Abstract
In the Mental Flesh offers a new way of thinking through the development of the ‘modernist mind.’ I use Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reimagining of the relation between interiority and manifest behavior to interrogate literary modernism’s radicalization of representation – its rejection of realist aesthetic norms in the name of a kind of paradoxically heightened (subjective) realism – and I argue that the (apparent) disappearance of a controlling narratorial presence compromises the representation of interiority. The modernist runs into trouble when she tries to separate represented consciousness from the represented person, seeking to render consciousness ‘directly’ from the inside out. It becomes difficult as readers to acknowledge the modernist character, despite the fact, or precisely because, their ‘minds’ are so utterly (seemingly without narratorial mediation) exposed.
Fiction, it seems, lets us peer into the unadulterated mind of another, whereas in life, we can peer thus only into ourselves. I challenge both these intuitions, arguing 1) that the transparency of fictional minds costs them their fictional personhood, and 2) that the idea of transparency encourages a misleading picture of the relation between narrator and character. What is ‘in’ a character’s (or actual human being’s) mind is internally related to the form of attention directed at that mind, to our reasons for communicating it. (In fiction, the form of attention is distinct; the character cannot attend to herself as we do in life. An author or narrator is always looking over her shoulder.) If a fictional character is hateful or in love, this is not simply a ‘transparent’ fact. It is – must be – the narrator’s intimate affair.
The five chapters of this study concern five stories of ‘unhappy interiority’: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). The protagonists I examine are unhappy, but they are also suffering from unhappy narrative conditions. Each character tries to learn who they are by laying bare what is ‘in’ their mind, and each character is prevented in turn – prevented by narrators increasingly reluctant to narrate, to take responsibility for their creations – from being who they are. (Henry James, I argue, is the exception that proves the rule.) I work ultimately to undermine the idea of the vanishing modernist narrator, the narrator who is (supposedly) no longer needed once the stream of consciousness is displayed. Such an idea, I contend, misleads us with respect to the streams of consciousness we find in both literature and life. In neither case can the narrator – the possibly unreliable human voice – disappear.