Consciousness and the Novel

by David Lodge

  And so the story moves towards its climax (and at this point I would recommend that any readers who have not yet read The Dying Animal put this essay aside until they have done so). On New Year’s Eve, 1999, the last day of the millennium, Kepesh receives a phone message from an evidently distressed Consuela, to say that she wants to tell him something face to face. After some hesitation, fearing the disruption of his hard-won peace of mind, he agrees. She shows up at his apartment, as beautiful as ever, but ominously wearing a fez. She quickly reveals that she has breast cancer and has been having chemotherapy to shrink the tumors. Now she faces surgery for partial removal of one of the breasts that Kepesh once told her were the most beautiful he had ever seen. She wants him to “say goodbye to them”: to touch them, and to photograph them, but not to take this intimacy any further. Kepesh realises he wouldn’t be able to anyway, once he has felt the lumps under her armpit. “At that moment I knew hers was no longer a sexual life. What was at stake was something else.”

  Consuela’s life-threatening illness also threatens Kepesh’s libertine philosophy. To succumb to inevitable death after a lifetime of licentious pleasure, as George O’Hearn did, is one thing. To do so when one is only thirty-two is quite another. In fact Consuela has been told she has a 60 percent chance of cure, but her intuition tells her otherwise. “Time for the young is always made up of what is past, but for Consuela time is now how much further she has left, and she doesn’t believe there is any.” She is experiencing her own mortality prematurely, out of the natural order of things. Kepesh’s maxim, “Sex is the revenge on death,” would be of no use or consolation to her. All he can do is hold her and comfort her, as they distract themselves by watching the television coverage of the millennium celebrations sweeping around the globe, their vacuous cheeriness and vulgar spectacle suiting the medium perfectly: “TV doing what it does best: the triumph of trivialization over tragedy.”

  That happened three weeks ago, he tells his companion. She left his apartment at one-thirty in the morning of New Year’s Day, saying she would get back in touch after her surgery. He has been waiting for her call ever since, wondering uneasily what kind of claim on him she might have if she survives the operation. He fears that she might decide to try out sex again “first with someone familiar and someone old.” He knows from a previous experience that he couldn’t make it with a woman mutilated by even a partial mastectomy. He associates the lump of raw meat in the Stanley Spencer painting with Consuela’s threatened breast and the failure of sex. He recalls the pathos of her ravaged head when she took off her fez, covered by a thin, meaningless fuzz that was worse than perfect baldness. He kissed the head again and again.

  What else was there for me to do? . . . She’s thirty-two, and she thinks she’s now exiled from everything, experiencing each experience for the very last time. Only what if she isn’t? What—

  There! The phone! That could be—! At what time? It’s two A.M. Excuse me!

  The time of the story has finally caught up with the time of its telling. Kepesh returns to report that the call was indeed from Consuela. She is having a panic attack. Her surgery is due in two weeks’ time, and the doctors now tell her they have to remove the whole breast. She wants him to go to her, to sleep in her bed, to look after her, feed her. He has to go immediately. The story ends in a staccato exchange of dialogue, with the narratee’s words quoted in direct speech for the first time:

  “Don’t.”

  What?

  “Don’t go.”

  But I must. Someone has to be with her.

  “She’ll find someone.”

  She’s in terror. I’m going.

  “Think about it. Think. Because if you go, you’re finished.”

  The narratee is probably right that if Kepesh answers Consuela’s call for help he is going to be sucked into a maelstrom of appalling emotional stress, but of course he won’t be “finished” in the sense that Consuela will be finished if she dies. But what if she recovers and lives on, wounded, traumatised, burdening Kepesh with her pain and fear and sexual insecurity? Possibly that would “finish” him psychologically. Kepesh himself has already feared as much. The narratee, speaking like a reincarnation of George O’Hearn, urges him not to take the risk. Should he go or not?

  If 1 Corinthians 13 is invoked, there is no question—of course he must go. He must give a helping hand to Consuela in her hour of need, without weighing up the possible long-term consequences. And that gesture of kissing her unappealing, fuzz-covered head suggests that he is capable of such a selfless act. But by ending the story where he does, Roth leaves the reader free to suppose that Kepesh doesn’t go, perhaps shouldn’t go. Certainly, if he goes, he will be repudiating everything he has asserted in the previous one hundred and fifty pages. What the implied author himself thinks is inscrutable, because of the chosen form. Like many works of modern literature, The Dying Animal ends on a note of radical ambiguity and indeterminacy. What is unusual about it is the way it challenges the reader at every point to define and defend his own ethical stance towards the issues raised by the story. It is a small, disturbing masterpiece.

  chapter ten

  KIERKEGAARD FOR SPECIAL PURPOSES

  In 1996 I was invited to address an international conference of Kierkegaard scholars, gathered in Copenhagen to discuss “Kierkegaard and the Meaning of Meaning It.” What follows is a shortened version of what I said on that occasion. I never discovered the meaning of the conference’s title.

  THIS IS NOT an academic paper, but if there were a branch of Kierkegaard studies called (by analogy with linguistics) “Kierkegaard for Special Purposes,” that is where it might belong. In my novel Therapy there is a good deal of reference to Kierkegaard, to his writings and to his life story, and I will try to explain how and why I used him in this way, and what special fictional purposes he served for me.1

  Readers of novels often assume that the knowledge of a particular subject displayed in their pages must be the visible tip of a submerged iceberg of information, when in fact there is often no iceberg—the tip is all there is. Some years ago I wrote a novel called Nice Work. Much of the story concerns an engineering factory and the professional life of its Managing Director. This was based on a few weeks’ research on my part, visiting factories and “shadowing” a friend who was MD of an engineering company. After the novel was published I received several invitations to address seminars and conferences on business management and industrial relations. In declining these invitations, I had to explain that Nice Work contained everything I knew about business management and industrial relations. Of Therapy I might say that it contains more about Kierkegaard than I know, because it contains several passages quoted from his writings, the full meaning of which has certainly eluded me.

  If I admit that until I started to work on this novel, in the winter of 1992–93, I had never read anything by or about Kierkegaard except Walter Lowrie’s short biography,2 and that in the process of writing it I read only a few of his works, and skimmed through some others, you will not expect any profound or original insights from me into Kierkegaard’s philosophy. But it may be of interest to learn how a novelist could be stimulated and enlightened by even such a hurried and selective encounter with Kierkegaard’s life and work, and how the distinctive fictional and ludic strains in his philosophical writings made them especially suggestive and inspiring to me. If I have any light to shed, it will be on the nature of the creative process, rather than on the “Meaning of Meaning It.”

  Therapy did not start with my discovery of Kierkegaard, but with a number of loosely linked ideas, situations, and themes, mostly arising out of my own experience. The most important of these elements was depression, and it was the theme of depression which led me to Kierkegaard. As I have grown older I have become more and more vulnerable to bouts of anxiety and depression, though the material circumstances of my life have become steadily more comfortable and secure. This seems to be a fairly common experience. To judge by newsp
aper reports and magazine articles, there is something of an epidemic of depression in contemporary British society, and in the world generally. Here is a revealing journalistic comment on the phenomenon (published after I had finished my novel) written by Helen Fielding, before she became famous as the creator of Bridget Jones:

  Next Sunday the Defeat Depression Campaign will be holding a “Fun Run” in Battersea park. Last Tuesday the Samaritans launched a new advertising campaign to encourage despairing people to call them more readily, before they reach the brink. “Ringing the Samaritans should be as commonplace as going to the Post Office,” enthused their communications manager. The Depression Alliance, a self-help group for depressed people, launched two weeks ago, is receiving 250 enquiries every day. This week’s Melody Maker includes a special feature on the extraordinary number of depressive letters the magazine is receiving from young people, and how depressing grunge lyrics are . . . Sometimes it seems that the whole world has just got really fed up . . . that the globe is being swept by an end-of-millennium fug of existential angst, gloominess and ennui.3

  The scale of this spiritual and psychological malaise has provoked a corresponding growth of therapies to cope with it: psychotherapy in all its various forms, pharmaceutical therapy, and numerous alternative and holistic therapies like acupuncture, aromatherapy, yoga, reflexology, and so on. Even shopping is called “retail therapy” these days. If the 1960s were about politics, the seventies about sex, and the eighties about money, then (it seemed to me) the nineties were about therapy. I decided to write a novel about this general subject—depression, anxiety, loss of self-esteem, and the diverse therapies we use to cope with these things, using one or two narrative ideas I had been turning over in my mind for some time.

  I began to develop a character called Lawrence Passmore, known familiarly as “Tubby” because of his portly build, the writer of a successful TV situation comedy called The People Next Door. He is in his late fifties. Some of the circumstances of his life correspond to mine; in other respects he is very different from me. He is, for instance, a largely self-educated man, whose formal education ended at sixteen, apart from a spell at drama school.

  Tubby is professionally successful, affluent, and in a long-lasting stable marriage to Sally. He has all the material possessions he desires. Yet he suffers from depression, anxiety, insomnia, panic attacks. His only concrete cause for complaint is an intermittent pain in the knee, a mysterious injury which does not respond to surgical treatment. He seeks relief or cure for these afflictions in a variety of therapies:

  I have a lot of therapy. On Mondays I see Roland for Physiotherapy, on Tuesdays I see Alexandra for Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, and on Fridays I have either aromatherapy or acupuncture. On Wednesdays and Thursdays I’m usually in London, but then I see Amy, which is a kind of therapy too I suppose.

  Amy is a female friend in the television business with whom Tubby has a secret but platonic relationship.

  What happens to Tubby Passmore in the course of the story is that both his professional and private lives go into a state of crisis soon after the beginning of the novel. First, the producers of his sitcom threaten to hire someone else to write the scripts; then Tubby’s wife stuns him by announcing that she cannot stand living with him any longer and asks for a divorce. These twin disasters jolt Tubby from a state of low-pulsed, nonspecific anxiety and depression into something like a full-blown nervous breakdown. One symptom of his derangement is a series of absurd and unsuccessful attempts to make up for a lifetime’s marital fidelity by getting into bed with any woman who has shown the slightest interest in him in the past.

  I had two other ideas for this novel at an early stage in its genesis. One was the notion that Tubby would somehow resolve his personal crisis by seeking out his first sweetheart, after an interval of nearly forty years. And I had long wanted to write a novel in the first-person colloquial style which the Russian Formalist critics called skaz—a type of narrative discourse which is modelled on casual speech rather than writing. I decided that Tubby would tell his story through keeping a journal, but, as he says himself: “I can only write as if I’m speaking to someone . . .”

  So where and how did Kierkegaard come in? As I prepared to start writing, it seemed to me there was some danger that, if the whole novel were contained within Tubby’s limited perspective and limited language, it might be rather monotonous and ultimately unsatisfying. I felt the need of another discourse, another perspective, another (parallel) story. This is a feature of several of my novels, and is something I learned, as did many other writers, from James Joyce’s use of Homer’s Odyssey in Ulysses, and T. S. Eliot’s allusions to the Grail legend in The Waste Land. Small World, for example, is based on a structural equivalence between the lives of modern academics jetting around the world attending conferences, competing for glory and sometimes love, and the adventures of the knights of chivalric romance. The story of Nice Work recycles, echoes, and inverts the plots of the Victorian industrial novels on which its heroine is an academic expert. For me, conceiving this “structural idea” is usually the most important stage of a novel’s genesis.

  When I am preparing to write a novel, I keep a notebook dedicated to that project, in which I write down ideas, observations, character-sketches, provisional synopses, and memos to myself. I wrote in the Therapy notebook, one day, regarding the restrictiveness of Tubby’s perspective: “Perhaps Tubby should read Kierkegaard.” As noted earlier, all I knew about Kierkegaard at this point was Lowrie’s short biography, which I had read some years before in connection with Paradise News, a novel that deals in part with modern theology (there is just one fleeting reference to Kierkegaard in it). What I chiefly remembered from Lowrie’s book was that Kierkegaard had been sorely afflicted by depression—or, as he called it, “melancholy”—and that his philosophy and somewhat eccentric life-style were in part driven and shaped by his unceasing struggle with this affliction. I also recalled that he had had a strange, poignant, unhappy, obsessive relationship with a young girl, Regine Olsen, to whom he was engaged for a time. I had a hunch that in Kierkegaard’s depression and lifelong obsession with Regine I would find what I wanted: an intertextual strand for Therapy, a parallel story to Tubby’s, which would yield a different perspective on his plight and a different language for talking about it. The fact that I had already decided to write the novel in the form of Tubby’s journal, and that Kierkegaard was one of the great journal writers of literary history, was further encouragement to pursue this notion.

  Of course, the idea of a self-educated television comedy scriptwriter reading Kierkegaard—and not only reading him, but becoming obsessed with him to the point of identifying with him, seeing himself as a kind of reincarnation of Kierkegaard—is inherently risible, “absurd” in the ordinary, not the existentialist sense. But that was very much to my purpose. I was determined from the outset to write a novel about depression that would not be depressing, and comedy was the best way to ensure that result. There would be nothing amusing in a novel about an intellectual—a professional philosopher, say—who became obsessed with Kierkegaard. Such structural ideas are like metaphors: there must be difference as well as similarity between the two things compared. There was the additional advantage to me, a complete novice in the work of this difficult writer, that, since the whole novel is narrated by Tubby, it wouldn’t matter if he misunderstood Kierkegaard, as long as he did so in an interesting and instructive way.

  Tubby begins his reading in Kierkegaard by choosing, at random, The Concept of Dread, and is put off by its abstract and heavily religious language. But a few days later, he dips into Either/Or, and is hooked. He is particularly struck by the chapter entitled “The Unhappiest Man”:

  Kierkegaard explains that the unhappy man is never present to himself because he’s always living in the past or the future. He’s always either hoping or remembering. Either he thinks things were better in the past or he hopes they’ll be better in the future, but they
’re always bad now. That’s ordinary common-or-garden-unhappiness. But the unhappy man “in a stricter sense” isn’t even present to himself in his remembering or his hoping. Kierkegaard gives the example of a man who looks back wistfully to the joys of childhood which in fact he himself never experienced (perhaps he was thinking of his own case). Likewise the “unhappy hoper” is never present to himself in his hoping, for reasons which were obscure to me until I came to this passage: “Unhappy individuals who hope never have the same pain as those who remember. Hoping individuals always have a more gratifying disappointment.”

  I know exactly what he means by “gratifying disappointment.” I worry about making decisions because I’m trying to guard against things turning out badly. I hope they’ll turn out well, but if they do turn out well I hardly notice it because I’ve made myself miserable imagining how they could turn out badly; and if they turn out badly in some unforeseen way (like clause fourteen in the Heartland contract) that only confirms my underlying belief that the worst misfortunes are unexpected. If you’re an unhappy hoper you don’t really believe things will get better in the future (because if you did you wouldn’t be unhappy). Which means that when they don’t get better it proves you were right all along. That’s why your disappointment is gratifying. Neat, eh?

  Tubby’s fumbling attempts to understand Kierkegaard reflect my own reading experience, and the things which interest and excite him in Kierkegaard’s writings are those which interested and excited me: the early works rather than the later ones, the secular works rather than the religious ones, the pseudonymous books rather than the ones Kierkegaard published under his own name. In particular I was impressed by Kierkegaard’s insights into the subjectivity of happiness and unhappiness, into the perverse habits of unhappy hoping and unhappy remembering by which we rob ourselves of contentment and fail to enjoy each moment of life for what it is; and I was struck by the paradox that this man could see so clearly into these matters, and yet be so incapable of putting their lessons into practice in his own case.