Vessels of Consciousness

Abstract

The modern turn to psychological inwardness in the novel has often been discussed with reference to William James’s phrase, “vessel of consciousness.” Much of this chapter concerns his brother, Henry James, and his theorization of perspectivally delimited states of consciousness as a primary medium for the novel. James’s theories make a point of gendering this delimitation, claiming that female consciousness, historically constrained by lack of access to masculine vocations, actually possesses an awareness of the world advantageously enlarged by the exercise of imagination. James’s theory is placed against the backdrop of the novel’s gradual turn from epistemological to psychological veracity, from chronicling the material and social world to anatomizing the vicissitudes of consciousness as such—a transition from “character” to “psychology,” a transition made evident in Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black. Once the twentieth-century novel establishes the vessel of consciousness as a primary component of its generic toolkit, the fragility of the vessel became apparent, and a technical gain in verisimilitude (refinement of character psychology) turned out to be discordant with the generically contracted principle of reality in previous fiction. The vessel of consciousness could no longer be confined to the novel itself, but became contingent on the participatory immersion of the reader’s consciousness as well.