HABIT

In the 1870s, Charles Darwin published a book in which he recounted a commonly cited experiment: a frog has its brain removed and is then tested for nervous reflexes. The application of acetic acid to the frog's thigh causes the foot on the affected side to move in a manner suggesting irritation and consciously responsive planning, despite total encephalectomy. In 1936, Charlie Chaplin produced the satire Modern Times, in which the hapless Tramp succumbs to the bodily demands of the mechanised assembly line. Between these dates, a host of publications and even new discourses emerged to probe the boundaries between volitional action and passive reaction in complex organisms. Habit enters the literary modernist stage through the confluence of these sociological and scientific discourses. Among the most significant were the scientific and philosophical debates of the late nineteenth century between scientific and philosophical mechanists, for whom the interrelations of complex entities could be likened to the components of a MACHINE, and the vitalists, philosophers and scientists for whom living organisms could not be reduced to their physical components. The question of determinism and human freedom was integral to this debate since the reduction of human capacity to mechanical operations involved the implicit curtailment of human potential. Rejecting rationalist and materialist conceptions of subjectivity (of mentally or physically predetermined substrata to human consciousness), the vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson foregrounded the role of environmental experience, continuity and duration to the constitution of individual personhood, as an open-ended process rather than a fixed entity (see BERGSONISM). For Bergson, habit was the embodiment of repetitive memory, a pattern of bodily reaction to external stimuli rather than any mechanical blueprint of action. Of course one of Bergson's most famous literary modernist influences was on the sinuous convolutions of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), a work that opens with a famously ambiguous declaration of nocturnal habit.

Bergson's popularity among Anglophone modernists was partly attributable to the American psychologist William James, the author of an essay on STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS and another on habit. For James, EVERYDAY habits of the body are far from incidental or predetermined – indeed they play an active role in the formation of individual character. Moreover, by rejecting reductive or materialist accounts of habit, James also perceived its constraining social and ideological functions, calling it ‘the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent’.