The Nothing That Is by Johanna Skibsrud

Author:Johanna Skibsrud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookThug
Published: 2019-09-21T21:14:20+00:00

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1 “It is high time,” writes Marx, “that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.”

Transcribing the Waves

Language as a Spiritual Medium in Virginia Woolf and Anne Carson

When F. H. Myers — inventor of the word telepathy and founding member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) — died in Rome in January 1901, American psychologist William James awaited the message Myers had promised him from beyond the grave. According to the doctor who’d been treating Myers, writes John Gray in The Immortalization Commission, the two had made a solemn pact: whoever died first would send a message as soon as he crossed over into the unknown. Too grief-­stricken to remain in the room with his dying friend, James reportedly sat outside the open door, and — pen in hand, notebook in lap — appeared ready to diligently transcribe Myers’s spectral communication. When the doctor returned, however, James “was still leaning back in his chair, his hands over his face, his open note-­book on his knees. The page was blank.”

The purpose of the SPR, over which first Myers, then James, and later Henri Bergson presided, was to “examine paranormal phenomena in ‘an unbiased and scientific way,’” writes Gray. Like Myers, whose best-­known publication is a book titled Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, James believed that communication could continue after death, and that, eventually, the phenomenon would be scientifically explained. A series of interconnected automatic writings, produced over several decades by various mediums, served to confirm the thesis that human personality could indeed survive “bodily death.”

Gray quotes Alice Johnson, a member of the SPR, who tells us that the automatic writings collected from various mediums were characterized by their fragmentary and indirect nature. “What we get is a fragmentary utterance in one script,” she explains, “which seems to have no particular point or meaning, and another fragmentary utterance in the other of an equally pointless character; but when we put the two together, we see that they supplement one another, and there is apparently one idea underlying both, but only partly expressed in each.” Johnson’s description of automatic writing could equally characterize the “stream of consciousness” literary technique employed by Virginia Woolf and other modernist writers; indeed, the literary term takes its name from James’s influential description of consciousness in The Principles of Psychology as “a ‘river’ or a ‘stream.’” Consciousness, James argued, cannot be “chopped up in bits,” and neither could it simply disappear. “It is nothing jointed,” he avers; “it flows.”

That the most notable innovation in modernist narrative takes its name from James’s writings on psychology and paranormal phenomena is more than an incidental detail. The “stream of consciousness” technique — and later postmodern literary techniques that employ fragmentation and non-­linear progression — are rooted in a Jamesian sense of human psychology and spirit as multi-­vocal, continuous, and — ultimately — shared.

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