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.