Consciousness and the Novel

by David Lodge

  You may multiply little facts that can be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like—the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its absence the whole effect is as nought; I mean the invention, the representation of the old consciousness—the soul, the sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world, were non-existent. [James’s emphases]37

  It is interesting that the word “soul” crops up again in this context.

  In his famous essay of 1884, “The Art of Fiction,” James says, “Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.” His words are remarkably close in sentiment and tone to Virginia Woolf’s assertion in her equally famous essay, “Modern Fiction”:

  The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms . . . life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.38

  That essay, published in 1919, was a manifesto for the modernist stream-of-consciousness novel, and an attack on the perpetuation of the nineteenth-century novel tradition of social realism by writers like Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy, whom Woolf calls “materialists.” She herself was at this point in her own career as a novelist between the rather conventional Night and Day, published in the same year, and the much more experimental Jacob’s Room, published in 1922. James Joyce was publishing Ulysses serially in The Little Review at this time, and in spite of her reservations about his explicit treatment of sex and other bodily functions, Virginia Woolf was excited and inspired by Joyce’s technical innovations in rendering the stream of consciousness. Referring back to her own description of the “atoms of experience,” she declares:

  Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.

  And she cites the Hades chapter of Ulysses as an example of how this can be done:

  In contrast with those we have called materialists, Mr Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickering of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain.

  Again the idea of the human spirit or soul occurs, as it nearly always does in literary reflections on consciousness. Virginia Woolf’s metaphor for it, the innermost flickering flame, is perhaps more appropriate to her own fiction than to Joyce’s; but her tribute to him is genuine:

  The scene in the cemetery, for instance, with its brilliancy, its sordidity, its incoherence, its sudden lightning flashes of significance, does undoubtedly come so close to the quick of the mind, that, on a first reading at any rate, it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece.

  Let us look at the beginning of that chapter of Ulysses. The mourners at Paddy Dignam’s funeral are getting into the carriage that will take them from the house of the dead man to the cemetery.

  —Are we all here now? Martin Cunningham asked. Come along, Bloom.

  This first line is, apart from Joyce’s idiosyncratic punctuation, a completely normal combination of direct speech and narrative.

  Mr Bloom entered and sat in the vacant place. He pulled the door to after him and slammed it tight till it shut tight. He passed an arm through the armstrap and looked seriously from the open carriage window at the lowered blinds of the avenue.

  This is still narrative discourse, third person past tense, but increasingly focalized through Bloom and coloured by his consciousness. The redundancies of “tight till it shut tight” and “arm through the armstrap” express his self-consciousness about his deportment, his anxiety to behave in the right way, a certain nervousness and social tension generated by the occasion which he tries to relieve by performing these trivial physical actions with almost excessive care and deliberation. “[He] looked seriously from the open carriage window” identifies Bloom as the visual point of view of the narrative. The locution “looked seriously” is also a kind of pun, playing on the other meaning of “look,” to appear, expressing Bloom’s wish to look suitably serious. Then the discourse shifts into the interior monologue mode:

  One dragged aside: an old woman peeping. Nose whiteflattened against the pane.

  Joyce creates the illusion of representing what Virginia Woolf called “the quick of the mind” partly by a technique of condensation. Since we know that our thoughts are faster and more fragmentary than any verbal articulation of them, to present the interior monologue in well-formed sentences like “I see one of the blinds dragged aside. It’s been dragged aside by an old woman who is peeping out. Her nose is flattened against the windowpane, so it looks white” would be much less expressive. Throughout Ulysses Joyce represents the stream of consciousness by leaving out verbs, pronouns, articles, and by leaving sentences unfinished. The nonce word “whiteflattened,” incidentally, is a good example of the literary representation of qualia. Why does it seem such a vivid and exact description of a common phenomenon? Because the word actually mimes what it signifies: the two key words are “flattened” against each other to create the synaesthetic image. Bloom speculates that the old woman is relieved it is not her own funeral—a fairly safe guess, based on folk psychology:

  Thanking her stars she was passed over.

  Then he slips into a characteristic reverie in which general reflections on the special relationship that women seem to have to the bodies of the dead mingle with personal memories, through the association of ideas.

  Extraordinary the interest they take in a corpse. Glad to see us go we give them such trouble coming. Job seems to suit them.

  So far it’s all generalization. Then Bloom begins to picture a house with a corpse in it, the women moving about quietly and secretively before laying out the body. This triggers a memory of his wife Molly and her domestic help making the bed:

  Huggermugger in corners. Slop about in slipper-slappers for fear he’d wake. Then getting it ready. Laying it out. Molly and Mrs Fleming making the bed. Pull it more to your side.

  That last sentence is an aural memory. Bloom actually quotes to himself Molly’s words on the occasion. This is sometimes called free direct speech, since it is not defined by a speech tag or quotation marks. The “it” was evidently a sheet because it triggers by association the phrase “our winding sheet.” This also seems to be a kind of quotation, but from some literary or religious source. That returns Bloom’s thoughts to the topic of death and a series of morbidly whimsical reflections and speculations.

  Our winding sheet. Never know who will touch you dead. Wash and shampoo. I believe they clip the nails and the hair. Keep a bit in an envelope. Grow all the same after. Unclean job.

  “Wash and shampoo” is another phrase that is lifted from another context—the barber’s shop. Mikhail Bakhtin called this “doubly oriented discourse”—when a speech act not only refers to something in the world but also refers to another speech act. A great deal of what we say alludes to, echoes, responds to, argues with pre-existing discourse, and it is therefore realistic to represent thought as doing the same. Then there is a brief return to third-person, past-tense narrative:

  All waited. Nothing was said.

  which slips back into interior monologue:

  Stowing in the wreaths probably. I am sitting on something hard. Ah, that soap in my hip pocket. Better shift it out of that. Wait for an opportunity.

  Joyce’s representation of consciousness was a quite new combination of third-person and first-person discourse. The third-person narrative is impersonal and objective—there is no trace of an authorial persona, a confiding, commenting, ruminating authorial “I” such as Fielding’s or Dickens’s or George Eliot’s. Its function is to establ
ish the spatio-temporal frame in which the subjective consciousness of the individual character is operating. The first-person narrative is vividly expressive of personality; and it is important to note that Joyce represents the consciousnesses of his three main characters, Bloom, Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, in three quite distinctive styles—as regards vocabulary, syntax, and the type of association, whether metaphoric or metonymic, that makes one thought beget another.39 He came as close to representing the phenomenon of consciousness as perhaps any writer has ever done in the history of literature.

  Henry James, although dedicated to representing life through the consciousness of his characters, did not go so far. He would not surrender the coherence and control of the well-formed grammatical sentence. It would not have occurred to him to do so. His preference was for a third-person narrative that was intensely focalised through the consciousness of one character, as in The Ambassadors, or in one character at a time, in large narrative blocks, as in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. He did not approve of the first-person, pseudo-autobiographical mode for full-scale novels, deploring “the terrible fluidity of self-revelation” it encouraged. He favoured first-person narration only for the short story or tale. These narrators are usually reporters of some enigmatic behaviour in other people, and the narrator’s consciousness is used as a convenient way to select and reflect on lives that if presented from within would require much more textual space. When James’s first-person narrators focus on their own experience, the question of their reliability usually becomes the underlying theme—most famously in The Turn of the Screw. The example of James in this respect encouraged later novelists to use “I” narrators to problematise the meaning of a narrative rather than, as in the classic confessional novel, to make it fluidly transparent. Novels written in the first person continue to occupy many rooms in the house of fiction throughout the twentieth century. Indeed, one has the impression that for the last few decades it has been the dominant narrative mode for literary fiction. Why that should have happened is a question I shall consider in the last section of this essay.

  III SURFACE AND DEPTH

  The modern novel in the sense of modernist—that is to say, the artistically innovatory, cutting-edge literary fiction that evolved in the first few decades of the twentieth century, in conscious reaction against the classic realist novel of the previous century; the kind of novel pioneered by Henry James, and carried forward in various ways by Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence, among othersfn1—manifested a general tendency to center narrative in the consciousnesses of its characters, and to create those characters through the representation of their subjective thoughts and feelings rather than by describing them objectively. Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis, his magisterial study of the representation of reality in Western literature from Homer and the Old Testament onwards, takes as his exemplary text for the modern period Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927), in which, as he says, “The world of objective facts has almost completely vanished, almost everything stated appears by way of reflection in the consciousness of the dramatis personae.”40 This technique implies a belief that reality inheres not in the common phenomenal world but in the perceptions of that world in individual minds. Describing the fiction of the Edwardian novelists Bennett, Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells, with its scrupulous descriptions of external appearances, Virginia Woolf asked rhetorically, in her essay on Modern Fiction, “Is life like this? Must novels be like this?” and answered her own question: “Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this.’ Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day . . .” There follows that passage about the atoms of experience falling like a shower on the mind which I quoted earlier. “Look within,” she exhorts. The heuristic direction of this kind of fiction is, one might say, always from outside to inside, from spoken to unspoken thought, from surface to depth.

  Undoubtedly one of the crucial factors in this shift of emphasis in literary fiction was the development of psychoanalysis, especially the work of Freud and, to a lesser extent, Jung. It was Freud who first produced a plausible and persuasive account of human nature in which behaviour was chiefly accounted for by motives that were hidden in the secret recesses of the individual psyche, and hidden not just from observers, but often from the subject’s own conscious mind. The idea of subconscious or unconscious motivation, of suppressed or repressed drives and desires which lie behind overt behaviour, and which may be traced in the jumbled and enigmatic narratives of dreams, was immensely stimulating to literary imaginations, as was the idea that these drives were more often than not sexual in origin—for the novel has always been especially interested in human sexuality and eagerly read for its revelations about the sexual lives and thoughts of its characters. Another potent idea for writers was that of a collective unconscious that connects us to the earliest stages of our evolutionary history and manifests itself in the archetypes of myth and legend. It wasn’t necessary for writers to have actually read the psychoanalytical writings of Freud and his followers to be influenced by them. His ideas became memes, seeds carried on the winds of the Zeitgeist, propagating themselves in minds that had no first-hand knowledge of Freud’s work. But we know, for instance, that Frieda Lawrence, who had close personal connections with the European psychoanalytical movement, introduced D. H. Lawrence to Freud’s theories, especially the Oedipus Complex, and that this influenced the final version of Sons and Lovers. Virginia Woolf had close personal connections with the British psychoanalytical movement, through the Stracheys—James Strachey, brother of Lytton, was Freud’s English translator. Though Woolf’s essay “Freudian Fiction” is sceptical about the application of psychoanalytical theory to the representation of character in the novel, there was, as her biographer Hermione Lee observes, something “self-defensive” about this posture.41 Both her life and her work have provided rich pickings for Freudian commentators.

  Freud’s theories fell on fertile literary ground partly because they had to some extent already been intuited by imaginative writers before him, as he himself acknowledged. “The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious,” he said. “What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.” In fact the claim of Freudian psychoanalysis to be scientific has been hotly contested—most thoroughly perhaps by Richard Webster in Why Freud Was Wrong (1995). Arguably, the success of Freud’s ideas as memes depended more on his literary skills than on the hard evidence he produced for their therapeutic efficacy. The factual accuracy of his famous case histories has been seriously questioned, but as narratives, in which the great psychoanalytical detective solves the apparently baffling enigmas presented by his patients, they exert the same spell as the classic tales of Sherlock Holmes—which Freud himself, rather suspiciously, much admired.42

  Given the sceptical scrutiny to which Freud’s writings have been subjected in recent times, I was surprised to find considerable respect for him among some of the leading scientific investigators of consciousness. One of the most uncompromising apologists for “strong” Al, Marvin Minsky of MIT, says: “Freud had the best theories, so far, next to mine, of what it takes to make a mind.”43 The distinguished and hardheaded neuroscientist Rodney Cotterill says:

  Freud came surprisingly close to divining the way in which the brain serves the senses, and the manner in which it stores records of experiences. Amongst his clairvoyant conjectures, mention should be made of his belief that nerve fibres carry signals to the brain, where the body’s outer surface is appropriately represented . . . He saw the brain’s neural elements as being capable of discharging when sufficiently excited . . . And he guessed that the neural elements are mutually separated by what he called contact barriers and we now call synapses.44

  Most importantly, Freud’s idea of the unconscious anticipated the discovery of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists that much of the brain activity that produces the effect of conscious
ness is hidden from us. V S. Ramachandran says: “Freud’s most valuable contribution was his discovery that your conscious mind is simply a façade and that you are completely unaware of what really goes on in your brain.”45 The neuroscientist Gerald Edelman recalls arguing with the molecular biologist Jacques Monod, who regarded Freud as a charlatan, “that, while perhaps not a scientist in our sense, Freud was a great intellectual pioneer, particularly in his views on the unconscious and its role in behaviour.”46

  The Freudian model of the mind was structured like geological strata: unconscious, ego, superego—in ascending order. It therefore encouraged the idea that consciousness had a dimension of depth, which it was the task of literature, as of psychoanalysis, to explore. For modernist writers, the effort to plumb these depths, to get closer to psychological reality, paradoxically entailed an abandonment of the traditional properties and strategies of literary realism. The traditional plot, which demonstrates that all effects have their logical causes, is discarded or destabilised, and poetic devices of symbolism and leitmotif and intertextual allusion are used instead to give formal unity to the representation of experience, which is itself seen as essentially chaotic. Ambiguity and obscurity permeate human behaviour in the stories of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. The play of human memory disrupts and shuffles the chronological order of events in the minds of Joyce’s characters, and Virginia Woolf’s. D. H. Lawrence uses an incantatory symbolist style to base character on some deeper level than that of the ego. “You mustn’t look in my novels for the old stable ego of the character,” he writes to Edward Garnett in 1914. “There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically-unchanged element” [italics mine].47 In the Nighttown episode of Ulysses Joyce exploits the surreal substitutions, juxtapositions, and displacements of dream to represent the turmoil of Bloom’s unconscious. In Finnegans Wake he went a step further and represented the whole of human history as a dream, in which every character and event is, in Freudian terms, overdetermined—that is, bears more than one signification, simultaneously. In that extraordinary work Joyce both demonstrated and exceeded the limits of the representation of consciousness in literary narrative.