Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, LXI, z.

1
PL ISSN 0084-4446
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26485/ZRL/2018/61.1/1

Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga
Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej*

When the Mind Becomes a Place:

The Modernist Psychological Novel

Abstract
The paper focuses on the modernist psychological novel as a genre that dramatizes the
radical transformations of spatial and temporal categories of the time. The genre is often
identified with the narrative experiments of stream of consciousness, which represent the
mind in and through time. Yet an equally important inheritance of the generic experiments
is the spatialization of the mind — understood in the context of the spatial conception of
human subjectivity and in terms of the spatial character of inner reality. The paper argues
that the most vivid spatialization of the mind is evident in the portrayal of schizophrenic
experience and demonstrates the thesis in the analyses of two novels — Virginia Woolf ’s
The Waves and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy.

modernism, psychological novel, space, time, Woolf, Beckett

* Instytut Anglistyki, Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej
Pl. M. Curie-Skłodowskiej 5, 20-031 Lublin
e-mail: uterentowicz@hektor.umcs.lublin.pl
Among the transformations that most significantly shaped the first decades of the twen-
tieth century were those involving space and time. The modernist paradigm entailed
a marked change in the self ’s experience of the world and a radical redefinition of the
scientific, philosophical and artistic conceptualizations of the spatio-temporal dimension.
New technological developments, means of transport and communication redefined
the daily experience and constructed new spatialities and temporalities. The Newtonian
world-view, entailing the existence of absolute, objective, homogenous space and time,
had already been seriously problematized by Kant’s epistemology, which envisioned time
and space as forms of experience and understanding determined by the observer even
if still aspiring to universality. But it is only the broad intellectual impact of the theory
of relativity formulated by Albert Einstein and perspectivism, developed by Friedrich
Nietzsche and José Ortega y Gasset that truly captured the modernist imagination. The
two theories, whose near-simultaneous publication Ortega himself considered a sign of
the time, “signified a breakdown of the old notion that there is a single reality in a single,
absolute space” (Kern 1983: 151). Both denied the existence of universal categories inde-
pendent of the position of the individual observer. “With the general theory of relativity
the number of spaces increased beyond calculation to equal the number of moving refer-
ence systems of all the gravitational fields generated by all of the matter in the universe”
(Kern 1983: 136). Perspectivism proclaimed that there are as many realities as there are
points of view; it argued that there are no universal facts and truths, only observations
and interpretations. Perspective thus becomes a component of reality and since there is
no absolute perspective, there is no absolute space and time.
As a result of the modernist loss of a stable external reality, “space and time occupied
a peculiar position in the imagination of the 1920s, provided (…) a fashionable terminol-
ogy particular to the decade” (Stevenson 1992: 10). Rather than being transparent contain-
ers of action, they became “forms of thought — ways of thinking” (Stevenson: 227), as
May Sinclair wrote in her 1919 novel Mary Olivier. The new “forms of thought” forged
new relations between the self and the world, new ways of experiencing one’s being in the
world. Once the perspective is reality, the individual mind becomes the centre of meaning.
12 Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga

Space and time as new “forms of thought — ways of thinking” shaped not only novel
ways of looking at the relationship between the self and the world but also new forms of
artistic expression. Spatiality and temporality became central categories that defined the
themes and forms of modernist art. One way of looking at the experiments of the era
is to see them in the context of Gotthold Lessing’s taxonomy that divided art forms into
spatial and temporal. In modernism the visual arts, traditionally considered spatial, tried to
introduce time into their form, while those that are naturally temporal, based on narrative
progression, aimed at overcoming linearity. Thus, as Stephen Kern explains, the Impres-
sionists’ sequences of landscapes portraying the same view at different times of day and
seasons, Cubists’ multiple perspectives inscribed on a single canvas, and Giacomo Balla’s
dynamic paintings all involved introducing time into an essentially spatial artistic form
(Kern 1983: 21–2, 84). By contrast, the spatial form in literature, focusing on the frozen
and/or epiphanic moment and constructing a complex architectonics of interpretation,
aimed at overcoming the linearity of narrative (Frank 1991).
The importance of space and time as “forms of thought” had a big impact on the de-
velopment of the modernist psychological novel. The genre came into existence together
with and as a result of the inward turn (Edel 1964: 11) and its appearance had as much
to do with the development of psychology as a new discipline and the broad impact of
Freudian psychoanalysis on the way the human self is conceptualized as with the new
sense of time and space. If the perspective is reality; if, as May Sinclair writes, “all that is
perceived in space or time, and with it all objects (…) have no existence grounded in them-
selves outside our thoughts” (Sinclair 1982: 247) then reality is in the mind. The question
that follows is how one represents the inner self and the mental experience of construct-
ing the world. How can language record “an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and
as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday” (Woolf 1925:
150) and how can the narrative convey the process? “Since the self [as Bergson insisted] is
an endless change of sensibility, the authentic selfhood can only be lived, not thought; our
real existence must be sought in the shifting currents of our most immediate conscious-
ness” (Sypher 1962: 59) that discursive language has problems capturing and expressing.
The different ways modernist artists responded to the problem of representing the
mind had much to do with the new forms and theories of space and time. The genre
of the modernist psychological novel is often identified with the narrative experiments
of stream of consciousness or interior monologue, with James Joyce’s Ulysses, Marcel
Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage. These works are
often called “time-novels” not only because “time might be said to be their primary con-
cern” (Edel 1964: 94) but also because they represent the mind as and in time. They use
narrative progression — even if no longer logical, discursive or chronological — “to cre-
ate the illusion of a mind flowing with thought and image and impression” (Edel 1964:
125); they conceive reality as a process developing in time.
Yet if in modernism time is an important way of thinking about the inner experience
and the mind’s construction of reality, so is space. The idea of the spatial character of the
mind, as I shall argue in more depth, is an equally important development and inheritance
of the modernist psychological novel. In modernist writing, the mind is conceived of as
a flow of thoughts but it is also envisaged as a place, a spatially imagined world of its own.
The spatial character of the mind needs to be understood in two ways: firstly, in terms of
 When the Mind Becomes a Place: The Modernist Psychological Novel 13

the spatial conception of human subjectivity, whereby the mind and the human self are
conceptualized in spatial terms; and secondly, in terms of the spatial character of inner
reality, made all the more real, as I have explained and will demonstrate in more detail, by
the modernist inward turn and the crisis of external coordinates of experience, or in other
words by the ontological redefinition of the relationship between inner and outer worlds.
The spatial conception of human subjectivity is rooted in a more general tendency to
describe human subjects and their relations with the world in spatial language, entailed in
the Cartesian division into res extensa — the realm of matter — and res cogitans, the world
inside. The Cartesian assumption “that the self can be imagined as a kind of physical
space inside of which one’s thoughts move about” (Sass 1992: 370) is an integral part of
the process of interiorization and spatialization of the mind in Western culture. Yet, for
modernism it is the Freudian topologies of the mind that were of crucial importance,
as “they conceptualize the psyche as a spatial entity, and at the same time present it as
a constellation of several systems or »mental localities«” (Keitel 1989: 29). As Nicholas
Dion in Spacing Freud: Space and Place in Psychoanalytic Theory (Dion 2012) explains, Freud’s
models of the mind are called topographies in so far as they depict the human psyche
and the self ’s relation to the world in terms of a spatial layout. The different agencies of
the mind — the unconscious and conscious in the first topography and the id, ego and
superego in the second — stand in a regular spatial relation to one another: “If the ego
emerges as a defined space within the id, the superego forms such a space within the
ego” (Dion 2012: 95). The three are often described as “realms [Reiche], regions [Gebiete],
provinces [Provinzen], into which we divide an individual’s mental apparatus” (Dion 2012:
97). In Freud, “[t]he creation of the subject, then, can be understood psychoanalytically
as a partitioning of space” (Dion 2012: 23) and a definition of reality arises “through
a spatial process, the creation of a boundary between inside (subject) and outside (object)”
(Dion 2012: 64). While spatial language in Freud is used metaphorically and mental spaces
should not be considered concomitant with the physiological division of the human brain,
it nevertheless offers an important conceptual and visual paradigm that orients and organ-
izes thinking about the human self and the relationship between inner and outer realities.
Conceptualizing the mind as a place not only offers a tangible, embodied way of thinking
about the abstractions of the psyche but also paves the way for the more radical remod-
elling of the inner realm that comes with an ontological redefinition of the relationship
between inner and outer realities.
The metaphorization of human subjectivity in spatial terms is closely related to
the process of spatialization of inner reality. “Being in the mind” means “being in and
through” one’s flow of thoughts but it is also represented as being in a different realm, in
a separate space of inner experience. The concept of inner space has a deeply metaphori-
cal meaning and yet with the crisis of external coordinates of experience and the increas-
ingly problematic sense of reality, the sharp ontologies separating the realm of phenom-
ena from the realm of the psyche become increasingly blurred. In modernist works the
external, phenomenal world is often “derealized, robbed of its substantiality or objectivity,
its ontological status as an entity or horizon independent of the perceiving subject” (Sass
1992: 32). The emphasis can be put “on the loss of the feeling that reality is external or
on the loss of reality’s aura of significance” (Sass 1992: 32), the two processes being often
closely related. Once the outer world is derealized, the inner one becomes more real and
14 Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga

in effect it is often imagined in cosmological terms, as a separate universe, conceived as

a spatially developed realm.
The most radical spatialization of the inner realm is connected with the most radical
redefinition of the inner/outer ontologies and can be observed in the representations
of schizophrenic and schizoid experiences. Louis A. Sass in the magisterial study Mad-
ness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought explores the
relation between schizophrenia, “the quintessential form of madness in our time” (Sass
1992: 13), and modernist art, literature, and thought. He points to the similarities between
schizophrenic experience and modern literary forms. Both, he argues, are characterised by
“derealisation, dehumanization (disappearance of the active self), giddy perspectivism or
relativism, and detachment” (Sass 1992: 318) and both manifest an off-putting “quality of
being hard to understand or feel one’s way into” (Sass 1992: 8). In contrast with the cus-
tomary understanding of madness, which associates insanity with Dionizian frenzy, loss
of control and animal instincts, schizophrenia is a form of acute hyperreflexivity; it results
from too much thinking rather than too little. Schizophrenic experience, argues Sass:
may have less in common with the spirit of Dionysus than with what Nietzsche, in The Birth of
Tragedy, associates with the god Apollo and the philosopher Socrates: it may be characterized
less by fusion, spontaneity, and the liberation of desire than by separation, restraint, and an
exaggerated cerebralism and propensity for introspection. (Sass 1992: 10)

Such a vision of madness resonates with changing patterns in the development of sensi-
bility in modernist genres, emphasizing extreme self consciousness and proposing a new
character type, a “psychological man” bent on his inner self rather than on outer reality.
Sass points to the close affinity between schizophrenia and the structure of conscious-
ness found in modernist literature: both are characterized by acute self consciousness,
self-reference, and alienation from action, qualities he calls hyperreflexivity. Characters
are represented as being and thinking rather than doing; withdrawing from active life in
the way the protagonist in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain does. Modernist literature
“radically probed the nature of selfhood and problematized the means whereby self could
be expressed” (Brown 1989: 1). If the inner self became the focus of attention and the
principal arbiter of reality, it was the self that was radically, often chronically divided and
fragmented. The modernist dissolution of the self entailed a highly deconstructive vi-
sion of identity; rather than as “autonomous, integral and continuous” it was conceived
as “pluralist, heterogeneous and discontinuous” (Brown 1989: 20–21). Modernist writers
concentrated on the complex, intangible character of the self and emphasized a strong
division between the body and the mind.
Schizophrenia can be seen as the most extreme form of the inward turn, the experi-
ence of the most complete withdrawal from the external world. The ontological relation-
ship between inner and outer realities is radically redefined; the external, phenomenal
world is derealized, deprived of sense and significance, while the inner one becomes the
true source of meaning and order. What is significant from the perspective of the present
considerations is the fact that a redefinition of the ontological status of reality entails
a significant reconstitution of spatial and temporal coordinates. As Sass explains, schizo-
phrenic experience may involve
 When the Mind Becomes a Place: The Modernist Psychological Novel 15

the most profound alterations in the very structures of human consciousness, in the forms
of time or of space, causality, and human identity that normally provide a kind of bedrock
foundation for a stable human existence. The sense of time or of space may be destabilized
or radically transformed, the objective world may loom forth as a solid but strangely alien
presence, or else may fade into unreality, or even seem to collapse or disappear. (Sass 1992: 14)

In effect, the inner world comes to be experienced and conceived of as a place, a spatially
imagined realm of being, as real or even more real that the outer world. As the narrator
in The Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl explains, this form of madness does not “feel
like” a condition but “rather a country opposed to Reality, (…) an immense space without
boundary, limitless, flat” (qtd. in Sass 1992: 47).
While the modernist representations of the mind in terms of the temporal flow have
been well analysed (see e.g. Cohn, Humphrey, Quinones), the different forms of spatiali-
zation of the mind in the early psychological novel need to be examined in more depth.
The paper will focus on two modernist novels in which the spatialization of the human
mind is most evident. Virginia Woolf in The Waves and Samuel Beckett in Murphy por-
tray radically divided, disembodied selves characteristic of the condition of schizophrenia.
Though both writers use spatial imagery to represent the human mind and both portray
the inner self as a place, they do so in very different ways. Woolf uses poetic language to
present the inner mind in terms of symbolic landscapes, Beckett’s approach is more dis-
cursive and theoretical. Considered together, the two novels represent well the contrasting
approaches to the modernist spatialization of the mind that shaped the development of
the psychological novel.

Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves

Virginia Woolf was among the key proponents of new type of fiction that aimed at repre-
senting the complexities of modern experience and new forms of subjectivity by means
of the inward turn. In her quarrel with her predecessors, the materialists, as she called
them, she criticised the fact that they represent characters through a meaningless accumu-
lation of external detail:
if we speak of quarrelling with Mr Wells, Mr Bennett, and Mr Galsworthy, it is partly that by
the mere fact of their existence in the flesh (…) It is because they are concerned not with the
spirit but with the body (…) they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial
and the transitory appear the true and enduring. (Woolf 1925: 146–148)

While the body stands here as a metaphor of the material and the external, the phrase
can also be read quite literally, as a reference to bodily rather than mental experience. At
the centre of Woolf ’s artistic universe there is always the experiencing self, the mind con-
structing a vision and version of reality.
Virginia Woolf ’s interiorization of perspective found its fullest and we might say most
extreme realization in The Waves, most specifically in the character of Rhoda, who might
be considered the “most interior” of Woolf ’s protagonists 1. While the novel in all its
aspects — including the compositional clash of the interludes and the chapters and the
1
For an extended discussion of Woolf ’s spatiality, see Terentowicz-Fotyga 2006. For the analysis of different
semiospheres in The Waves, see Terentowicz 1995; 1996.
16 Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga

limited factual characterization contrasted with the scrupulous portrayal of minute flick-
erings of the mind — documents the breach between inner and outer realities, Rhoda
represents the clearest separation of the body and the brain, of inner and outer realms.
From the opening images Rhoda speaks of herself as being different from other peo-
ple. Though all the main characters in the novel define reality through personal images
and phrases, Rhoda’s “being in the world” is conveyed in highly idiosyncratic and distinct
imagery that strongly evokes the sense of loss and alienation. In her soliloquies Rhoda
emphasizes her profound sense of being estranged and ostracized and other characters
describe her in similar terms, as somebody isolated from everyday life, incapable of com-
municating feelings or sharing thoughts. For Louis she “has no body as the others have”
(Woolf 1992: 16); Bernard imagines her as “the nymph of the fountain always wet, ob-
sessed with visions, dreaming” (Woolf 1992: 229). While other characters order the cha-
otic flux of life by imposing their individual structures and systems — Bernard language,
Louis tradition, Neville philosophy, Susan maternity and Jinny sensuality — Rhoda is
incapable of creating any permanently secure and orderly place in external reality. She
compares life to an “emerging monster to whom we are attached” (Woolf 1992: 51) like
“bodies to wild horses” (Woolf 1992: 50).
It is only when Rhoda is alone that she can feel secure to freely “replenish her dreams”
(Woolf 1992: 99), to create the world of beauty and order in her imagination. In the even-
ing, when going to sleep, feeling free from the pressures of the shared, external world and
other people, Rhoda regains her composure and lives more fully:

‘As I fold up my frock and my chemise,’ said Rhoda, ‘so I put off my hopeless desire to be
Susan, to be Jinny. (…) Now I spread my body on this frail mattress and hang suspended.
I am above the earth now. I am no longer upright, to be knocked against and damaged. All is
soft, and bending. Walls and cupboards whiten and bend their yellow squares on top of which
a pale glass gleams. Out of me now my mind can pour. I can think of my Armadas sailing on
the high waves. I am relieved of hard contacts and collisions. I sail on alone under the white
cliffs. (…) Travelling through darkness I see the stretched flower-beds, and Mrs Constable runs
from behind the corner of the pampas-grass to say my aunt has come to fetch me in a carriage.
I mount; I escape; I rise on spring-heeled boots over the tree-tops.’ (Woolf 1992: 20)

As this quote suggests, being in the mind is presented as being in a different space. When
Rhoda goes to bed, the material world gradually loses its substantiality and the inner one
becomes more significant. The reality she constructs in her mind appears to her just as
real or even more real than the outer, material world. The inner realm is conceived of
as a landscape, withdrawing into the mental sphere is shown as moving in space. “Sus-
pended” in the material world, Rhoda can travel freely into the realm of her dreams, a fully
developed world of its own. The metaphor of spatial movement into the inner realm
appears also in the soliloquies of other characters in reference to Rhoda. Observing her
at the maths lesson, lost and baffled by the figures, Louis describes her escape from the
reality of the here-and-now in spatial terms: “as she stares at the chalk figures, her mind
lodges in those white circles, it steps through those white loops into emptiness, alone”
(Woolf 1992: 16). Bernard (“Rhoda leave[s] us, flying past us to the desert”; Woolf 1992:
222) and Neville (“Rhoda flies with her neck outstretched and blind fanatic eyes, past us”;
Woolf 1992: 164) refer to her moments of alienation similarly.
 When the Mind Becomes a Place: The Modernist Psychological Novel 17

Rhoda’s divided self exists concurrently in two realities, which are presented as two
separate spaces. The material, shared world that she sees as dangerous and threatening is
contrasted with the safe inner reality of dreams and visions. Particularly revealing in this
respect is Rhoda’s soliloquy in the eighth interlude, in which all the characters gather at
Hampton Court. In this passage the separation of the two worlds is signalled topographi-
cally by means of the brackets:
Behind you is a white crescent of foam, and fishermen on the verge of the world are drawing
in nets and casting them. A wind ruffles the topmost leaves of primeval trees. (Yet here we sit
at Hampton Court.) Parrots shrieking break the intense stillness of the jungle. (Here the trams
start.) The swallow dips her wings in midnight pools. (Here we talk.) That is the circumference
that I try to grasp as we sit together. (Woolf 1992: 186)

Rhoda’s sense of self is split into two realities: the world of the present moment, which
she shares with her friends, and the imaginary landscape “on the verge of the world” into
which she escapes from the pressures of communal living. Particularly revealing here is
the fact that it is not the world of the imagination but the reality of the here-and-now
that is bracketed and in effect portrayed as less significant. From the perspective of the
character, it is not the material world but the world of imagination, the imaginary exotic
landscapes that she visits in her mind, that seem more real and more important. The dual-
ity of her being, described as a spatial separation of the inner and outer worlds is, Rhoda
says, the “circumference” that she tries to understand and harmonize.
Rhoda is a dynamic character and the evolution she undergoes has much to do with
the changing relations between inner and outer realities. While for other characters grow-
ing up means gradual adapting to the rules of the shared world, for Rhoda it means
a more and more complete withdrawal from outer reality into the sphere of the mind. The
immersion in the inner world depends on and results from a redefinition of the ontologi-
cal status of both worlds, a gradual derealisation of the material, shared existence and an
ontological realisation of the inner realm.
At the beginning of the novel the imaginary spaces are shown as fragile and insubstan-
tial. They offer only a temporary refuge and a momentary escape. At this stage, Rhoda’s
imaginary reality seems to her but a “thin dream” easily “blow[n] to atoms” by the solid-
ity of external reality (Woolf 1992: 44). She feels she cannot withdraw altogether from
outer reality. She cannot disregard the external world as it is equipped with the authority
of the whole of society, since for other people it is the only reality. Initially, Rhoda per-
ceives the external world as real, solid, and substantial as opposed to her space, which is
only a product of the imagination, an unreal, fragile, and temporary vision. The moments
when she withdraws into the space of the mind and feels separated from the body are
seen as perilous and threatening. She is afraid that unless she touches something hard and
makes the effort to call herself back to the body she will “fall off the edge of the world
into nothingness” (Woolf 1992: 33).
The most important moment in terms of the novel’s plot, the death of Percival, marks
the moment of Rhoda’s epiphany. Percival’s death makes her look closely at outer real-
ity without transforming it into visions or dreams. In this moment of revelation almost
every aspect of external reality is questioned: civilization, art, nature, friendship. The outer
world suddenly appears much more insubstantial than it seemed to be; the houses prove
18 Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga

so lightly founded that they can “be puffed over by a breath of air” (Woolf 1992: 131).
By looking closely and questioning all the elements of outer reality, Rhoda deprives it of
its authority over her. For the first time she admits that outer reality is not more real than
her imaginary world, that the external world is wearing only a “semblance of life”. Con-
sequently, the inner reality, her valley “on the other side of the world” becomes more real
and solid; for the first time Rhoda can fully appreciate the advantages of the safe, control-
lable, beautiful, and above all, unchanging space of the mind. Percival’s death is a turning
point in Rhoda’s life as it brings a redefinition of the relation between inner and outer
realities. The external world is ultimately rejected and the world of the mind embraced
as her microcosm. Rhoda withdraws more thoroughly into the reality of her dreams, her
loneliness deepens, she leaves Louis, and she avoids contact with other people.
Rhoda’s ultimate escape from the material world takes the form of suicide, although
the fact is implied rather than made clear. In her last soliloquy, she says that the monu-
mental figure she once saw in her valley is Percival, suggesting that he became part of her
imaginary landscape when he died. Death thus becomes a gate-way to a different realm,
a passageway to the world of eternal beauty, order, and permanence. If Percival’s death
allows Rhoda to question the solidity of the material world, it also frees her desire “to be
consumed”, to withdraw even more completely into “the uttermost corners of the earth”
(Woolf 1992: 135) by dying.

Samuel Beckett’s Murphy

A similar path is at the centre of the plot in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. In comparison with
The Waves and Beckett’s later novels, Murphy has a more traditional form. Its plot revolves
around the love story of Murphy and Celia and the pursuit of Murphy by another woman,
Miss Counihan. From the very first page, however, the dynamics of the novel’s action is
clearly undermined by the inaction represented by the protagonist. As the novel starts, we
see Murphy succumbing to his favourite activity — sitting naked, tied to a rocking chair
and “setting his mind alive,” separating himself from the outer world represented by dis-
tracting sights and sounds:
These were sights and sounds that he did not like. They detained him in the world to which
they belonged, but not he, as he fondly hoped. (…) He sat in his chair in this way because it
gave him pleasure! First it gave his body pleasure, it appeased his body. Then it set him free in
his mind. For it was not until his body was appeased that he could come alive in his mind, as
described in section six. And life in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was
not the word. (Beckett 1993: 6)

Murphy, like Rhoda, needs to separate himself from the external, material world and to
immerse himself in the inner realm. Coming alive in the mind requires silence and im-
mobility in the outer world, as he himself says: “motion in this world depended on rest in
the world outside” ( Beckett 1993: 64). The body belongs to the external realm and thus to
fully appreciate the life in the mind, Murphy needs to distance himself from the physical
and the bodily. The inner realm is associated with peace, security, pleasure and a sense of
freedom, the external world with the pressures of communal living.
The tension between the mind and the body, between inner and outer realms, is the
key opposition and the structuring theme of the novel. For Murphy, like for Rhoda, the
 When the Mind Becomes a Place: The Modernist Psychological Novel 19

most fundamental experience of being in the world is rooted in an essential split into the
body and the mind: “Murphy felt himself split in two, a body and a mind. They had inter-
course apparently, otherwise he could not have known that they had anything in common”
(Beckett 1993: 64). The separation, with typically Beckettian humour, is explained in terms
of the experience of a kick: “[t]he mental experience was cut off from the physical experi-
ence (…). He neither thought a kick because he felt one nor felt a kick because he thought
one” (Beckett 1993: 64). The split, as numerous critics pointed out, evokes Cartesian
ruminations on the relation between the material and the mental. In contrast to Descartes,
however, Murphy favours a complete separation of res cogitans from res extensa. The mind
seems to him “bodytight” (Beckett 1993: 64) and while he accepts that the intercourse
between the two is somehow effected, the actual channel that links the body to the mind
remains a mystery and one that is “of little interest” to the protagonist.
In the notorious Section Six, announced at the beginning of the novel, the narra-
tor ventures to explain the meaning of the expression “Murphy’s mind” as “it felt and
pictured itself ” to Murphy (Beckett 1993: 63). As C. J. Ackerley explains, trying to define
where Beckett’s ideas in this section come from would be “an extravagance and imper-
tinence (…) The chapter, brief as it is, represents a compression and distillation of his
years of reading, from the pre-Socratics through the traditions of Western mysticism
and reason to recent discoveries of psychology” (Ackerley 2010: 117). The section has
been interpreted varyingly, as a parody of the Cartesian self-contained thinking subject,
the Leibnizean ideal of splendid self-adequacy (Kearney 1988: 66–67), and the Neopla-
tonic realm of the immutable and the timeless (Steinberg 1972: 105). The chapter “moves
from Cartesian clarity to Schopenhauer’s will-lessness, by means of Spinoza’s Ethics, Leib-
niz’s Monadology, Geulincx’s Ethica, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” (Ackerley and
Gontarski 2004: 388). What interests us here, however, is the way the section develops the
idea of the mind as a place, a “mental chamber” from which there is “no way out”:

Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe
without. (…) He was split, one part of him never left the mental chamber that pictured itself
as a sphere full of light coming into dark, because there was no way out. (…) There were the
three zones, light, half light, dark, each with its speciality.
In the first one were the forms with parallel, a radiant abstract of the dog’s life, the ele-
ments of physical experience available for a new arrangement. (…) In the second were forms
without parallel. Here the pleasure was contemplation. (…) In both these zones of his private
world Murphy felt sovereign and free, in the one to requite himself, in the other to move as he
pleased from the unparalleled beatitude to another. There was no rival initiative.
The third, the dark, was a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder
of forms. (…) Here he was not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom. He did not
move, he was a point in the ceaseless unconditioned generation and passing away of line. (…)
a missile without provenance or target, caught up in a tumult of non-Newtonian motion. So
pleasant that pleasant was not the word. (Beckett 1993: 63–66)

In this extended passage, parodying scientific and philosophical language, the narrator
tries to capture Murphy’s sense of “what he kept on calling, indefatigably, the little world”
(Beckett 1993: 103). For Murphy, like for Rhoda, the mind does not “feel” like a flow of
thoughts. It feels like a space. As Murphy says, “what he called his mind functioned not as
an instrument but as a place” (Beckett 1993: 101), as a “mental chamber” in which, under
20 Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga

certain circumstances, after shutting out the outer world, one can hide. He pictures it as
a separate universe, a self-contained, multidimensional sphere with its own rules and logic.
As in The Waves, setting the mind alive does not mean thinking, it means being in a separate
world, “mov[ing] among its treasures” (Beckett 1993: 111). Yet, while in Woolf ’s novel the
mind is conceived of as a set of recurrent landscapes, united by water imagery, in Murphy
its presentation is less symbolic and visual and more discursive and rationalized. While
Woolf ’s method is poetic, drawing on the mythical symbolism of the four elements, Beck-
ett’s is theoretical and intellectual.
The philosophical inspirations behind the tripartite division of Murphy’s mind are
vast, as Ackerley duly demonstrates. They range from Greek idealism, through Christian
mystical tradition to Cartesian rationalism (Ackerley 2010: 117–125). Yet perhaps its most
clear resonance is with the conceptualization of the human psyche formulated on the
grounds of psychoanalysis, most specifically with Freudian topologies of the self, visual-
izing the mind in terms of three realms, each with a different type of experience, different
speciality and a different relation to the outer world. The three zones of Murphy’s mind
corresponding to the “topographical agencies of the unconscious, preconscious and con-
scious” (Keitel 1989: 29) are represented in spatial terms, as different regions. The rela-
tions between the different parts of the mind are defined in terms of spatial coordinates:
“The mind felt its actual part to be above and bright, its virtual beneath and fading into
dark (…). The third, the dark, was a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and fall-
ing asunder of forms” (Beckett 1993: 64). The pleasure of the darkest realm results from
“the sensation of being a missile without provenance or target, caught up in a tumult of
non-Newtonian motion” (Beckett 1993: 66).
Psychoanalytical resonances in Beckett’s fiction have been analysed by numerous crit-
ics and the impact of Beckett’s own therapy and his reading in the field has also been
discussed quite extensively (see, e.g. Ackerley, Murphy, O’Hara). Ackerley and Gontarski
explain that the vision of the mind in Murphy might have been inspired by Jung’s lecture
that Beckett attended at the Tavistock Clinic, during which Jung “presented a diagram
showing the different spheres of the mind and the dark centre of the unconscious”. They
conclude, referring to Knowlson, that “if Murphy could not have gone into the dark zone
without SB’s descent into the depths with Bion, equally it could not have been pictured
without the aid of Jung and Freud” (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004: 389).
As in the case of Rhoda, Murphy’s encounter with external reality is only brief and
ultimately makes him withdraw even more completely into his inner world. When he gets
a position as a male nurse in a mental asylum, he leaves Celia and returns to the habit of
rocking in a chair and setting his mind alive. At this point both subplots fail: his love affair
is abruptly interrupted and he is not found by Miss Counihan. Murphy, the pivot for the
novel’s plot, ultimately rejects his role as a storymaker and the decision may be seen as
analogous to Rhoda’s epiphany after Percival’s death. They are moments of the characters’
assertion of the internal over the external, of the reality of the mind over that of the body.
The two protagonists identify more fully with what they see as their true, inner self over
the false, external identity. They reject the shared reality and withdraw from the world
of “big blooming buzzing confusion” to “what he kept on calling, indefatigably, the little
world” (Beckett 1993: 4, 103).
 When the Mind Becomes a Place: The Modernist Psychological Novel 21

In both novels, the assertion of the inner over the outer realm leads characters to
death; in both there is a suggestion of suicide. While in The Waves Rhoda’s suicide is sug-
gested by the poetic imagery inscribed in her landscapes, in Murphy it is presented as a ra-
tional effect of the changing definition of the real that Murphy formulates while working
in the mental asylum:
The definition of outer reality, or of reality short and simple, varied according to the sensibility
of the definer. But all seemed agreed that contact with it, even the layman’s muzzy contact, was
a rare privilege. On this basis the patients were described as “cut off ” from reality [and] the
function of treatment was to bridge the gulf, translate the sufferer from his own pernicious
little private dunheap to the glorious world of discrete particles, where it would be his inesti-
mable prerogative once again to wonder, love, hate, desire, rejoice and howl in a reasonable
balanced manner (…) All this was duly revolting to Murphy, whose experience as a physical
and rational being obliged him to call sanctuary what the psychiatrists called exile and to think
of the patients not as banished from the system of benefits but as escaped from a colossal
fiasco. The issue therefore (…) lay between nothing less fundamental than the big world and
the little world, decided by the patients in favour of the latter, revived by the psychiatrists on
behalf of the former, in his own case unresolved. (Beckett 1993: 101)

To Murphy, the world without does not appear as a safe sanctuary with an enticing system
of benefits, as the psychiatrists would like him to see it, but as a colossal fiasco of unsta-
ble discrete particles and turbulent emotions. Raising Lazarus from the dead, he remarks
sarcastically, seems to be “the one occasion on which the Messiah had overstepped the
mark” (Beckett 1993: 102) and death is not defined in negative terms but as a positive
state of “not being.”

Conclusion
The similarities in the plots of Rhoda and Murphy, centred on the changing relationships
between the characters’ inner and outer realities, point to a more general congruence be-
tween the interests of the two writers that constitute an important heritage of the genre
of the modernist psychological novel. Though in different ways, Woolf and Beckett both
trod on ground that psychology was at the time only beginning to explore. The schizoid
condition, which, as R. D. Laing was later to explain, consists in “developing a microcosm
within [one]self ” without recourse to the outer world of persons and things and which in-
volves “a persistent scission between the self and the body” (Laing 1965: 74, 78) finds two
of its earliest literary representations in The Waves and Murphy. Woolf ’s poetic and highly
symbolic landscapes and Beckett’s intellectual, comic ruminations capture the experience
of the unembodied self haunted by a sense of “ontological insecurity” (Laing 1965: 39).
They represent important attempts at portraying “the experience rather than appearance
of madness” (Valentine 2003: 101) by reconstructing “the patient’s way of being himself
in his world” that Laing’s existential psychiatry was calling for years later.
But the two novels also represent important voices in the process of interiorization
and spatialization of the mind that took place in modernist fiction. In contrast to the
“time-novels” that portrayed the mind as a flow of thoughts, Woolf and Beckett imagined
it as a place, a spatially extensive realm that could be creatively explored by the different
aspects of the self. The representation of the schizoid condition, with its radical redefini-
tion of the ontological relationship between inner and outer realities, offered the writers
22 Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga

an opportunity to construct extended visions of inner worlds. The mind became a sepa-
rate universe, a fully developed world of its own, imagined in cosmological terms and
experienced as a kind of physical space, a mental locality that offered an alternative sense
of reality to the world without.

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