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Johnson-Neuronarratives.Pdf This essay identifies a new subgenre of narrative fiction, “neuronarratives,” defined as works of fiction that incorporate advances in cognitive studies as a prominent theme, that compel novelists to struggle with con- sciousness as “content” and to reassess the value of narrative fiction. Consciousness as Content: Neuronarratives and the Redemption of Fiction GARY JOHNSON he opening chapter of David Lodge’s 2001 novel, Thinks . ., presents a self-con- scious exercise in stream-of-consciousness narration. Ralph Messenger, Lodge’s Tco-protagonist, is a cognitive scientist endeavouring to understand and describe the workings of the human mind. As the work begins, we encounter Ralph as he dic- tates his own thoughts into a tape recorder—a quaintly retrograde piece of equipment given his position as the head of a fictional British university’s Centre for Cognitive Science. One of the aims of the exercise, he reveals, is “to try to describe the structure of, or rather to produce a specimen, that is to say raw data, on the basis of which one might infer the structure of ...thought” (1). Ralph is acutely aware of the “artificiality” of his experiment, recognizing the fact that his consciousness of the exercise will inevitably change the nature of his thoughts and his thought process. He wants “random” thoughts, but his project necessarily imposes some kind of order on those thoughts; it is nearly impossible, it seems, to be aware of one’s thinking without allowing that Mosaic 41/1 0027-1276-07/169018$02.00©Mosaic 170 Mosaic 41/1 (March 2008) awareness to alter the process itself. As he admits later in the novel, “The brain does a lot of ordering and revising before the words come out of your mouth” (172). Ralph’s experiment is artificial on a second level as well. Although the reader osten- sibly takes the place that would be occupied by a specific narratee, Lodge is obliged to construct and reveal Ralph’s thoughts in a way that makes them accessible to us. Thus, Ralph’s opening monologue provides more information than would be necessary if no audience—other than Ralph himself—were anticipated. The first line of Lodge’s novel, in fact, introduces this somewhat artificial manner of narration:“One, two, three, testing, testing, recorder working, OK . .” (1). Shortly thereafter, Ralph reveals the aim of his exercise, an aim that will prove crucial to the unfolding of the novel’s main plot: “Where was I? But that’s the point, I’m not anywhere, I haven’t made a decision to think about anything specific, the object of the exercise being simply to record the random thoughts, if anything can be random, the random thoughts passing through a man’s head [. .] at a randomly chosen time and place” (1). Such information appears not “naturally,” but rather as the result of a conscious decision on Lodge’s part to orient his reader. The subject matter of this novel—the structure of human thought—necessitates this type of orientation. Traditional stream-of-consciousness narratives, to which parts of Lodge’s Thinks . bear some resemblance, endeavour “simply” to represent natural human thought. At their most basic level, these narratives aspire to mimesis, the realistic depiction of an individual’s consciousness. Thought, therefore, is crucial to the narrative, and the human psyche is certainly one area of the novelists’ interest, but cognitive science was not yet a central concern, since cognitive science itself did not yet exist. Lodge’s work, in contrast, approaches consciousness from a scientific angle, one made possible by the scientific advances of the last several decades, and one that obliges him not only to represent thought, but also, as Ralph puts it, to describe its structure. As a result, Lodge must both represent and explain. The problem of explaining human consciousness, or at least of explaining what scientists know of human consciousness, within the framework of a literary text pres- ents the novelist with some interesting and revealing narrative challenges. Chief among these, I believe, is the issue of how to convey to the lay reader scientific infor- mation that he or she likely lacks, but that is essential to the narrative itself. And Lodge is not alone in facing this dilemma; indeed, in 1995, Richard Powers published his own neuronarrative (the term I will use to describe a work of fiction that has cognitive sci- ence as a, or the, main theme), entitled Galatea 2.2, a work that poses narrative chal- lenges similar to those we find in Thinks . ..While my focus in this essay will be on the works of Lodge and Powers, a growing list of narrative works, including Powers’s recent The Echo Maker, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, and A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman, follows suit in foregrounding the emerging fields Gary Johnson 171 of neuroscience and neurobiology. These works, I propose, constitute an emerging subgenre of literature that can provide us with a glimpse of how authors are respond- ing to scientific advances concerning the nature of human consciousness. In Thinks . ., Lodge has provided Ralph—an intellectually stereotypical scien- tist—with a foil/love interest from the humanities, a novelist named Helen who has accepted a temporary teaching position at Ralph’s university. Early in their relation- ship, as the writer comes to make sense of what it is that a cognitive scientist does, Helen surmises somewhat incredulously that “consciousness is apparently the sort of thing cognitive scientists study” and that those scientists “have decided that conscious- ness is a ‘problem’ which has to be ‘solved’” (61). Helen’s use of scare quotes here is sig- nificant; it reveals the fact that, for this humanist, the scientific approach to consciousness is foreign, suspect, and, in a way, threatening.“I’ve always assumed, I sup- pose,” Helen muses, “that consciousness was the province of the arts, especially litera- ture, and most especially the novel. Consciousness, after all, is what most novels [. .] are about. [. .] Consciousness is simply the medium in which one lives, and has a sense of personal identity. The problem is how to represent it, especially in different selves from one’s own” (61). Helen’s interaction with Ralph is significant because it enlarges her understanding of the problem of consciousness; the challenge involved in working with consciousness now has an epistemological dimension as well as a mimetic one. Indeed, cognitive science purports to know something about con- sciousness as an object of study that this particular novelist, who takes consciousness “more simply” as a given component of human life, does not. The contrasting views of Ralph and Helen regarding the nature of consciousness, and Helen’s sense of bewilderment with the scientific approach that Ralph both advo- cates and embodies, can help us to understand the challenges faced by contemporary novelists. As Helen indicates, the issue for authors (especially authors of realistic fic- tion) has always been how to represent consciousness, how, in other words, to construct characters that seem true to life in the sense that they could be real people with their own individual consciousnesses. Seen from this angle, consciousness always pertains to characters (or narrators) and, thus, as Helen reveals, one of the primary tasks of an author involves figuring out how to narrate or represent that mind. This places the problem of consciousness squarely in the realm of “discourse,” the term that narratol- ogists use for “the expression plane of narrative as opposed to its content plane or story; the ‘how’ of a narrative as opposed to its ‘what’” (Prince 21). This distinction, and the placement of consciousness in it, works particularly well when we think about much of twentieth-century literature; what were the “high modernists” doing if not, among other things, experimenting with modes of representing consciousness? 172 Mosaic 41/1 (March 2008) Helen’s emerging grasp of the nature of cognitive science, however, has profound implications for her understanding of consciousness and how it might be relevant to, and treated by, novelists. If she accepts Ralph’s position, then she must accept the pos- sibility that consciousness is no longer the sole province of the arts and, more pro- foundly, that consciousness might fit equally well in the “content plane” of narrative, as a “thing” or a “problem” that is separable from individual selves or characters. As scientists learn more about the general human phenomenon of consciousness, novel- ists find themselves forced to rethink how that phenomenon manifests itself in their individual narratives. Neuronarratives, I submit, allow readers to see the early results of this new way of thinking about consciousness. I have divided this essay into two sections in order to pursue two primary objec- tives. The first is to illustrate how two novelists struggle to approach consciousness as “content” and how that struggle manifests itself in the structure of their respective nar- ratives. My second aim is to argue that the encroachment of neuroscience on the field of literature results in a kind of revaluation of narrative fiction on the part of the nov- elists who produce it. Even as neurologists, psychologists, medical doctors, and others in the scientific community embrace narrative as a legitimate area of inquiry, Lodge and Powers seem to need to convince themselves of the potential value of narrative fiction. erhaps because the broad field of what we might call consciousness studies—and, P by extension, consciousness as a part of the story world—remains in its infancy, novelists such as Lodge and Powers seem to be struggling with what to do with it and wrestling with what it portends for literature as a field.
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