The Autobiographical Novel of Co-consciousness

In a comparative study, Galya Diment draws a novel comparison between two giants of Modernism and a relatively obscure 19th-century Russian Realist, claiming that the three writers all re-invented the idea of duality in literature. Focusing on Woolf's ""To the Lighthouse"", Joyce's ""Ulysses"" and Goncharov's ""A Common Story"", she introduces and redefines the idea of ""co-consciousness"" as the mechanism that allows each work to transcend the genre of the autobiographical bildungsroman and the classical tradition of duality, represented by the doppelganger. Defining co-consciousness as the means by which writers fictionalise what appear to be equally conscious sides of their personalities, she argues that this concept is the telling distinction between these three ""divided-they-stand"" writers and the ""divided-they-fall"" approach of other celebrated masters of the double. A crucial feature of the three writers is their tendency to tolerate the split personality as an inevitable yet not life-threatening condition. Diment presents strong evidence that the fictional split self often functions not only as an expression of a writer's inner conflicts but also as a powerful and conscious artistic tool. For Woolf, Joyce and Goncharov, she writes, the fictional alter ego appears to act as a critical buffer between the writers themselves and their autobiographical material. The author discusses at some length the extent to which the concept of ""simultaneous consciousness"" is psychologically valid, and she pays considerable attention to the dual nature of the periods that formed each writer's sensibilities. She ends the main part of the book with ""Ulysses"", she says, because she believes that in this novel ""the co-conscious split autobiographical self has found its perfect home"".