An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day | Lapham’s Quarterly

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A sk about the unconscious and most neuroscientists will acknowledge its existence, grudgingly, before going on to explain that consciousness is hard enough to study as it is, without complicating the matter by bringing in something as elusive and ill-defined as unconsciousness. Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, a Bulgarian-born psychologist at the University of British Columbia, is a notable exception, a self-described misfit in the field. “There is something inherently poetic in consciousness that’s evading scientists right now,” Christoff Hadjiilieva told me during one of our conversations. “Most scientists don’t value the free movement of the mind, because they don’t believe anything good can come of it. They want every effort of the mind to be rewarded, preferably with a publication.”

She recently coedited The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought, an anthology that includes an illuminating essay on the history of spontaneous thought. It describes the routines of several highly accomplished historical figures—including Darwin, Beethoven, Dali, and Chandler—who achieved great success despite working a relatively short day (four to five hours) followed by lots of long walks, afternoon naps, loads of unstructured time, and long vacations. It is often not until we leave our desks to wander, whether in mind or body or both, that inspiration strikes.

We moderns tend to attribute the thoughts that arrive unbidden, from “out of the blue,” to somewhere within us, like the unconscious, but in the past, people believed they came from outside us—inspirations from the Muses or the gods. Yet even now, these spontaneous insights or intuitions possess an aura and an authority that ideas delivered by reasoning seldom command. We imbue them with a residue of magic, perhaps because their origin remains something of a mystery.

A devoted novel-reader since her teens, Christoff Hadjiilieva suspects that artists—who “live their thoughts”—may know more about the stream of consciousness than her fellow scientists do.

“Catching one’s thoughts as they arise is a lot more difficult than it sounds,” she said. “I suspect that fiction writers develop the ability to watch their own thoughts arising in the course of writing.”

A s an English major in college, I had read (or at least been assigned) a handful of stream-of-consciousness novels, and I began to wonder what they might have to teach me now. At the time, I found reading novelists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf difficult and, to be honest, boring. Not much ever happened. Strolling a few short blocks through Dublin or London could take fifty pages, most of them consisting of fragments of interior monologue, sometimes impossible to piece together. But now, as a student of the stream, I look to these works for wonderful case studies: Spontaneous Thought 101. Here’s how Woolf spelled out her ambition for the English novel in a 1925 essay in The Common Reader:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall…they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday…Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.

Of course, Woolf and Joyce and the other modernists did not “discover” consciousness; novelists have been writing about it since at least the birth of the novel. It’s pretty much what novels do—take us into the minds of characters to satisfy our deep human curiosity to find out what, but also how, other people think. We probably know more about Emma Bovary’s thinking than we do any person in our world, perhaps even ourselves. Third-person omniscient narrators can penetrate the consciousness of characters quite deeply (think of those created by Gustave Flaubert, Jane Austen, or Leo Tolstoy), and first-person narrators can directly share the contents of a fictional mind, rendering it more or less transparent.

What distinguishes the stream of consciousness is its attempt to depict not only the contents of a character’s mind but its phenomenology as well: the rhythms and movements, the logic (and illogic) of its transitions and associations, the fragmented quality of inward-turned thought. We are to imagine that the author has left the room, leaving us alone with the mind of the character, to which we have complete access. The satisfactions of reading a stream of consciousness verge on the prurient, though the experience can also be disorienting and claustrophobic. Here’s a passage from Ulysses that is all of these things at once. Leopold Bloom is at the funeral service for Paddy Dignam, in the “Hades” chapter....