The Limits of the Mind: Cognition and Narrative Form in the Modernist Novel

The modernist novel displays a recurrent interest in the limits of perceptual and cognitive faculties. Exploring this "cognitive thread" I reconsider terms for understanding literary modernism (difficulty, "unknowing," inwardness, stream of consciousness) as well as terms fundamental to narratology (frame, character, focalization, discourse). Chapter One addresses the difficulty of tracking the thoughts of a large number of characters. This challenge is also at work in narratology's communicative frame. Modernist narratives and the narratological frame for understanding them approach cognitive limitations in tracking multiple consciousnesses, resulting in a pragmatic "functionalizing"--a readerly practice of reducing characters and agents from sources of consciousness to discrete functions. Chapter Two addresses the functionalizing tendency of modernist experimentation in the single character. I reinterpret E.M. Forster's distinction between "flat" and "round" characters as the basis of a computationalist theory of character rather than a mimetic theory. I show how this conception of character is at work in A Passage to India. By foregrounding artifice rather than mimesis, Forster gives a new dimension to modernist "unknowing," the tendency for modernist narratives to dismantle the Bildungsroman structure of a subject coming to know itself. Chapter Three addresses the critical debate between "inwardness" and the external world in the works of Virginia Woolf. I argue that in Woolf's essays and fiction, forms of misperception are an index of her understanding of the inherent connection between the inner life and the outer world by a fallible human body. The limits of the sensory apparatuses run parallel to the limits of what can be conveyed in narrative. Perceptual limitations form the basis of Woolf's experimentation with focalization--the narratological term for the vantage from which a narrative is told. Chapter Four focuses on the minimum threshold of consciousness itself--moments of not thinking at all--in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes. The novel uses familiar stylistic strategies such as free indirect discourse but not in the service of the "inner voice" or the "stream of consciousness." Instead, the novel focuses on the "core" element of consciousness--what Antonio Damasio explains as "a sense of self about one moment--now--and about one place." Despite the focus on core consciousness, Lolly Willowes is nonetheless a novel of self-discovery in which Laura comes to understand herself to be a witch. In Warner's version of epiphany, I show how insight comes not from a process of reasoning but from core consciousness--an emanation from the lowest limit of the mind.