Vessels of Consciousness

Jed Rasula
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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.
意识的容器
在讨论小说中对心理内在性的现代转向时,经常提到威廉·詹姆斯的短语“意识的容器”。这一章的大部分内容都是关于他的兄弟亨利·詹姆斯,以及他对作为小说主要媒介的视角界定的意识状态的理论化。詹姆斯的理论强调了这一界限的性别化,声称女性意识在历史上由于缺乏接触男性职业的机会而受到限制,实际上拥有一种对世界的意识,这种意识通过想象力的运用得到了有利的扩大。詹姆斯的理论是在小说逐渐从认识论转向心理真实性的背景下提出的,从记录物质和社会世界到剖析意识的变迁——从“性格”到“心理”的转变,这一转变在司汤达的小说《红与黑》中表现得很明显。一旦二十世纪的小说将意识的容器作为其通用工具的主要组成部分,容器的脆弱性就变得显而易见,真实性的技术进步(人物心理的改进)与以前小说中普遍收缩的现实原则不一致。意识的容器不再局限于小说本身,而是取决于读者意识的参与性沉浸。
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