of the cardinal differences between the mid-Victorians and ourselves may be found in the much greater faith they had in the power of the human will as a spiritual force outstripping its material substrate (quoted in Reed, Victorian Will 14)—a faith that seems inextricable from its political and moral optimism concerning modern progress, a certainty about its capacity to uplift human beings across the globe to a higher state of enlightenment and happiness.

As we began to see earlier, however, in Trilling’s depiction of the novel’s fascination with the will’s physiology, its pathological excesses and deficiencies, such statements may rely overmuch on a particular, triumphalist construal of what will actually meant at that earlier time. Far from simply entailing the victory of a human mind and spirit now laid low by the revelation of its neuronal foundations, it turns out, even in the view of its greatest champions, to have been a matter already definingly vexed. Consider that William James, in his famous chapter on Will in The Principles of Psychology (1890), dispenses with rational deliberation in a mere handful of pages, so as to devote about half the remaining hundred or so to the will’s mysteries and its tendencies to go awry—to what he, too, conceives as either the Explosive or Obstructed (excessive or deficient) will. (Over a century before the neuronovel, James in his Varieties of Religious Experience was already concerned about the narrowed perspective of what he, too, termed a medical materialism ready to finis[h] up St. Paul by proclaiming his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex [21].) Seen through James’s both medical and philosophical lens, the will represented neither a way for the mind to deny the claims of the body nor an idealized site from which the modern subject strode forth, confident in having decided independently on a rational aim. Rather, as suggested earlier, the will was a problem—a sign that the individual was also a problem, if not perhaps the enduring problem of the modern age, as much as the sign of its triumph.

Indeed, as James’s invocations of Paul’s experience, in Romans 7, of "seeing the better and