On 11 January 1842 in New York, the American philosopher and psychologist William James was born: he came from an already talented family, especially his brother, Henry James, doomed to become a giant of the American Literature.
James is not one of the main thinkers of the world but he contributed consistently to that historical period, especially in Europe: he came from the American Pragmatism and at that time the European culture was much different from the American one as in Europe the various arts were living the so called “crisis of certitudes”, in every field.
This period in Europe put a seal on the era of Positivism, the age of the uncritical use of reason and the divinisation of science and rationality as the only keys to understand the world: this was proven wrong and the arts, from literature to the figurative arts, were affected by it.
As Husserl stated in the “Crisis of the European sciences”, Natural and rational sciences could not explain what really matters for human beings, what good and evil are for instance.
The United States of William was a young country whilst Europe was a crumbling land, devoured by nationalisms and prepared to vent its frustrations in the First World War.
James’ Pragmatism was based on two main pillars: the first one of the truth based on the utility of something and the second of how decisions can transform beliefs and ideas in truths (if we are lost in a forest and we see a path we must believe that it is the way out of the forest because it is the only way we can verify whether this belief is true).
James used to say “act as if what you do makes a difference” to synthesise his last point.
Anyway William James introduced as first a concept which will be essential for all the literature of his time, the concept of the stream of consciousness, therefore a kind of river of thoughts of an individual without any logic or connexion, just what it comes to her/his mind.
The stream of consciousness became the main narrative technique of that time: letting the characters to express, like in a soliloquy, all their thoughts as though they are in the mind, in a fluid and confusing way for the reader but giving her/him the impression to read the head of the character.
James Joyce was the main writer of that time to use it, especially in his “Ulysses” and “Dubliners”, but among Joyce also the Italian Italo Svevo and Marcel Proust: artists at that time transformed in words what was a sad constatation, that human beings are not the rational creatures they claim to be and that this ultra-Rationalism can become a machine for destruction.
The Stream of consciousness is an example of the conception of the individual as irrational, without a real structure, with an internal unconscious dimension, a precursor of the Freud’s Es.
From the other side of the Atlantic, an American schooled Europe at that time on things which very few Europeans realised (with the exception of the artists) and enriched culturally our continent, because I cannot imagine an Europe without Joyce, Proust or Svevo, and they should all thank William James.
– Riccardo Grisanti
The Window on the World 