Consciousness and the Novel

by David Lodge

  The primary limitation is this: that verbal language is essentially linear. One word or word-group comes after another, and we apprehend their syntactically cumulative meaning lineally, in time. When we speak and listen, when we write and read, we are bound to this linear order. But we know intuitively, and cognitive science has confirmed, that consciousness itself is not linear. In computer terms the brain is a parallel processor running many programs simultaneously. In neurobiological terms it is a complex system of billions of neurons between which countless connections are being made simultaneously as long as we are conscious. Virginia Woolf’s injunction to “record the atoms [of experience] as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall” is therefore flawed. The atoms do not fall in a discrete chronological order—they bombard us from all directions, and are dealt with simultaneously by different parts of the brain. “The temporal order of discriminations cannot be what fixes the subjective order in experience,” says Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained.48 His metaphor for the brain is Pandemonium, in which all the different areas are, as it were, shouting at once and competing for dominance. Intuitively, Virginia Woolf knew this. In an interesting correspondence her friend Jacques Raverat, a painter, argued that writing’s essential linearity prevented it from representing the complex multiplicity of a mental event, as a painting could. She replied that she was trying to get away from the “formal railway line of the sentence . . . people never did think or feel in that way, but all over the place, in your way.”49 By breaking up the formal railway line of the sentence, by the use of ellipses and parentheses, by blurring the boundaries between what is thought and what is spoken, and by switching point of view and narrative voice with bewildering frequency—by these and similar devices she tried to imitate in her fiction the elusiveness of the phenomenon of consciousness. But she could never entirely escape the sequential linearity of her medium. The pun is perhaps the closest that verbal language can come to mimicking the simultaneous input of heterogeneous information which is the normal state of consciousness before the mind takes up the task of selecting and articulating some of this information verbally; and by writing an entire narrative text, Finnegans Wake, in a punning synthetic language of his own invention, Joyce perhaps came closer than any writer had done before to representing the extraordinary complexity of the brain activity that goes on just below the surface of the self-conscious mind. But the price of this was to sacrifice the narrative cohesion which makes stories intelligible to us, and therefore to take leave of the novel as a literary form.

  The terms “postmodern” and “postmodernist” entered the English language in the second half of the twentieth century (the first, specifically architectural, citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated 1949; and the first literary critical application is dated 1965). But there is a sense in which all artists, whether writers, painters, sculptors, or musicians, who started their careers after the great masterpieces of modernist art had been created were axiomatically “post-modern.” The key figures in the first postmodern generation of English novelists were, I would suggest, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Henry Green, Anthony Powell, Christopher Isherwood, and George Orwell. They all began to write in the daunting shadow of James, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf; they admired and imitated and were influenced by them in various ways; but they also in due course reacted against them, as of course new generations of writers always do react against their literary parents. These writers do not constitute a “school.” Though there are clearly affinities between some of them—between Waugh and Powell, for instance—they are all quite distinctive and their fictions have different personal and ideological sources. But what they have in common, to a greater or lesser extent, is a retreat from the modernist effort to represent subjective consciousness as faithfully as possible. They reverse the modernist privileging of depth over surface. There is a return in their novels to objective reporting of the external world, and a focus on what people say and do rather than what they think and feel. There is a striking readjustment of the ratio of dialogue to narrative, of direct speech to the rendering of characters’ unspoken thoughts.

  In the classic novel there was a kind of balance between these elements. In Jane Austen’s or George Eliot’s novels, for example, an exchange of dialogue between characters is customarily framed within a narrative description of the situation, including the body language of the speakers, and is followed by a passage in which the authorial narrator comments on the import of what was said, or reports the reflections of the protagonist on the import of what was said. In the modernist novel, typically, a line of dialogue will be followed by a long, intricate, densely written account of the private thoughts and feelings of the speaker or listener, which may last for a paragraph, or a couple of pages, before we come to the next line of direct speech; and it is not the authorial voice who speaks in these interpolated passages of introspection and analysis, but the inner voice of the character himself or herself who is the “center of consciousness,” rendered in interior monologue or free indirect style, and mingled with the accents of other discourses, written and spoken, which belong to that character’s mental world. That is what happens, for example, in the passage from “Hades” in Joyce’s Ulysses that I analysed. And it happens in the passage Auerbach selected from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. This extract—the whole of section 5 of the first part of the novel—is too long to quote here in full. It shows Mrs. Ramsay sitting by the window of her living room, knitting a stocking for the lighthouse keeper’s little boy, and using her own young son James, who is cutting pictures out of a catalogue, as a rough-and-ready guide to measure the size of the stocking. The passage contains about 1,500 words, but fewer than fifty of them consist of Mrs. Ramsay’s direct speech, distributed over five speech acts:

  “And even if it isn’t fine tomorrow, it will be another day. And now stand up and let me measure your leg.”

  “My dear, stand still.”

  “Stand still, don’t be tiresome.”

  “It’s too short, ever so much too short.”

  “Let’s find another picture to cut out.”

  It is notable that only Mrs. Ramsay speaks. No reply of James is reported, or even implied, though it seems implausible that he would be entirely silent in the circumstances. This intensifies the focus on Mrs. Ramsay and her inner life. The five remarks describe a small emotional arc in her relationship with her son: she begins by consoling him in motherly fashion about the prospects of the longed-for trip to the lighthouse, then she becomes irritated with him for fidgeting while she is trying to measure the stocking, then with herself because the stocking is too short, then she finally makes peace with James again. But this little scene between mother and son is overwhelmed with information that has little or nothing to do with it. In between these banal utterances of hers we are given a detailed and eloquent rendering of her thoughts and feelings about other members of her family and her friends and her house. The irritation she feels with James derives more from her gloomy private thoughts about the Swiss au pair who is homesick and whose father is dying than from the business of the stocking. There is a long parenthesis in which her friend Mr. Bankes is described speaking to her on the telephone, and then talking to himself about her after putting down the receiver. Auerbach comments that the punctuation is deviant: words spoken aloud sometimes lack quotation marks, while in other places there are quotation marks around silent thoughts.

  You only have to open a novel by one of the next generation of novelists—Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930), for example, or Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men (1931), and riffle through it, to see a great difference, just in the way the pages are laid out. There is a great deal more dialogue in proportion to description, and direct speech is clearly marked off from the narrative discourse by conventional indentation and quotation marks. One whole chapter of Vile Bodies consists entirely of dialogue, apart from two short sentences: “Adam rang up Nina” and “Later Nina rang up Adam.”
In the first conversation the hero tells his fiancée he can’t marry her immediately, as he has just promised to do by telegram.

  Adam rang up Nina.

  “Darling. I’ve been so happy about your telegram. Is it really true?

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “The major is bogus.”

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t got any money?”

  “No.”

  “We aren’t going to be married today?”

  “No.”

  “I see.”

  “Well?”

  “I said, I see.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes, that’s all, Adam.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Nina.”50

  In the second conversation, later the same day, Nina tells Adam in the same clipped, offhand fashion that she’s going to marry his best friend. The complete absence of authorial comment or any description of the thoughts and feelings of either party to these conversations is of course vital to their literary effect. It is a kind of negative eloquence, a rhetoric of abstention, that evokes a social milieu of people who are alienated, amoral, hedonistic, emotionally immature, spiritually empty—the Bright Young Things of the Twenties, one of several generations that were described as Lost in the last century.

  The style and tone of Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men, published the following year, are very similar. The hero, Atwater, has a dull job in a museum. He spends his spare time going to parties and getting drunk, having shallow affairs with women he doesn’t much like, and mooning hopelessly after one called Susan Nunnery whom he does like. In this scene he has called on an artist friend who is living with a girl called Sophy.

  Atwater said: “Do you know Susan Nunnery well?”

  “What has she been doing?”

  “Somebody was talking about her last night.”

  “Oh, yes. She was there last night, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she still living with Gilbert?”

  “Was she?”

  “I don’t know,” said Barlow. “Perhaps she wasn’t. I can’t keep up with girls like that.”

  Atwater drank his tea. Sophy went out to get some more hot water. Barlow said:

  “Miriam was here yesterday. I think really I’d better marry her.”

  “Why? Have you ruined her?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t think she’d like me to.”

  “She’s a nice girl.”

  “Yes, I shall certainly marry her.”

  “Do you see much of her?”

  “No, not much.”

  Sophy came in again.51

  Again, like the passage from Vile Bodies, this is effective precisely because it stays on the surface of the situation, giving the reader no privileged insights into the hero’s thoughts and feelings. In the first part of the dialogue we infer the frantic longing and seething jealousy that lie behind Atwater’s apparently casual questions about Susan, emotions only exacerbated by Barlow’s vague and uninterested replies. The second part is funny and shocking because of the complete absence of any condemnation by Atwater of Barlow’s selfishness—his patronising attitude to Miriam and his readiness to betray Sophy—either overtly in the dialogue, or privately in thought. Of course if there were any explicit condemnation by either Atwater or the narrator, it would seem very heavy-handed, and would destroy the comedy. The reader has to supply the emotion and moral outrage that are missing from the text. This device is used to brilliant effect in the climax to the novel, when a character called Pringle apparently commits suicide by swimming out to sea, and the friends he is entertaining at the time, including Atwater and Barlow, fail utterly to respond to the crisis, either emotionally or practically.

  Evelyn Waugh claimed that the pioneer of this kind of fiction, in which meaning is implied through conversational nuances, was Ronald Firbank. In an essay published in 1929, Waugh praised Firbank for achieving “a new, balanced interrelation of subject and form,” thus solving “the aesthetic problem of representation in fiction . . . Other solutions are offered,” Waugh concluded, obviously thinking of the modernist novel, “but in them the author has been forced into a subjective attitude to his material; Firbank remained objective.”52

  Among the writers whom Waugh saw as developing the technical discoveries of Ronald Firbank, he mentions Ernest Hemingway. I doubt whether Hemingway knew the work of Firbank, but he himself certainly influenced Waugh and his contemporaries. Hemingway read and admired and cultivated the acquaintance of the great modernist writers like Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, but he wrote a very different kind of fiction, especially in his short stories. Superficially it looked like slice-of-life vernacular realism, but it was in fact charged with a kind of intensity and resonance of association found in Symbolist writing. He thus provided a bridge between the aesthetics of high modernism and the preference of the young post–Great War generation of English novelists for staying on the surface rather than probing the depths of experience. Hemingway was, he said, developing “a theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted it and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel more than they understood.”53 What Hemingway omitted from his stories was all the psychological analysis and introspection that one finds in James or Joyce or Woolf. He stays scrupulously on the surface, describing behaviour, places, persons in deceptively simple, apparently denotative language, and setting down speech with what seems like colloquial authenticity. In fact this language, in both narrative and dialogue, is full of patterns of repetition, lexical and phonological, through which simple synecdoches and metonymies generate metaphorical associations without ever being overtly metaphorical. The apparently objective representation of the world in this fiction is like the tip of an iceberg, beneath which there is a huge mass of invisible subjective emotion which the reader gradually apprehends. The trout-fishing so exactly described in “Big Two-hearted River,” it slowly becomes clear, is a ritual to exorcise the traumatic memories of a war veteran. The trivial bickering of the couple on the Spanish railway platform in “Hills Like White Elephants” conceals, then reveals, a bitter emotional conflict over the girl’s unwanted pregnancy. In “The Killers,” the contemptuous badinage of the two gangsters in black overcoats who walk into the provincial diner, and order a meal while they prepare a murderous ambush, is a chilling index of their brutal power, and of the terror they generate in the other unwilling participants:

  George put the two platters, one of ham and eggs, the other of bacon and eggs, on the counter. He set down two side-dishes of fried potatoes and closed the wicket into the kitchen.

  “Which is yours?” he asked Al.

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “Ham and eggs.”

  “Just a bright boy,” Max said. He leaned forward and took the ham and eggs. Both men ate with their gloves on. George watched them eat.

  “What are you looking at?” Max looked at George.

  “Nothing.”

  “The hell you were. You were looking at me.”

  “Maybe the boy meant it for a joke, Max,” Al said.

  George laughed.

  “You don’t have to laugh,” Max said to him. “You don’t have to laugh at all, see?”

  “All right,” said George.

  “So he thinks it’s all right.” Max turned to Al. “He thinks it’s all right. That’s a good one.”

  “Oh, he’s a thinker,” Al said. They went on eating.54

  Though there is some black humour in “The Killers,” Hemingway’s vision was essentially tragic. Waugh’s and Powell’s was essentially comic. Yet there is an affinity of technique between the last three passages I have quoted. In all of them dialogue dominates; the narrative observes only the surface of human behaviour; and the emotional and moral significance of the action is all implied.

  The passage
from “The Killers” reminds one irresistibly of a scene from a gangster film, and indeed two movies have been made based on Hemingway’s story. It seems likely that the stylistic turn of the novel, away from depth to surface, was connected with the emergence of a new narrative medium in the twentieth century—cinema. Compared with prose fiction or narrative poetry or drama, film is most tied to representing the visible world, and least well adapted to representing consciousness, which is invisible. Although voice-over interior monologue can be and has been used in films, it goes against the grain of the medium, and cannot be used extensively and repeatedly without becoming obtrusive. The principal means by which film conveys the thoughts and feelings of its characters are (1) dialogue—though in the era of silent movies this was restricted to a few captions; (2) nonverbal acting—gesture, body language, facial expressions, and so forth—by the performers; (3) suggestive imagery in the setting of the action or the way it is lit and photographed; (4) music. The combination of all these channels of communication operating together and sometimes simultaneously can have a very powerful emotional effect, but it is not semantically fine-grained—it is not capable of the precise descriptions and subtle discriminations of a character’s mental life that we find in the classic and modern novel. In film, the subjective inner life of the characters has to be implied rather than explicitly verbalised—as in the scenes from prose fiction, consisting mainly of dialogue, that I have just quoted.