The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism

by Judith Ryan

Is thinking personal? Or should we not rather say, "it thinks," just as we say, "it rains"? In the late nineteenth century a number of psychologies emerged that began to divorce consciousness from the notion of a personal self. They asked whether subject and object are truly distinct, whether consciousness is unified or composed of disparate elements, what grounds exist for regarding today's "self" as continuous with yesterday's. If the American pragmatist William James declared himself, on balance, in favor of a "real and verifiable personal identity which we feel," his Austrian counterpart, the empiricist Ernst Mach, propounded the view that "the self is unsalvageable."

The Vanishing Subject is the first comprehensive study of the impact of these pre-Freudian debates on modernist literature. In lucid and engaging prose, Ryan traces a complex set of filiations between writers and thinkers over a sixty-year period and restores a lost element in the genesis and development of modernism. From writers who see the "self" as nothing more or less than a bundle of sensory impressions, Ryan moves to others who hesitate between empiricist and Freudian views of subjectivity and consciousness, and to those who wish to salvage the self from its apparent disintegration. Finally, she looks at a group of writers who abandon not only the dualisms of subject and object, but dualistic thinking altogether.

Literary impressionism, stream-of-consciousness and point-of-view narration, and the question of epiphany in literature acquire a new aspect when seen in the context of the "psychologies without the self." Rilke's development of a position akin to phenomenology, Henry and Alice James's relation to their psychologist brother, Kafka's place in the modernist movements, Joyce's rewriting of Pater, Proust's engagement with contemporary thought, Woolf's presentation of consciousness, and Musil's projection of a utopian counter-reality are problems familiar to readers and The Vanishing Subject radically revises the way we see them.

Genres: Psychology, Literary Criticism

278 pages, Hardcover

First published October 8, 1991

Reviews

[Bertrand · Rating 5 out of 5]

If it is an understatement to say that the definition of modernism is contentious, its periodisation is probably even further away from any kind of consensus: if we are to treat modernism not only as a literary phenomenon, but one that also covers visual arts, design, theology, social sciences or law, we need to look at the broadest definitions, which are often variations on the idea of modernism as the self-critique of modernity (or in Bermann's jamesonian formulation, as the "unconscious" of modernity) : in this configuration modernism inherit the intrinsic blur proper to "modernity", which finds its apotheosis in Adorno's famous formulation "Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category"...
To those interested in the explosion of "isms" that appeared around the turn of the century which I will call avant-gardes, issues of periodisation are all the more difficult: how did those movement, with their highly self-conscious promulgation of absolute novelty, relate to the generally broader field of modernism? What preceded them, and what actual continuity is to be found between their worldview, those of their artistic forerunners, and those of the very philistines and positivists who had shaped the world in which they had appeared?
Ryan's book look at one of the possible nexus of continuity, and examine it in through a number of small essays covering a variety of writers stretching from the embers of naturalism to the anglo-american high modernists. The titular "vanishing subject" springs from the diagnosis, which spread like wildfire in the second half of the XIXth century, that there was no such thing as "selves". The dismantling of the subject, via Nietzsche, has since become a staple of much recent philosophy, but overshadowed by a number of other movements (first of all existentialism) it remained to some extent the privileged hunting-ground of literateurs over the period covered by the book. The self, for Ernst Mach and his fellow monists, is nothing but a "bundle of sensations", sensations whose long-lasting overlap produce the illusion of permanence, and thus has lead many thinkers to posit it as a transcendantal, otherworldly presence on the plane of immanence.
Ryan divides her studies in three groups, baed on their position towards this crisis of the subject. Some approach it as an opportunity for new experiments with language and creation, others attempts to resist it, and the third wave integrate it in a larger scheme of narrative deconstruction. The resulting picture is a compelling one, tracing a new network among famous and less famous cultural actors, which differs but often converge with the more traditional focus of formalist readings. Some of her interpretations are more compelling than others, but this is no doubt the price to pay for such a wide ranging study, and none of them entirely miss the point. Of particular interest to me was her section of those attempting to resist the said vanishing of the subject, which entail a variety of strategies to reconstruct or "salvage" it, which could be regarded in many ways as leading the way to the post-war "return to order" : from this vantage point the shift from radical individualism, which was so common to the first-wave of avant-gardes, to the humanist or totalitarian variations of the interwar period is illuminated as a continued attempt to reassert a material subject.
A lot has been written on subjectivity in literature before and after Ryan's book but her focus on the early psychological tradition, rather than existentialist or phenomenological systems, provide us with that continuity between "positivists" and "avant-gardes" : the fact that the positivists against whom the avant-garde claimed to revolt was little more than a straw man thus become obvious and the claim to radical novelty, or the epistemological break that many have sought become diffused in a network of evolving theories about the self, which, as psychology and materialism did at the time, oscillate between experimental science and philosophy.
With all those convoluted concepts, the book manages to remain highly readable, in part thanks to the compact format of each essays, and even rather entertaining. The chapter on Alice James' diary, of whom I had never heard, was a high point, as were those on Viennese modernism, which highlighted the sense of continuity between modernity and modernism common to german-speaking countries, without reducing its particularity to linguistic or freudian influences. I do not see Ryan often quoted or mentioned but I think her book is definitely worth reading for anyone interested in the social or cultural history of the period, and all the more for those interested in modernism.