Consciousness and the Novel 2

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.

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