Galya Diment’s Autobiographical Novel of Co-Consciousness: Multiple Personality in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

“I have borrowed Morton Prince’s term ‘co-consciousness’ to define…Woolf’s and Joyce’s approaches to inner duality where the writers fictionalize what appear to be equally conscious sides of their complex personalities. I strongly believe that it is this co-consciousness that provides the most telling distinction between two different approaches to the theme of inner duality—the ‘divided-they-stand’ approach of the writers discussed in this study, and the ‘divided-they-fall’ approach of the celebrated masters of the double” (1, p. 4).

“Being a psychopathologist, Prince was naturally concerned with the clinical cases of dissociation…Yet by the turn of the century Prince’s contemporaries were postulating that a tendency toward splitting one’s personality is a common trait in many healthy psyches…by 1924 Prince himself came to believe that one did not have to be clinically ill to ‘have as many selves as we have moods, or contrasting traits, or sides to our personalities,’ and that so-called abnormal cases merely took those rather benign Ichspaltung tendencies to pathological extremes” (1, pp. 49-50).

Virginia Woolf

“…the largely autobiographical nature of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, published in 1927, is well established…Cam Ramsay and Lily Briscoe can be seen as complementary autobiographical characters…Woolf’s use…of two characters to represent one personality accurately reflects not only her sense of inner duality but also her belief in the possibility of multiple states of consciousness. Thus in April of 1925, at the time she was conceptualizing To the Lighthouse, Woolf noted in her diary: ‘My present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness…second selves is what I mean’…In her use of a split autobiographical self…Woolf may have been guided by the example of Joyce’s Ulysses…"(1, pp. 63-106).

James Joyce

“Frank Budgen quotes Joyce as saying to him once: ‘Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?’ That simple remark captures, it seems to me, what may have been in Joyce’s mind when he decided to split his fictional alter ego into two in Ulysses. Joyce was interested in the ‘mystery of the conscious,’ and…chose to fictionalize in his novel two equally co-conscious parts of his nature…

“The parallel quests of Stephen Dedalus as a son in search of a surrogate father, and Leopold Bloom as a father in search of a surrogate son, are among the most discussed themes in this century’s literary criticism…(1, pp. 111-117).

Co-Consciousness is Multiple Personality

“I think, therefore I am,” because a person is a thinking being; that is, a being with consciousness. Thus, more than one consciousness means more than one being. Co-consciousness means at least two beings who are aware of what each other thinks. If there is only one body, it is called multiple personality.

Novelists Use Normal Multiple Personality to Write Novels

Prof. Galya Diment is saying that Woolf and Joyce had normal multiple personality, and that they each used two of their alternate identities as complementary characters in these novels.

She calls it The Autobiographical Novel of Co-Consciousness. I call it Multiple Identity Literary Theory.

1. Galya Diment. The Autobiographical Novel of Co-Consciousness: Goncharov, Woolf, and Joyce. University Press of Florida, 1994.