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Wednesday
I’ve been reporting on Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, and today turn to stream of consciousness. As the Ohio State Professor of Story Science explains it, this literary invention has brought relief to people suffering from “heightened cognitive reactivity,” which is what happens when our mind “overreacts to a wave of its cognitive stream.” Among such overreactions, Fletcher points to how a memory can send us into a panic, a slight can “pitch us into gloom,” and an idea can “dash us into stampeding thought.”
Heightened cognitive reactivity, he elaborates, is “a feature of mania, depression, post-traumatic stress, complicated grief and other psychiatric conditions.” It is also “a common result of stress, tiredness, overstimulation and other conditions of ordinary life.”
For healing help, he recommends turning to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
The chapter begins by looking at the revolutionary breakthroughs in psychology made by William James, the brother of Henry. James broke with the psychology of his day by noting that the mind flows like a river or a stream. As he put it,
Every definite image in the mind is stepped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echol of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead.
Before James and even after, the common prescription for people suffering from nervous disorders (as they were called at the time) was rest. This applied to soldiers with PTSD and women suffering (like Woolf) from bipolar disorder. But James discovered, and Woolf agreed, that doing nothing actually made things worse. When such a remedy is tried on PTSD victim Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, he commits suicide by leaping out of a window.
Instead of telling people they shouldn’t read, James said they should find the right kind of reading. James himself
consumed a steady diet of books “favorable” to his own volition, and gradually he felt his dark emotions lift. By 1872, the relief was so complete that James declared his “soul sickness” gone.
The psychological conclusion is that we should cultivate some form of mindfulness, which helps us
feel a slight separation from our consciousness, as if we’re observing our own ideas from without. So instead of being dragged along by a rushing river of moods, memories and impressions, we stand free on the riverbank, watching our mental waves lap past.
Fletcher says that this feeling of psychological distance
reduces brain activity in emotion and memory-processing regions such as our cortical midline structures and insular cortex. And that reduction in turn lowers our cognitive reactivity, gentling the symptoms of even depression, mania, generalized anxiety, and posttraumatic stress.
Fletcher notes that different authors have different styles of stream of consciousness. Proust remains within a single consciousness while Joyce, without any warning, jumps between minds, often without providing the connections between thoughts so that one feels constantly jolted. (This is one reason Ulysses is so hard to read.) Like Proust, Woolf always shows us the the connections but, like Joyce, she doesn’t stay inside one mind but moves between multiple minds (four in Mrs. Dalloway).
To watch Fletcher’s theory in action, let’s start with a passage from Woolf’s novel. On the first page, Mrs. Dalloway has just decided to go out and buy flowers for herself:
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—”I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings like this about cabbages.
Fletcher says that the style provides a therapeutic effect similar to mindfulness exercises:
As it guides us through the consciousnesses of character after character after character, it gradually attunes our brain to a great consciousness: the third-person perspective of the novel itself. That perspectives weaves us in and out of the minds of Clarissa, Scrope,Septimus, and all the rest, enabling us to simultaneously experience inside feelings and outside distance. The resulting blend of emotion perception and cognitive separation mimics the modern psychiatric treatment for heightened cognitive reactivity. Filling our consciousness with mental flow, yet reducing the neural activity of our cortical midline structures and insular cortex, it allows us to experience emotional torrents while remaining free of their undertow.
In this flow, we are conscious both of Clarissa Dalloway’s “shock of delight” and Septimus’s desperate suicidal thoughts, even while we are not shocked or desperate ourselves. As Fletcher succinctly sums up our situation,
We can know the river’s deepest currents while feeling calm upon the shore.
Fletcher recommends other novels as well, including one by Ian McEwan that I read recently:
Whenever you’d like more of that peace, you can find the innovations of Woolf and Proust in a wide range of modern fiction. If you’d like a sci-fi mystery, try Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. If yuou’d like a voyage through the mind of a neurosurgeon, try Ian McEwan’s Saturday. If you’d like a dip into sixties-style hallucinogenic paranoia, try Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. If you’d like a love story, try Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You.
As you turn the pages, he advises, “feel the war inside your nerves relax as the flow of rivers rushes past.”
