by David Lodge
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Also by David Lodge
Dedication
Title Page
Preface
1. Consciousness and the Novel
2. Literary Criticism and Literary Creation
3. Dickens Our Contemporary
4. Forster’s Flawed Masterpiece
5. Waugh’s Comic Wasteland
6. Lives in Letters: Kingsley and Martin Amis
7. Henry James and the Movies
8. Bye-Bye Bech?
9. Sick with Desire: Philip Roth’s Libertine Professor
10. Kierkegaard for Special Purposes
11. A Conversation about Thinks . . .
Notes
Index
Copyright
About the Book
Human consciousness, long the province of literature, has lately come in for a remapping – even rediscovery – by the natural sciences, driven by developments in Artificial Intelligence, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. But as the richest record we have of human consciousness, literature, David Lodge suggests, may offer a kind of knowledge about this phenomenon that is complementary, not opposed, to scientific knowledge. Writing with characteristic wit and brio, and employing the insight and acumen of a skilled novelist and critic, Lodge here explores the representation of human consciousness in fiction (mainly English and American) in the light of recent investigations in cognitive science, neuroscience, and related disciplines. How, Lodge asks, does the novel represent consciousness? And how has this changed over time? In a series of interconnected essays, he pursues this question down various paths: how does the novel's method compare with that of other creative media such as film? How does the consciousness (and unconscious) of the creative writer do its work? And how can criticism infer the nature of this process through formal analysis? In essays on Charles Dickens, E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Henry James, John Updike and Philip Roth, and in reflections on his own practice as a novelist, Lodge brings to light – and to engaging life
Also by David Lodge
FICTION
The Picturegoers
Ginger, You’re Barmy
The British Museum is Falling Down
Out of the Shelter
Changing Places
How Far Can You Go?
Small World
Nice Work
Paradise News
Therapy
Home Truths
Thinks
CRITICISM
Language of Fiction
The Novelist at the Crossroads
The Modes of Modern Writing
Working with Structuralism
After Bakhtin
ESSAYS
Write on
The Art of Fiction
The Practice of Writing
DRAMA
The Writing Game
Home Truths
Remembering
MALCOLM BRADBURY
(1932–2000)
WRITER AND FRIEND
Consciousness & the Novel
Connected Essays
David Lodge
preface
For most of my adult life I combined the professions of novelist and academic, writing novels and works of literary criticism in regular alternation. I used some words of Gertrude Stein’s as an epigraph for one of my books of criticism, The Modes of Modern Writing, that could serve the purpose for all of them: “What does literature do and how does it do it. And what does English literature do and how does it do it. And what ways does it use to do what it does.” I posed these questions mainly in relation to the novel, in an effort to ground the interpretation and evaluation of novels in what I hopefully called a “poetics of fiction”—that is, a systematic and comprehensive description of the stylistic devices and narrative methods through which novels communicate their meanings and have the effects that they have upon readers. I started, in a book called Language of Fiction (1966), by applying to novels the kind of close reading that the New Criticism had applied primarily to lyric poetry and poetic drama. In the 1970s and 1980s, like many other English and American academic critics, I absorbed and domesticated some of the concepts and methods of Continental European structuralism, and applied them in The Modes of Modern Writing (1977) and Working with Structuralism (1981). Later, again like many others, I discovered the work of the great Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, which went back to the 1920s but only became widely known in the recent past. His idea that the novel, unlike the classic genres of epic, lyric, and tragedy, was essentially dialogic or polyphonic in its verbal texture, and his subtle analysis of the various types of discourse that are woven into it, informed and inspired most of the essays in my book After Bakhtin (1990).
In short, my quest for a poetics of fiction was at every stage furthered by exposure to some new, or new-to-me, source of literary theory. But the journey ended with my discovery of Bakhtin, partly because he seemed to answer satisfactorily all the remaining questions I had posed myself; and partly because as literary theory entered its post-structuralist phase it seemed to be less interested in the formal analysis of literary texts, and more interested in using them as a basis for philosophical speculation and ideological polemic. It so happened—or perhaps it wasn’t entirely coincidental—that at about this time, in the late eighties, I retired from academic life to become a full-time freelance writer. I have continued to write criticism, but for a nonspecialist audience, and have more or less given up reading literary theory. Such general, or generalisable, ideas as I have about literature nowadays tend to grow out of reflection on my own “practice of writing”—the title of my last book of criticism. Such reflection is also a feature of several of the essays in this volume.
In the mid-nineties, however, I started working on a novel, eventually called Thinks . . ., which entailed reading a good deal of theoretical or quasi-theoretical literature in what was quite new territory for me, the interdisciplinary field of “consciousness studies.” In fact the idea for this novel grew directly out of my somewhat belated discovery that consciousness had become a hot topic in the sciences, with challenging consequences for those whose assumptions about human nature have been formed by religious, humanist, and literary traditions. The research I did for this project also prompted some reflections about “the novel” as a literary form, which are developed in the title essay of this book. I have gathered together in the same volume a number of essays and review articles written over recent years which connect with “Consciousness and the Novel” and with one another in various ways. How the novel represents consciousness; how this contrasts with the way other narrative media, like film, represent it; how the consciousness, and the unconscious, of a creative writer do their work; how criticism can infer the nature of this process by formal analysis, or the creative writer by self-interrogation—these are recurrent themes in the essays collected here. Needless to say, I have not attempted to cover the topic of consciousness and the novel either exhaustively or systematically, nor to engage with the work of previous scholars who have endeavoured to do so. There was inevitably a certain amount of repetition or overlap between the different essays in their original form, which I have not entirely removed.
Chapter 1, “Consciousness and the Novel,” is the revised and extended text of the Richard Ellmann Lectures, which I gave at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, in October 2001. I am very grateful to Emory, and to Professor Ron Schuchard in particular, for inviting me to give these lectures, and for entertaining me so royally while I was the guest of the University. “Literary Criticism and Literary Creation” was also originally a lecture, and in its present form was first published in The
Arts and Sciences of Criticism, ed. David Fuller and Patricia Waugh (Oxford University Press, 1999). “Dickens Our Contemporary” is a revised version of an article first published in The Atlantic Monthly (© 2002 in The Atlantic Monthly by David Lodge). “Forster’s Flawed Masterpiece” is a slightly shortened version of my Introduction to the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics edition of Howards End (New York, 2000). “Waugh’s Comic Wasteland” was originally published as the Introduction to the Folio Society’s edition of Evelyn Waugh’s Comedies (1999). “Lives in Letters: Kingsley and Martin Amis” was first published in the Times Literary Supplement. “Henry James and the Movies” is a revised and extended version of the 1999 Henry James Lecture, given at the Rye Festival; it incorporates a review of the film of The Golden Bowl published in the Times Literary Supplement. “Bye-Bye Bech?” and “Sick with Desire: Philip Roth’s Libertine Professor” were first published in the New York Review of Books. “Kierkegaard for Special Purposes” was an address given to a conference in Copenhagen in 1996, and was subsequently published in Kierkegaard Revisited, Kierkegaard Studies: Monograph Series 1, ed. N. J. Cappelørn and J. Stewart (Walter de Gruyter, 1997). “A Conversation about Thinks . . .” is part of an interview published in Areté, 5 (Spring-Summer 2001).
I am obliged to all the editors, conference convenors, lecture programme organizers, and publishers involved for the original stimulus to write each of these pieces. Thanks are due to John Herbert for research assistance on E. M. Forster and Howards End. I am especially grateful to my editors at Harvard University Press, Peg Fulton and Mary Ellen Geer, my agent, Mike Shaw, and my wife, Mary, for their useful comments and advice while this book was in preparation.
chapter one
CONSCIOUSNESS & THE NOVEL
I CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE TWO CULTURES
IT WAS AN article in the English Catholic weekly, The Tablet, encountered in the summer of 1994, that first alerted me to a current intellectual debate about the nature of human consciousness, in which old philosophical issues were being refreshed by new input from the sciences. The article was a review of two books: Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained and Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis. Daniel Dennett is a philosopher turned cognitive scientist with a strong commitment to Artificial Intelligence. He says:
Human consciousness . . . can be best understood as the operation of a . . . virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for any such activities. The powers of this virtual machine vastly enhance the underlying powers of the organic hardware on which it runs.1
Francis Crick is the physicist and biochemist who with James Watson discovered the molecular structure of DNA. His book begins:
The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’2
The review article in The Tablet was by John Cornwell, a well-known journalist and writer on religious and scientific matters. It was titled “From Soul to Software,”3 and it brought out very clearly the challenge that the new scientific work on consciousness offered to the idea of human nature enshrined in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. It seemed to me that this work offered an almost equally strong challenge to the humanist or Enlightenment idea of man on which the presentation of character in the novel is based. When I began to develop a novel of my own that would dramatise or narrativise this subject in terms of a relationship between two people, I made one of them an atheistic cognitive scientist and the other a novelist who is a lapsed but not entirely sceptical Catholic. What I propose to do here is to explore some thoughts about the novel as a literary form, about its historical development and about “the ways that it uses to do what it does” (Gertrude Stein’s phrasing), which were provoked by my exposure to the current debate about consciousness.
Let me begin with a passage from a contemporary novel, a “literary novel” (as it is called in the book trade), a highly and justly acclaimed novel, which has won at least two major prizes, the Orange Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize: Fugitive Pieces by the Canadian writer Anne Michaels, published in 1997. The narrator, Jacob Beer, is speaking to a woman, Michaela, whom he has just met, about seeing the prematurely born child of his friends, Salman and Irena. This conversation is the beginning of a relationship between Jacob and Michaela:
I find myself telling Michaela a story that’s a dozen years old, the story of Tomas’s birth, about my experience of his soul.
“When Tomas was born, he was very premature. He weighed less than three pounds . . .”
I had put on a gown, scrubbed my hands and arms to the elbows, and Irena led me in to see him. I saw what I can only call a soul, for it was not yet a self, caught in that almost transparent body. I have never before been so close to such palpable evidence of the spirit, so close to the almost invisible musselman whose eyes in the photos show the faint stain of a soul. Without breath, the evidence would vanish instantly. Tomas in his clear plastic womb, barely bigger than a hand.
Michaela has been looking down at the floor. Her hair, glossy and heavy and parted on the side, covers her face. Now she looks up. Suddenly I’m embarrassed at having spoken so much.
Then she says: “I don’t know what the soul is. But I imagine that somehow our bodies surround what has always been.”4
The narrator, Jacob Beer, is middle-aged, of Jewish-Polish extraction. He was rescued from the horror of the Holocaust as a child, was brought up on a Greek island, and subsequently emigrated to Canada. He is obsessed with the history of the Holocaust, which explains the presence of the strange word “musselman” in the passage. It is derived from muselmann, the German word for Muslim, and is usually spelled “Mussulman.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this was a slang term in the death camps for a prisoner who was physically and mentally broken, who was, in the words of one source, “a walking skeleton wrapped in a piece of blanket.” That this inherently racist term was apparently adopted by the victims of the most appalling racist regime history has ever known is a paradox and an irony that I will not attempt to pursue here. The point made in the novel is that Jacob Beer, looking at the premature baby whose hold on life is so fragile, is reminded of photographs of those walking skeletons in the death camps in whose eyes alone there is the faintest vestige of an inner life. It is a powerful passage and was chosen by the Guardian as an extract to represent the novel when it was awarded the newspaper’s Fiction Prize. In fact I first read it in that context, at a time when I was doing my research into consciousness studies, and I was struck by how utterly different its language was from the books and articles I was reading.
The passage invokes, not metaphorically but literally, the religious idea of the individual immortal soul, which in some Platonist interpretations (evidently shared by Michaela) pre-exists human birth. And the soul or spirit (the words are more or less synonymous here) is seen as intimately connected with the more secular idea of the self. It is implied that the soul becomes or acquires a self through life experience, which this newborn infant has scarcely embarked upon. It is of course possible to have a concept of the self—of the unique, autonomous, morally responsible individual human being whose inner life is fully known through introspection—without believing in the existence of immortal souls; but many people with no religious belief find the words “soul” and “spirit” useful, if not indispensable, to signify some uniquely valuable quality in human life and human awareness.
According to the most enlightened thinking, phneuroscientistsilosophical and scientific, of our age, however, this is all nonsense. It is what Gilbert Ryle denounced, in his influential book The Concept of Mind, as the fallacy of the Ghost in the Machine. According to this orthodoxy, the human body, including the human brain which produces the ph
enomenon of mind, is a machine; there is no ghost, no soul or spirit, to be found in it. And the self is not an immaterial essence but an epiphenomenon of brain activity. To distinguish between flesh and spirit, body and soul, the material and the immaterial, the earthly and the transcendent, is to commit the fallacy of dualism, which runs deep through the history of Western culture, but is now dead and buried. Or it ought to be. In fact it stubbornly persists, not only in ordinary casual speech about life and death, but also in the language of literature, as the passage from Fugitive Pieces attests. And one interesting effect of the current interdisciplinary debate about consciousness has been to open up once again the issue of dualism, and even to elicit some arguments in favour of modified versions of it.
Until fairly recently, consciousness was not much studied by the natural sciences. It was considered the province of philosophy. Psychology, inasmuch as it aspired to be an empirical science, regarded consciousness as “a black box.” All that could be observed and measured was input and output, not what went on inside. This placed severe limitations on the study of human experience. My cognitive scientist in Thinks . . . tells the novelist heroine, “There’s an old joke that crops up in nearly every book on consciousness, about two behaviourist psychologists who have sex, and afterwards one says to the other, ‘It was good for you, how was it for me?’”5 As recently as 1989 Stuart Sutherland wrote in the International Dictionary of Psychology, “Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.” Psychoanalysis, of course, was always concerned with trying to understand consciousness, but its claims to be a science have been dismissed by most natural scientists, and many of its critics have regarded it as a kind of religion or substitute for religion. Its ideas, or memes (to use Richard Dawkins’s useful term for the conceptual equivalent of genes), have been disseminated and kept in currency largely by literature and literary intellectuals. In recent times, however, psychology has become less rigidly behaviourist as a discipline. There is now something called Cognitive Psychology, and some academic psychology departments have even admitted Freud and Jung into the syllabus. Freud has also received some surprising endorsements from leading cognitive scientists and neuroscientists.
