The Worldmaker’s Umwelt: The Cognitive Space between a Writer’s Library and the Publishing House

Abstract

In his essay Re-Minding Modernism (2011), David Herman suggests that we regard as staging ground for of construction and modernist writers as Umwelt researchers in [Jakob] von Uexkull's sense - explorers of lived, phenomenal worlds that emerge from, or are enacted through, interplay between intelligent agents and their cultural as well as material circumstances.2 The biologist Jakob von Uexkull, contemporary of Joyce's, coined term Umwelt3 to denote an organism's model of world, consisting of all meaningful aspects of world for that particular organism. Since each organism has unique history, each organism has different Umwelt, which constantly changes as organism interacts with world. This interaction is feedback loop or what Uexkull called functional circle, implying that every organism enacts world in which it exists.4 In cognitive philosophy, an enactive approach to mind focuses on how manipulation of environmental vehicles constitutes cognitive processes.5This essay proposes to add dimension to narratological suggestion to consider modernist authors as researchers and their inquiries into human mind (by means of e.g. stream-of-consciousness techniques) as inquiries into so-called extended or mind (see below for discussion of these concepts). Whereas analysis tends to focus on synchronic structure of literary text and its reception, criticism focuses on its diachronic structure,6 including complete genetic dossier7 of notes and multiple drafts. If storyworlds are staging ground for procedures of construction, as David Herman suggests, these storyworlds are, in their turn, constructions, made according to specific composition methods or ways of worldmaking, as Nelson Goodman called them.8 From perspective, Daniel Ferrer refers in particular to Goodman's observation that decomposition is just as crucial as composition in creative processes.9 The dialectic of composition and decomposition can be found in every dossier that consists of multiple drafts. The combination of this literary worldmaking with Uexkull's notion of suggests that modernist writers can only be researchers (in Herman's sense) because they have an themselves. And to some degree, aspects of this historical can be reconstructed by means of research. The enactive cognition that characterises creative processes is not just result of interaction between an intelligent agent (Joyce) and materiality of page (the manuscript). It is also result of interaction with other elements in his environment, such as newspapers and books, his personal library, as well as publishing houses and critics.10 To analyse this enactive genesis, essay's first case study is Joyce's use of Wyndham Lewis's criticism of behaviourism and of telling from inside in The Art of Being Ruled.The well-known controversy between Lewis (interested in notion of space) and Joyce (who, according to Lewis, was too preoccupied with notion of time) is reflected in so-called dime-cash problem (fw 149.11-150.14), considered from point of view of spatialist. In first draft, dime was originally spelled time: my disposals of same time-dime-cash problem elsewhere, naturalistically, of course, from blinkpoint of spatialist.n In The Art of Being Ruled (1926), spatialist Lewis had criticised considerable degree of naturalism aimed at in Ulysses, suggesting correspondence between Leopold Bloom's stream of consciousness and conversation of Mr Jingle in Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers. His conclusion was that Joyce made extensive use of a fashionable naturalist device - that usually described as 'presenting character from inside'}2This description corresponds with what Erich von Kahler has famously called the inward turn of narrative in Modernism. …