Fuller consciousness in fiction is limited by the unconscious it cannot reach.

Evidence

And then I was, of course, interested; if you’re interested in James, you’re interested in a statement that he made: “I want to be someone on whom nothing is lost.” I wanted to be a consciousness that could respond to everything in the world, not universal but specific and deep. James said, you can tell that from five minutes of somebody’s story at dinner that this is the source of your next novel. I don’t want to hear any more. I don’t want the literal detail. I want to explore the lives and conflicts that come out of that, but it must be to the full extent of my consciousness. Now the funny thing about that is that there is no full extent of one’s consciousness because there’s always the unconscious that one can’t think about. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1076

Categorization

• XREF: Touches the conscious/unconscious split that recurs across cultural theory’s account of the subject; Hall reads James’s project as an asymptotic ethics of attention.