Minding Manuscripts: Modernism, Genetic Criticism and Intertextual Cognition
Dirk Van Hulle
In disciplines such as the study of visual arts, there is a long tradition of examining the painting process to interpret the painted result. Applied to literary studies, this procedure involves at least two approaches, which Jonathan Culler has termed ‘a basic distinction, too often neglected in literary studies’: one approach starts from meanings and tries to find out how they come about; the other approach starts from forms and tries to find out what they mean. In literary studies, these two approaches are referred to as ‘poetics’ and ‘hermeneutics’: ‘Poetics starts with attested meanings or effects and asks how they are achieved. […] Hermeneutics, on the other hand, starts with texts and asks what they mean, seeking to discover new and better interpretations’ (Culler, 2009, 84). These approaches are not mutually exclusive. In Culler’s dichotomy, however, poetics is seen as an approach modelled on linguistics, examining, for instance, why a particular passage seems ironic, what makes us sympathize with a character or why a particular ending seems right, whereas another does not seem to ‘work’. These effects are usually analysed on the basis of the published texts, but it is both possible and useful to add a temporal dimension to this approach. The making of a tale often involves numerous notes, plans, sketches and multiple drafts, which is the domain of genetic criticism. This branch of literary studies, focusing on writing processes, understands ‘poetics’ in its etymological sense, derived as it is from the Greek verb poein, ‘to make’.
With reference to poetry in the realm of modernist literature in English, famous examples such as the facsimile edition of the avant-texte of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or Helen Gardner’s genetic study of The Composition of ‘Four Quartets’ indicate the apparent use of manuscript research despite the author’s repeated expressions of doubt as to the usefulness of genetic criticism. As for dramatic texts, the genesis of Samuel Beckett’s theatrical works serves as an interesting paradigm, as it has been the subject both of critical studies (Gontarski, 1985; Pountney, 1988) and of annotated editions, including the author’s theatrical notebooks (Beckett, 1992a,b, 1993). In terms of prose fiction in English, a particularly strong tradition of genetic research developed in Joyce studies. In other literatures, the manuscripts of modernist authors such as Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust have also been the subject of careful scrutiny. In this chapter, I would like to focus on the genre of prose fiction, because – as I will argue – there seems to be a connection between the preservation of manuscripts and a modernist interest in the workings of the mind, which is particularly noticeable in prose fiction.
When writers’ interest gradually shifted from reality to the perception of reality, a process that was especially pronounced in the period of modernism, this development implied an increased focus on the mind. This shift coincided in the first half of the twentieth century with what Florence Callu has called ‘the golden age of the literary manuscript’ (1993, 65). The fact that so many writers from this period have preserved their notes and drafts could be a measure of the value they attached to these traces of the creative process, giving them a special status in their œuvre and enabling readers to apply ‘poetics’ in addition to ‘hermeneutics’. My research hypothesis is that knowing how something was made can contribute to an understanding of how it works and that this also applies to literary texts.
The Process of Taletelling
There is more to the telling of a tale than meets the eye. Whether a story is published in print or online, the writing and telling of the tale is an art that deserves close scrutiny. This means that the writing process is regarded as an integral part of a rationale, a particular conception of, or view on, literature. It is remarkable how often the writing process is made thematic in modernist and late modernist writings. This is not a mere coincidence. The motif of the telling as part of the tale is indicative of the status of the writing process in the narrative composition.
This motif is also inextricably linked with the observation that writers in the beginning of the twentieth century were explicitly interested in the workings of the mind and with the observation that many of the characters in the literary writings of this period, such as K. in Kafka’s works or Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), are modelled after their creators, not in an (auto)biographical but in an ‘autographical’ sense (see below). Metafictional references to the writing process may be understood as part of the literary evocations of the mind. The evocation of fictional minds constitutes one of at least six main facets of a narrative text (based on structuralist narratology as well as the more recent insights of post-classical narratology): (1) time and temporal ordering; (2) space and spatialization; (3) actions, events and emplotment; (4) characters and characterization; (5) focalization (perspective) and narration (voice); and (6) fictional minds (consciousness representation).
From the perspective of genetic criticism, Raymonde Debray Genette has shown how useful the combination of manuscript research with narratology can be, for instance in her genetic analysis of the excipit (the closing paragraphs) of Flaubert’s story ‘Un Cœur simple’ (Debray Genette, 2004). This combination of genetic criticism and narratology is not unidirectional. In the past (though less in recent years), narratologists were not afraid of taking recourse to manuscript research to investigate one or other of the six facets mentioned earlier. As to aspect 5 (focalization and narration), for instance, a notable example is Dorrit Cohn’s 1968 study of Kafka’s Das Schloss (1926), ‘K. enters The Castle’. The manuscript informs her examination of Kafka’s narrative techniques in a rather spectacular way, since the famous ‘K.’ turns out to be a relatively late addition to the manuscript.
Originally, the first part of the manuscript had a first-person narrator. With only a few minimal replacements, Kafka changes the first-person narrator into ‘K.’ and refers to the experiencing self through third-person pronouns. The shift from first person to third person turns homodiegetic narration (with a narrator telling the story from within the fictional world) into heterodiegetic narration (with a narrator who does not take part in the plot) and yet maintains the fixed internal focalization (Bernaerts and Van Hulle, 2013), as the adverb ‘today’ in the following sentence illustrates: ‘Das Schloβ […], das ich heute noch zu erreichen gehofft hatte, entfernte sich wieder’ [‘The castle […], which I had hoped to reach today, receded again’] (Ms./26, qtd. in Cohn, 1968, 31; emphasis added). In the published version, ‘I’ is replaced by ‘K.’ but ‘today’ (heute) remains unchanged. ‘The logic of a first-person narrative determines […] that the period of time lying between experience and recounting be known to the narrator’ (Cohn, 1968, 32), but this logic is less self-evident if the narrating self is effaced.
In the manuscript version of Kafka’s The Castle, with its first-person narrator, ‘the narrating self remains effaced’, since ‘by shifting the focus entirely onto the experiencing self, the past situation loses its pastness and becomes a virtual present within the text’ (Cohn, 1968, 31). Kafka’s use of temporal adverbs such as ‘today’ (heute) or ‘now’ (jetzt) in combination with the past tense within the erlebte Rede [free indirect discourse, narrated monologue] are, according to Cohn, signals of what she calls ‘the complete surrender of the narrator to his own earlier self’ (33). It was possible and even relatively easy for Kafka to replace ‘I’ with ‘K.’ because of this surrender to the experiencing self. Another example is this series of three questions: ‘Wo waren wir? Ging es nicht mehr weiter? Würde Barnabas mich verabschieden?’ [‘Where were we? Didn’t it go any further? Would Barnabas take leave of me?’], which in the published version became ‘Wo waren sie? Ging es nicht mehr weiter? Würde Barnabas K. verabschieden?’ [‘Where were they? Didn’t it go any further? Would Barnabas take leave of K.?’] (qtd. in Cohn, 1978, 170). While past-tense first-person narratives ‘cannot eliminate the temporal distance between the moment of narration and the narrated moment’ (Cohn, 1968, 144), the past-tense third-person narrative has the advantage that it creates the illusion of immediacy. Thanks to the manuscript, Cohn’s attention was drawn to how (in Culler’s sense) Kafka created this effect, since the manuscript foregrounds the experiencing self (Cohn, 1978, 170; emphasis added).
This emphasis on the ‘experiencing self’ suggests an interesting avenue to study aspect 6 (the evocation of consciousness or fictional minds). Especially in this category, the combination of genetic criticism and narratology can break new ground in modernist studies. To examine this avenue in the following sections, the works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett will serve as case studies.
Fictional Minds and Manuscripts
The evocation of consciousness and the emphasis on the experiencing self suggest a link with phenomenology and Husserl’s technique of bracketing. The three questions from Kafka’s manuscript (‘Where were we? Didn’t it go any further? Would Barnabas take leave of me?’) express a form of narrative uncertainty that prefigures the three opening questions in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953): ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’ The order of these central narratological questions is different in the original French version: ‘Où maintenant? Quand maintenant? Qui maintenant?’ (see Beckett, 2013). In the second manuscript version (UoR MS 1227/7/9/1), there were initially only two questions; the third question (‘Quand maintenant?’) was added at a later stage, above the line. And in the earliest manuscript version (HRC MS SB 3–10, inside front cover) the two questions ‘Où maintenant? Qui maintenant?’ turn out to be a substitution for an even earlier incipit that reads as follows: ‘Je ne saurais dire comment j’y suis arrivé. D’ailleurs quelle est cette situation?’ [‘I couldn’t tell how arrived there. Moreover, what is this situation?’] (Beckett, 2013; HRC MS SB 3–10, 01r). By adding questions, Beckett thus created the effect of bracketing (in a phenomenological sense). In the initial opening sentence, the first person seemed to be a given; in the later versions, this first person was no longer taken for granted. Then, in the version with the two questions, one element at least seemed to be given: ‘maintenant’. By adding the third question, even this temporal ‘given’ of the narrative situation became uncertain: ‘Quand maintenant?’
This temporal dimension – perhaps even more than the spatial and personal dimensions – suggests the potential to transgress the borders of the storyworld.1 Since The Unnamable is a first-person narrative, the other two questions can intuitively be completed: ‘Where [am I] now? Who [am I] now?’ But this is grammatically less evident with ‘When [am I] now?’ In combination with the question ‘Who now?’ the ‘when’ question at the very beginning of the story implies the suggestion that the narrator/narrated has a past. And later on in the story, this past will be connected to his ‘avatars’ – the protagonists in Beckett’s preceding novels, such as Murphy, Watt, Mercier, Molloy, Malone. This metafictional and metaleptic2 gesture relates to Beckett’s notion that ‘the individual is a succession of individuals’, as he noted in his essay Proust (Beckett, 1999a, 19) – an idea that is most explicitly staged in his play Krapp’s Last Tape. The transition from Malone Dies to The Unnamable is an interesting moment in the succession of narrators. For, on the one hand, Beckett seems to be pushing a Cartesian model of the mind to extremes, and, on the other hand, he implicitly prefigures a post-Cartesian model.
The caricature of the Cartesian model is what Daniel C. Dennett has dubbed the ‘Cartesian theatre’ or the so-called homunculus model, locating consciousness in the pineal gland or conarium, as if The Unnamable’s ‘who’ question could be solved by answering the ‘where’ question. Since the homunculus inside the brain would need a brain himself, with a smaller homunculus inside, etc., this series of conarium-within-conarium eventually becomes more and more infinitesimal until, not unlike Murphy’s pineal gland, the ‘conarium has shrunk to nothing’ (Beckett 2009a, 6). The result is a Chinese boxes model that locates consciousness at an ‘ideal core of the onion’, to use another metaphor Beckett employed in his essay Proust (1931) (Beckett, 1999a, 29).
On the other hand, a post-Cartesian model seems to be intuitively prefigured in some modernist and late modernist works. Instead of looking for a ‘core of the onion’, this other model sees the workings of the mind in terms of a process. While Beckett’s novels Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable push the homunculus model to extremes, they also hint at the possibility of such a post-Cartesian, processual approach to the study of the human mind. In Malone Dies, for instance, Malone literally writes his self, by means of an exercise book and a pencil. In this capacity, he is paradigmatic of the ‘autograph’ in the sense suggested by H. Porter Abbott, whose ‘working distinction between autography and autobiography is that autography is the larger field comprehending all self-writing’ (1996, 2).
The Autograph: Beyond ‘Endogenesis’
Although Porter Abbott does not study manuscripts in his book Beckett Writing Beckett, the notion of the ‘autograph’ in his narratological context does not need to be separated from its original meaning in manuscript studies. In Medieval studies, the word ‘autograph’ is used to denote a manuscript in the hand of the text’s author, as opposed to the vast majority of Medieval manuscripts that were written in the hand of a scribe. There is a reason why so many modernist authors kept their manuscripts or donated many of them to university libraries, as in Beckett’s case. The autograph is a key concept in literary research into the human mind, which in turn is a central concern of modernist literature. The autograph in the sense that the self is ‘written by itself’ comes close to Dennett’s notion of ‘narrative selfhood’ and his ‘multiple drafts model’ of consciousness – his alternative to the ‘Cartesian theatre’ (see below). Moreover, building on David Herman’s work on cognitive narratology, the notion of the autograph can be connected to the notions of the ‘extended mind’ (Clark and Chalmers, 1998) and the ‘extensive mind’ (Hutto and Myin, 2013), to investigate how intertextuality functions as a model of the ‘extended mind’ at work; and how manuscript research plays a role in modernist writers’ literary enquiries into the human mind. To examine this, my case study is James Joyce’s use of Wyndham Lewis’s critique of behaviourism and of ‘telling from the inside’ in The Art of Being Ruled.3
The controversy between Lewis (interested in the notion of space) and Joyce (who, according to Lewis, was too preoccupied with the notion of time) is reflected in the so-called ‘dime-cash’ problem in Finnegans Wake (Joyce, 1939, 149.11–150.14), considered from the point of view of a ‘spatialist’. In the first draft, the ‘dime’ was originally spelled ‘time’: ‘my disposals of the same time-cash problem elsewhere, naturalistically, of course, from the blinkpoint of a spatialist’ (Joyce 1963, 99; emphasis added). In The Art of Being Ruled (1926), the ‘spatialist’ Wyndham Lewis had already criticized the ‘considerable degree of naturalism aimed at’ in Ulysses, suggesting a correspondence between Leopold Bloom’s stream of consciousness and the conversation of Mr. Jingle in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers. His conclusion was that Joyce made extensive use of ‘a fashionable naturalist device – that usually described as “presenting the character from the inside”’ (Lewis, 1989, 346).
This description corresponds with what early critics of modernism called the ‘journey within’ (Guerard, 2006, 326). Building on Herman’s criticism of this ‘critical commonplace’ (Herman, 2011), I suggest that this inside-versus-outside image is an inexact metaphor, based on an obsolete Cartesian body/mind split, which to some extent is also recognizable in Raymonde Debray Genette’s distinction between ‘endogenesis’ and ‘exogenesis’ (1979). ‘Endogenesis’ is everything that belongs as it were to the inside (Gr. endo) of the writer’s ‘own’ writing project, whereas ‘exogenesis’ stands for the external source texts he or she makes use of during the writing process. I should immediately add that genetic criticism has always recognized that the border between endo- and exogenesis is indistinct (see de Biasi, 1996). But the point I want to make relates to the inside/outside, endo/exo metaphor, which may still be a remnant of our age-old bias towards an ‘internalist’ model of the mind, based on Descartes. Dennett’s alternative to this ‘Cartesian theatre’ is his so-called ‘multiple drafts model’ of consciousness, which roughly corresponds with the multiple versions that typically characterize ‘endogenesis’.
Dennett compares the workings of the conscious mind to a process of editorial revision, with various additions, emendations and overwritings (Dennett, 1991, 112). The resulting narrative sequences are, again, subject to continuous editing, to the extent that there is ‘no single narrative that counts as the canonical version’, because ‘at any point in time there are multiple “drafts” of narrative fragments at various stages of editing in various places in the brain’ (113). Especially to genetic critics and textual scholars, this may seem a plausible model of the mind, but I want to add two nuances.
First, this model is not new. In November 1929, Benjamin Crémieux wrote a review of ‘Work in Progress’, arguing that Joyce’s purpose in distorting words was to escape from the abstract symbols they represented and to bring them closer to cognition. Joyce allowed the words ‘to reproduce the hesitations, the errors, the drafts of cognition’ (‘de leur permettre de reproduire les hésitations, les erreurs, les ébauches de la pensée’).4 So, Crémieux already prefigured Dennett’s metaphor of the multiple drafts model of cognition.
Second, Dennett employed this metaphor to explain consciousness, but in genetic criticism, this is not just a metaphor: these multiple drafts are real. They are the stuff that fiction is made of. In other words, the manuscripts are not just a record of but an integral part of the cognitive process. This externalizes Dennett’s model and brings it closer to another recent paradigm in cognitive sciences, called enactivism, which has affinities with the extended mind theory. According to this theory, the mind is not limited to the brain, inside the skull; the mind is an interaction between an intelligent agent and his or her physical and cultural environment.
To study literary evocations of this ‘extended mind’ at work in modernism, an adequate starting point is the incipit of Anna Livia Plurabelle (first published as a separate book in 1928), which later became chapter 8 of Finnegans Wake: ‘O/tell me all’. In his study of the making of Anna Livia Plurabelle, Fred Higginson described the pleasure that he took in Finnegans Wake as ‘the pleasure of watching the mind at work’ (1960, 14). Higginson was one of the first to analyse the Wake as a ‘Work in Progress’, taking its successive versions into account, watching the mind at work and choosing the river chapter as his subject. Evidently, the metaphor of stream of consciousness imposes itself. The text of Anna Livia Plurabelle is famous for the hundreds of river names that are woven into the text, but it can hardly be called a description of the river Liffey. It would be more precise to see the text in performative terms: it performs ‘imagination’, it enacts the workings of a mind. This performative rendition of the notion of ‘stream of consciousness’ adds a cognitive dimension to what A. Walton Litz called Joyce’s ‘rendering [rather than description] of the river’ (1964, 113).
This metaphor of the river also recurs in Dennett’s view on consciousness. In his multiple drafts model, he considers the telling of tales to be a ‘fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition’ (Dennett, 1991, 417). He therefore sees the ‘self’ in terms of ‘narrative selfhood’, consisting of what he calls ‘streams of narrative’:
These streams of narrative issue forth as if from a single source – not just in the obvious physical sense of flowing from just one mouth, or one pencil or pen, but in a more subtle sense: their effect on any audience is to encourage them to (try to) posit a unified agent whose words they are, about whom they are: in short, to posit a center of narrative gravity. (418)
This positing of a centre of narrative gravity is exactly what happens in the opening of Anna Livia Plurabelle: the presentation of streams of narrative issuing forth as if from a single source.
Dennett, however, mixes this river metaphor with another powerful metaphor: that of the web. He suggests that
our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definiton is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others – and ourselves – about who we are. [ … ] Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source. (418)
But Dennett also notes that ‘Unlike a spider, an individual human doesn’t just exude its web; more like a beaver, it works hard to gather the materials out of which it builds its protective fortress’ (416).
The statement that a human being does not just ‘exude its web’ comes remarkably close to the age-old ‘querelle des anciens et des modernes’, notably to the fable of the spider and the bee in Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books (1704). As a ‘modern’ writer, the spider may be under the illusion that it builds its web ‘with [its] own hands, and the materials extracted altogether out of [its] own person’, as Swift puts it (Swift, 1986, 112), but the Ancients point out that the spider also feeds on insects and the ‘vermin of its age’, otherwise it would not be able to make its web.5 So, whereas the river metaphor corresponds well with the endogenetic process (as described, for instance, by Higginson), the web metaphor corresponds rather well with exogenetics.
Incorporating ‘Exogenesis’
Applying Swift’s terms to Joyce, it seems fair to say that he mainly worked according to the manner of the bee, and of the Ancients, gathering his ‘verbal booty’ – or ‘butin verbal’, as Samuel Beckett called it in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy (8 November 1931; Beckett, 1999b, xiv) – wherever he could find it. Wyndham Lewis accused him of lacking any special viewpoint of his own. In contrast, Lewis would probably have considered himself more of a spider, on the side of the moderns. Joyce, however, showed him that he was also feeding on the ‘vermin of his age’, to use Swift’s terms.
A good example is Wyndham Lewis’s criticism of behaviourism in his book The Art of Being Ruled (1926), where he starts railing at ‘Professor Watson’, ‘the greatest exponent of behaviorism, and the king of testers’ (Lewis, 1989, 339). Joyce took down the word ‘tester’ in his Finnegans Wake notebook VI.B.20 and a few other notes from Lewis’s rant against behaviourism. Lewis ridicules Watson’s way of explaining everything in terms of stimulus and response; he also ridicules Watson’s argument that ‘introspectist’ psychology threw away the notion of the ‘soul’ only to replace it by the notion of a ‘mind’ that ‘was to remain always hidden and difficult of access’ (Watson, qtd. in Lewis, 1989, 339). As opposed to this ‘introspectist’ inward turn, some cognitive philosophers such as Louise Barrett only very recently suggested that there is something to say for Watson’s behaviourist approach and that ‘a stimulus-response mechanism is a legitimate “cognitive” process’ (Barrett, 2011, 10).
Against this cognitive background, Joyce’s reaction to Lewis is quite interesting: after reading Lewis’s rant against behaviourism, Joyce responded ‘behavioristically’ in transition 6 (Joyce, 1927, 98), employing this adverb in the first draft of chapter 6, in which ‘Professor Levis-Brueller’ (99) tries to explain the ‘dime-cash problem’ and starts with the question ‘Why am I not born like a Gentilman’ (99), alluding to Lewis’s discussion of Bloom’s ‘gentleman-complex – the Is he or isn’t he a gentleman? – the phantom index-finger of the old shabby-genteel’ (Lewis, 1993, 105). But soon enough the Professor notices that his message is not coming across: ‘As my explanations here are probably above your understandings I shall revert to a more expletive method which I frequently use when I have to sermo with muddleclass pupils’ (Joyce, 1927, 100). To illustrate his point he tells the fable of ‘The Mookse and the Gripes’ (101).
In transition 6, this fable ends at the bottom of page 105 (‘I no canna stay!’). Page 106 opens with the Professor’s smug recapitulation (‘As I have now successfully explained to you … ’) and on the next page (106a)6 he reminds his audience:
My heeders will recoil with a great leisure how at the outbreak before trespassing on the space question [ … ] I proved to mindself as to your sotisfiction how his abject all through [ … ] is nothing so much more than a mere cashdime however genteel he may want ours (106a; emphasis added)
Again, the word ‘genteel’ alludes to what Lewis called the ‘gentleman-complex’ of the ‘shabby-genteel’ (Lewis, 1993, 105).
In transition 6, the fable is followed by the Professor’s second illustration, the Burrus and Caseous episode: ‘Burrus, let us like to imagine, is a genuine prime, the real choice, full of natural greace [ … ] whereat Caseous is oversely the revise of him’ (106a). Again, this episode is filled with ‘exogenetic’ fragments derived from Lewis’s critique. In the chapter ‘Hatred of Language and the Behaviorist “Word-Habit”’ (in The Art of Being Ruled), just before discussing Watson’s behaviourism, Lewis had argued that ‘without the control of the intellect, words have tended to go over into music’ (1989, 339). Joyce alludes to this theme on page 106d when he introduces ‘Margareen’: ‘We now romp through a period of pure lyricism of shamebred music evidenced by such words in distress as I cream for thee, Sweet Margareen’ (106d). Her intermediary position (‘Margareena she’s very fond of Burrus but, alick and alack! She velly fond of chee’; 106e) is appropriately presented as an intermezzo in the ‘art of being rude’ (106e-f). And finally, in The Art of Being Ruled, Lewis had made a link between Joyce’s literary project and the ‘exploitation of madness, of ticks, [and] blephorospasms, and eccentricities of the mechanism of the brain’ (347; emphasis added), which Joyce alludes to on page 106f: ‘a boosted blasted bleating blatant bloaten blasphorus blesporous idiot’.
Joyce’s ‘endogenetic’ incorporation of references to Lewis’s ‘exogenetic’ criticism is interesting in a cognitive context because it shows how Joyce managed to draw attention to the act of taletelling by turning the telling into the content of the tale. The point Joyce made, several decades before Dennett came up with the multiple drafts model, was that the telling of tales is constitutive of the human mind. And perhaps Joyce intuitively pushed the point even further than Dennett’s theory of narrative selfhood by suggesting that this is not an exclusively internal affair, but that it involves the environment. As a consequence, a more enactive understanding of narrative selfhood provides a model of the mind that implies the undoing of the inside/outside, exo/endo split. As an alternative for this split in literary studies, it might be useful to understand (especially modernist) taletelling in terms of intertextual cognition.
Conclusion: Intertextual Cognition
In the past, genetic research into Joyce’s notebooks has been derogatively called ‘source hunting’ or ‘philological spadework’. I would argue that this derogatory attitude was a remnant of a view on modernism as an ‘inward turn’, which saw the mind in terms of an inside/outside metaphor, the equivalent of what Hutto and Myin call the ‘Senior Partner Principle’ (in the context of cognitive philosophy):
To suppose that what is constitutive of mentality must reside in organisms or their brains alone is to endorse a Senior Partner Principle holding that, although a partnership with environmental factors may be causally necessary for cognition, the organism’s or system’s brain ‘wears the trousers’ in the relationship; only brains bring mentality to the party. In the place of this, we promote the more even-handed Equal Partner Principle as the right way to understand basic mental activity. Accordingly, contributions of the brain are not prioritized over those of the environment. (Hutto and Myin, 2013, 137)
Exogenetic research should of course not be limited to detective work. But on the other hand, disparaging exogenetic research as ‘source hunting’ may imply a similar Senior Partner Principle, focusing too narrowly on what is alleged to derive directly from the author’s ‘brain’: the endogenesis. I suggest modernist studies might benefit from a more integrative approach along the lines of the Equal Partner Principle, focusing on the interaction (rather than the distinction) between endogenesis and exogenesis.
This is not just a methodological issue and it does not apply only to genetic criticism, for this Equal Partner Principle reflects an enactive approach to what might be termed ‘intertextual cognition’. Intertextuality differs from ‘source hunting’ in that it puts the emphasis on the reader rather than on the author. It is the reader who finds links between a text and other texts and thus establishes the intertext. Given this focus on other texts, it may seem hard – at first sight – to reconcile intertextuality with, for instance, Dennett’s notion of ‘narrative selfhood’. But if we apply this notion of ‘narrative selfhood’ (consisting of so-called ‘streams of narrative’) to fictional minds, the exogenetic dimension of so many modernist texts stresses the fact that what Dennett calls the ‘streams of narrative’ issue forth as if from a single source. The effect of these ‘streams of narrative’ on an audience (readers) is to encourage them to posit a centre of narrative gravity (Dennett, 1991, 418). The exploration of the mind, which is a preoccupation of so many modernists, therefore counts on the reader’s ‘positing’ of this centre. And this positing is markedly intertextual. Manuscript research (especially exogenetic criticism) encourages such an intertextual reading. The enactments of the ‘streams of narrative’ that make up a fictional narrative selfhood in Anna Livia Plurabelle and the fable of the Mookse and the Gripes show the large extent to which this narrative selfhood consists of ‘exogenetic’ material. This observation leads us, first, to agree with David Herman’s suggestion that modernism’s investigations of the mind imply less of an ‘inward turn’ than the critical commonplace would have it; and secondly, to suggest that Dennett’s ‘multiple drafts model’ might benefit from opening up its ‘inward’ focus to a more enactivist approach that sees consciousness in terms of the extended mind, which finds its literary equivalent in intertextuality and also relies on the mind of the reader.
A fictional character that could be said to personify this intertextual cognition is Lucky in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In a sense, Lucky prefigures and ‘performs’ Dennett’s idea that ‘Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us’ and that ‘Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source’ (Dennett, 1991, 418). When Lucky is asked to dance, he responds ‘naturally’ to the impression of being caught in a web or a net: ‘He thinks he’s entangled in a net’ (Beckett, 2009c, 37). And when he is asked to ‘think’, his mind seems to be similarly entangled in a net or a web of allusions and references. Since many modernists and late modernists were preoccupied with the attempt to evoke the workings of the human mind, it is not a coincidence that intertextuality plays such an important role in their writings. From a cognitive point of view, intertextuality functions as a model of the taletelling self as a narrative ‘work in progress’. By revisiting Dennett’s ‘multiple drafts model’ and ‘narrative selfhood’ from an enactive perspective and studying the extended mind at work in real (not just metaphorical) drafts, minding manuscripts reveals itself as a valuable way of examining the central modernist concern with the workings of human consciousness and cognition.
Notes
1 In narratology, metalepsis denotes the transgression of the boundaries between narrative levels. For an in-depth study of this phenomenon in Beckett’s works, see Debra Malina, Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2002).
2 In the preceding novels, Beckett prepared the ground for this metaleptic transgression. In Molloy, the subject of the first question (where?) was the first ‘given’ in the narrative situation: ‘I am in my mother’s room’ (Beckett, 2009b, 3). The ‘when’ question, however, was problematized in the closing lines: ‘Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.’ (184)
3 For a more detailed and extensive analysis of Joyce’s incorporation of Lewis’s critique as a form of the extended mind at work, see Van Hulle, 2016a; the case study from Joyce’s work in this essay is a revised version of the proceedings of the 24th James Joyce Symposium in Utrecht (June 2014; see Van Hulle, 2016b).
4 ‘Ce que recherche l’auteur d’Ulysses, en créant ou en déformant les mots, c’est d’échapper au symbole abstrait qu’ils représentent, c’est de les rapprocher de la pensée, de leur permettre de reproduire les hésitations, les erreurs, les ébauches de la pensée, de reproduire le courant ininterrompu de la pensée’ (University at Buffalo, James Joyce Collection, clippings, envelope 33: 1018).
5 In this way, ‘The spider’s web appears as a proper part of [what Richard Dawkins called] the spider’s extended phenotype’, which Andy Clark compares to the extended mind (Clark, 2012, 287).
6 In transition 6, the fable was followed by the story of Burrus and Caseous. Joyce was extremely late with his lengthy addition for which the editors of transition even had to take apart the first four hundred copies of the review, which had already been stitched. The page numbering also had to be adapted.
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