Abstract
After having focused on “epiphanies” in the first stages of his career, Joyce gradually developed other literary methods for evoking the workings of the fictional mind, methods that presage a post-Cartesian approach to cognition. This essay examines (1) to what extent Joyce’s evocations of the fictional mind can be understood from the perspective of this post-Cartesian paradigm, and (2) how his reading notes may have been instrumental in the gradual transition from the “epiphany” model to a model that prefigures the extended mind thesis. This investigation involves both the workings of the writer’s mind (as reflected in notes and manuscripts) and the evocation of characters’ minds. The two case studies are Joyce’s reading of books by Sir Robert Ball and Otto Weininger.
This essay is a revised and expanded version of a section in Modern Manuscripts: Creative Undoing and the Extended Mind from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), in which the main argument of this essay is also further explored in manuscripts by other authors besides Joyce. The research for this essay and monograph was made possible with the support of the European Research Council, under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–13)/ERC grant agreement no. 313609 (ERC consolidator grant “CUTS”: “Creative Undoing and Textual Scholarship: A Rapprochement between Genetic Criticism and Scholarly Editing”), and the University of Antwerp (TOP BOF project “Literature and the Extended Mind: A Reassessment of Modernism”).
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Notes
- 1.
Another interesting instance of an “inward turn” that is contrasted with an outside is Otto Weininger’s statement: “Das Leben ist eine Art Reise durch den Raum des inneren Ich, eine Reise vom engsten Binnenlande freilich zur umfassendsten, freiesten Überschau des Alls” [“Life is a sort of journey through the space of the inner self, a journey from the tiniest inner space to the most comprehensive, panoramic view of the universe.”] (Weininger 1912, 108). The words in bold were excerpted by Joyce in his Subject Notebook (see Van Mierlo 2007).
- 2.
Fritz Senn, “Esthetic Theories,” JJQ 2 (1965), 135. In the endnotes to the Penguin edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Seamus Deane also refers to the third chapter of Ulysses: “Laocoon: in this essay of 1766, Lessing developed a theory of the essential differences between poetry and the plastic arts. The work was left unfinished. More substantial reference is made to this essay in the Proteus episode of Ulysses” (Deane in Joyce 2000, 319).
- 3.
- 4.
“All regions involved in mind-making have highly differentiated patterns of interconnectivity, suggestive of very complex signal integration” (Damasio 2010, 86).
- 5.
“The process of mind is a continuous flow of such images, some of which correspond to actual, ongoing business outside the brain, while some are being reconstituted from memory in the process of recall. Minds are a subtle, flowing combination of actual images and recalled images, in ever-changing proportions” (71).
- 6.
“[M]inds are not just about images entering their procession naturally. They are about the cinemalike editing choices that our pervasive system of biological value has promoted” (72).
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Van Hulle, D. (2018). Authors’ Libraries and the Extended Mind: The Case of Joyce’s Books. In: Belluc, S., Bénéjam, V. (eds) Cognitive Joyce. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71994-8_4
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