Was James Joyce the Greatest Mind-Scientist Ever?

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http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2012/08/10/was-james-joyce-the-greatest-mind-scientist-ever/



I bought a Kindle recently, and excitedly downloaded free stuff: Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (not as good as I remembered), stories of H.P. Lovecraft (like a parody of Poe, but good for bedtime) and, finally, James Joyce’s Ulysses, released in full (a journal published chunks beginning in 1918) in 1922. I trekked through Ulysses in college 30 years ago under professorial guidance and wanted to revisit it to see how it holds up.

It holds up just fine. In fact, I’m digging Ulysses so much that I must foist an appreciation of it on you. Joyce did something that still feels fresh and revolutionary, although it has inspired countless imitations. He put us inside the head of another human, in a way no one had done before. We eavesdrop on someone’s thoughts as though they are being telepathically transmitted into our brain. Joyce was not a theorist of mind but he was an exceptional observer of it, far more so than any scientist. He helped us become more aware of our awareness.

I’ve written about the problem of solipsism, how each of us is trapped in a hermetically sealed chamber of his or her own subjective awareness. Joyce knocks a hole in the prison of our selves so that we can peer into the mind of another person. We can never really know what it is like to be a bat or cat, but thanks to Joyce we have a better idea what it is like to be a human being.

Joyce had scientific precursors. William James, in the late 19th century, drew attention to the weird nature of consciousness. It is not a train—a collection of objects moving through space—but a stream, James said. And thoughts are not like atoms or protons, uniform and durable; they are evanescent, ever-changing, slip-sliding into each other. Another precursor of Joyce was Freud, who held that deep down we are nasty, horny creatures, much more so we realize or care to admit.