Novelists and Conscience - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Oct, 2003 by Stephen Wade

Consciousness and the Novel. David Lodge. Secker and Warburg. 18.99 [pounds sterling]. 320 pages. ISBN 0-436-21005-3.

As David Lodge asserts in this adventurous and ambitious work, consciousness has always been the business of the novelist, although in recent decades we have become more interested in what may be understood about this elusive concept in scientific terms. The author does a great service to the general literary man here, in summarising the current thinking about consciousness in relation to such notions as memes, Artificial Intelligence and post-Freudian ideas about the link between consciousness and the sub-conscious.

The above paragraph implies that this is a book bridging the traditional 'two cultures' put forward by C. P. Snow forty years ago and there is some truth in this. Mr Lodge does indeed explain the ways in which the range of novelistic approaches to our selfhood have achieved something different from the scientists' activities. But this is built on in a fascinating way, as he makes intriguing forays into the world of neuro-science. An example of this is the case of the 'qualia'--a word coined by the scientist, Joseph Levine, in 1983--the word meaning the specific individual sensual experience of the world, and the derived personal significance thereof. David Lodge takes this as one of the springboards for his ever-expanding study in the title essay of this collection.

The author quotes a verse of Marvell to show the meaning of qualia, and adds: 'Marvell does not speak for himself alone. In reading this stanza we enhance our own experience of the qualia of fruit and fruitfulness'. This is the keynote, leading to a prolonged examination of how writers have used narrative technique in order to provide aspects of what we guess about consciousness. We guess because the whole business is about empathy. A simple method of writing, such as using the third person to explore an imaginary and created character, is compared with the scientific (and logical) position on this, when compared to our trying to inhabit the skin of another, real person. That is, literature will always be inspired guesswork, but this has never stopped such influential novelists as Henry James, Jane Austen, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf from believing in narrative as a way to understand certain shared aspects of our sense of who and what we are.

As his long essay develops Mr Lodge begins to use a range of case studies to show (for the benefit of non-literary readers one supposes) how such techniques as free direct style or interior monologue exhibit this problem. This serves a very useful purpose: he highlights exactly how creative writers have progressed over the centuries, since the arrival of the novel proper in the hands of Defoe, and this provides the reader with some excellent explanations of the specific aesthetics of each period: 'The classic Victorian novel ... usually told its story from several points of view, which are often mediated through free indirect style, but compared and assessed by an authorial narrator'.

Such brilliant summaries pepper the whole book. The author takes time to offer clear and precise definitions all the way through this fascinating attempt to explain two academic and theoretical disciplines to each other. The reader's journey through this is always exciting, with an impressive range of reference and some unfamiliar examples from both writing and science to illustrate the importance of the intellectual quest. This quest is no less than the attempt to decode a complex unknown which we call 'the mind' or 'the brain' or 'consciousness'. The thing we call 'Me', David Lodge points out, has been the centre of humanistic learning since Aristotle, and its explanation does offer easy definition. The other essays in the book deal with the nature of criticism and its relation to writing, and also with particular writers, from Dickens to Philip Roth. The overall achievement here is typical of David Lodge the novelist-academic: intellectual stimulation and a challenging set of subjects for further discussion.